Buying silver grain or shot is another way to invest in precious metals, as opposed to purchasing coins, bars and rounds. Silver grain or shot are small pieces of silver that are sold by the weight. They are available in a number of weights and come bagged in the denomination of your choice.

While silver shot and grain can be purchased for investment purposes, they are also sold to those wishing to make silver jewellery, or have other practical uses for the silver in mind, such as manufacturing and industrial purposes.

Advantages of Purchasing Silver Grain and Shot

One of the main advantages of buying silver in this form is that it has a low ‘over spot’ price. This means you will be paying less over the current weight-based market price for silver, than other forms of precious metals. With grain and shot, you aren’t charged a premium for the production process of transforming the silver into a coin or bar.

Another way that owning some silver in this form is beneficial is that it is easily divisible. This makes it ideal for use as a backup currency should traditional forms no longer be accepted or available. As the silver is in tiny pieces, it can easily be weighed out in small amounts, for trading with low value goods or services. This is something that you wouldn’t be able to easily do with coins and bars carrying a high value.

If you want to make use of your precious metal investment while waiting for its value to rise or a time when you might need it for currency, then silver shot could provide such an option. If you are creative, it could be modelled into jewellery or some kind of decoration, allowing it to be displayed or used instead of being stored away, out of sight.

Disadvantages of Silver Shot and Grain

While coins, especially proofs, can be visually stunning, and large bars of silver can be very impressive to look at, there is no real beauty to speak of when considering the appearance of silver shot or gain. It simply looks like chips or shavings of metal, albeit it with the shine of silver. Pulling out a one ounce bag of shot doesn’t have the same effect as producing a mint condition coin, but it is silver nonetheless.

Due to the unremarkable appearance of this form of silver, it can be harder to sell on shot or grain, when coins and bars are so widely available. Also, there can be questions of its authenticity as you are not selling one object, but a bag full of 100s of pieces of metal. While the silver can be assayed for its quality, it might be harder to convince others of its purity.

Unlike silver coins, this form of silver has no face value and is not legal tender. This means it cannot be used to make purchases. While this isn’t a big concern, seeing as the face value of coins is often much, much lower than the actual price of the silver, it is something to think about should the price of silver drastically drop, leaving you with a bag of worthless metal that you cannot even spend in the shops.