This is part of a series of blog posts I wrote for a coin collecting site circa ~2015 that seems to have disappeared off the Internet. Note any prices mentioned in this series are from 2015.
Sure, we all know that the political and economic climate affects the prices of silver, gold, and platinum. But we too often forget that precious metals are also a commodity in the first place. There’s a lot of markets outside of coin collecting that impacts the prices of coins. Sometimes two or more patterns even overlap to produce a chaotic result.
Disease Outbreaks
Silver has biocidal properties, which means that it kills microbial stuff. Since anti-bacterial and anti-microbial materials are in demand in the medical industry, silver demand goes up when the demand for hospital-grade disinfectants goes up. Along with this, many kinds of medical equipment and surgical instruments incorporate silver in their manufacture. The next time a nasty flu outbreak happens, you might want to keep an eye on your silver investment.
Solar Power
Up until recently, solar energy equipment made do without silver. However, recent innovations in solar photovoltaic panels have incorporated silver in their design. Silver is both a great electrical conductor and a great reflective coating on concentrated solar energy panels. Not only does it do a better job, but the manufacturing process has recently made it cheaper. All over the world, solar power is coming into its own era as an alternative to fossil fuels. Statistically speaking, an area about the size ofthe state of New Mexico tiled with solar panels could meet the power demands of the entire world – not taking into account, of course, the problem of moving the power efficiently.
Mobile Phones
Is silver the panacea? Along with its many other uses, it’s still a reliable standby in electronics. However, in previous decades, silver was less in demand as other, cheaper metals were used. It’s since there’s been consumer demand for smaller, portable devices, combined with improved methods in manufacturing smaller devices, that the industry has turned to silver. Silver conducts more reliably in compact circuit designs. This includes silver-oxide batteries, printed circuits, RFID antennas, and RF connectors. More than anything else, the rise of the mobile phone market might have driven silver’s price in the past few years.
The Automotive Industry
Silver isn’t the only metal in demand for industrial applications. Platinum is used in a crucial part of every automobile – the catalytic converter. This is a lumpish-shaped thing under your car, with the exhaust system running through it. The catalytic converter ensures the complete combustion of low concentrates of hydrocarbon emissions – in other words, it’s a device that’s necessary to completely burn the gas. So why platinum? Because platinum is the least reactive metal known to science, making it the perfect catalyst because it doesn’t chemically combine with anything else very easily.
Christmas
It seems obvious after you mention it, but all precious metals are also used in the jewelry industry. And right around the holidays, demand for jewelry goes up as people trade gifts for the holidays. Christmas season is also the most popular for couples to propose, and there goes those engagement rings. Now think of all the piercings that people get which also use surgical-grade silver and platinum, mostly for skin that’s too sensitive for more common metals.
So, there’s so much more to pay attention to than the economy and political scene. The hard part is sorting the trends and knowing which ones will be more important.
