In this week’s video selection, silver expert David Morgan (silver-investor.com) examines the “myth”—and overused saying—in  regard to silver investment: “Everyone should own a little.”

“Two very ambiguous terms,” Morgan muses. “What is ‘everyone,’ and how much is a ‘little’?

If you take “everyone” literally, well, that’s every human being on earth—about 7 billion people at this point in time. Narrow that down to everyone in the United States, and you come up with some 350 million people.

To define “a little,” Morgan settles on two ounces—mostly because it makes for easy math.

Now consider that the amount of silver mined, worldwide, each year comes to around 700 million ounces, give or take a few million. So if all 350,000 people in the United States were to decide they need to own a “little” silver (two ounces), they would need to buy up  the entire global annual production of silver.

But not so fast… Because silver is so widely used in industry, Morgan reminds us, much of the silver mined each year is already spoken for, before it ever leaves the smelter.

“The silver that is above ground already is in tight hands,” he continues. “So the ‘float,’ or the amount of silver up for auction on a daily basis, is not that great, much smaller than the 700 or so million ounces that’s mined.

“Back to the saying that everyone should own a little—not everyone can. And not everyone will. There’s a lot less silver out there for investment than most people think.”