re: Buying Silver?

It starts with the value of silver per oz. Any premium paid for a Morgan as an example, is many times not worth paying.

I think the melt value of a silver morgan is under $12.00.

So there's a premium to spot, and a premium for mints and coins (Silver Eagles) that are perceived to be non assay at higher values.

I had sold some silver is the $40's, and assay wasn't required, so my experience has been there is not much need to pay any more premium than absolutely necessary.

I don't imagine silver at $15 is a bad long term buy. But there are several things to contemplate. The gold/silver ratio. Silver pricing is largely driven by the paper market, more so than most every other commodity. And we have have large shorts open, both from institutions and hedgers, and not quite as much by retail speculators. Not as large of short positions as they were recently, but large enough that you can figure out how they will unwind, if indeed they need to unwind. We have the Fed appearing to soften some of their comments about rate increases.

I've not bought any siver recently, but I wouldn't be opposed to it as one assets class in a balanced portfolio of asset classes. My preference has always been silver over gold, or for shorter term plays, options on SLV. Deep in hte money leap calls are prices attractively, and have a certain loss, and a relatively small cash outlay. As an example, January 2018 $11 SLV is $4.25. That's a long time to unload calls that would likely be profitable well before silver reached $15.25, and not an unreasonable speculative play in my opinion.