I do. I'd previously confined my trading to stocks: oil and resources, mostly. But I wanted to branch out and thought the gold and silver charts looked good for a solid bounce back. My thesis for gold was pretty clear: a nice solid investment to hedge the rest of my portfolio against inflation. And I figured I'd take a slight gamble with silver as I imagined it would provide me with a 'volatile version' of gold. So at the beginning of February 2011 I went in at 75% gold, and 25% silver.
Boy, did us newbie silver investors get lucky! The charts had pointed to a good rise in silver, but we hadn't imagined such a move in our wildest dreams. By the end of the month it had gone from $26 to $34, and I was scaling out of gold and in to silver. With this metal swap, the profits just kept rising. By the end of April, it had all gone stupid, and it was obvious to anyone with two neurons to rub together that we were in the grip of a mania. I got out at around $45 and never regretted the decision. A few days later silver started its plunge from $50 to (eventually) $26, and has barely recovered to this day (currently at $31 and change).
What I did regret, however, was what happened to everyone who had not ejected. It could easily have been me too, had I had a bit less trading experience and a bit less fear (yes, sharp moves higher always scare the absolute bejesus out of me, more so than the plunges - fact). And this burned my curiosity. What had actually taken place? How had such a mania developed? And why didn't most retail silver investors get out? They were still buying all the way up to $49, the poor bastards.
So I started to look more deeply into the 2011 Silver Bubble, and events since, and was rather shocked by what I found.
