This is a picture of my stack.

Inspired

I have been inspired by the community of stackers seen here on steemit lately. The level of support and contributions to the community...and to each other in general are on a whole different level.

My Stack

I wanted to share my stack in support of the community but also to share my own story and perspective. As seen in the photo are mainly 1 oz. buffalos, 1oz. bars lining the floor, and some of the Liberty 1oz. stack in the middle. I sprinkled in a 1 oz. Johnson Matthey gold bar and a couple copper kilos... for color. Ha

My Stack's Story

I started investing in silver while in the Navy with one of my good buddies. You can see the majority of the stamps are from 2011. I must say, like many, I got a little carried away. I have learned over the years that whatever your investment tends to be you will find more than enough people that can support your ideals. The more information you seek out the more you will find in fueling your "addiction". I got caught up in the "doomsday" movement and the impending collapse of civilization as we know it. Every society since the beginning of time believed they were in the end times... why should we be different? Being caught up we continued to invest during the massive boom and held through the massive bust. We averaged from $18 up to around 40$ in our purchasing. This is my second life lesson in bubbles following the housing bubble in 2008.

Diversify?

I saw a clever post the other day on steemit of a fellow stacker that had a picture of one hand holding a beautiful 100 oz. bar (~$1700) and another holding 1 Bitcoin (~$3440)... the hand with the bitcoin was empty... haha. This is a powerful statement. It is true, a picture is worth a thousand words and this made me reflect on my own investment journey.

I wanted to share this story and have shared this before but thought it was quite fitting after I saw that post... when my buddy and I were investing almost everything we had in silver I came across Bitcoin. At the time Bitcoin was about $1. I told him we should both throw $1,000 in and buy some Bitcoin... but he convinced me to buy another stack, and we did. He texted me a couple years later while I was at work (we were both out of the Navy at this point) and said "remember when you tried to buy Bitcoin?". I answered "yeah, why?"... he said "take a look at it". I did a quick search on my computer and it didn't take long to find an article that headlined "Bitcoin hits $1000 for the first time".... needless to say, that was a fun day for me. NOT!!

What's A Dollar Worth?

I know the argument of gold and silver being the true money of the world... I do not want to dispute this fact but maybe provoke additional conversations on this topic. I have pondered this topic for many years.

A couple weeks ago I was sharing some ideas with a buddy at work who is quite a savvy investor in the stock market. He is my elder by about 25 years but asks me my perspective as a "younger generation" quite often. At this point in my life I have been a part of many markets: physical metals, stocks, options, futures, forex, cryptocurrency etc. I told him "maybe consider buying a little Ethereum" ( a cryptocurrency). I study price movement of many markets and noticed Ethereum pulled back in price to about $189. He wrote down that price on a yellow sticky and stuck it to his desk. He asked about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general. I spent some time explaining the idea in very generic terms. He proceeded to ask "ok, who says ethereum Is worth this much? What is it backed by?" I proceeded to ask him "who says the dollar is worth what it is and what is IT backed with?" He said "I'm going to look at it". He is out on vacation this week but we will get a chuckle at how ethereum is doing when he returns.

The answer my friends is cryptocurrency, just like the dollar, isn't backed by anything but a consensus of The People saying it is worth something. We could trade clam shells for food if we deemed them as currency. Whatever the people accept as an assets value, is its value. This is true across the board and even true of gold and silver. I used to envision me trading my silver coins on the black market once the dollar collapsed... but why? Why would you take my physical silver as value? Are you going to make something with it? Can you eat it? Can you protect your family with it? I would argue no. The only practical use I could come up with is if I wanted to make my own colloidal silver solution and use it for its antibacterial properties... Please do not take offense to this, but just give it some thought.

Silver and Gold Price

Today is quite fitting for this post as we are experiencing tensions with North Korea and the stock market is in a correction. Gold and Silver are up!

Add some media fuel to the fire:

And you have a nice story for the immediate future of gold and silver. Taking a technical look you will see that both products are in a price range channel and have yet to break out.

Final Thoughts

I wanted to share the stacker side of my life and show that just because someone is interested in cryptocurrency doesn't mean that they are a one trick pony. I love learning and sharing about markets and wanted to share the pitfalls that can occur when you get tunnel vision and lock on to a single investment vehicle. I also wanted to share a general look at market behavior and a technical view of gold and silver price action from a thousand foot view. All of my physical was purchased from Gainesvillecoins.com. I am in no way associated with them but wanted to share a resource with you so you can compare. In general I was always able to get the lowest spot prices with them for the items I was looking to purchase and saved additional money by purchasing via wire transfer (I was hesitant to wire transfer the first time in fear of getting ripped off but they proved their great service to me time and time again). Thank you all for sharing with me and hope to be able to share more ideas with you. Happy Stacking #steemsilvergold

-Josh