“I remember the Hunt Brothers trying to corner the market and other fools joining in, including a couple of guys in my college dorm that bought silver on margin. They lost everything they had and then some.”
I remember the same thing. Sitting around some bar/dorm in college ( after way to much beer)listening to guys talking about how they were spend all the money they were going to make on silver. Did not work out that way. At least they were young enough to recover/learn from it.
It worked, until it didn’t. Hunt Brothers actually did accumulate about 30% of the world’s supply, and drove the price way up. But they got greedy and held/accumulated for too long. They should have been taking some profits along the way. The market got wind of it, the regulators took notice, and soon enough people took the other side of the trade in bigger numbers. They lost about 80% of their family’s oil fortune in the end. Losses of about $4 billion in 1980’s money. That’s about $12.5 billion in today’s inflation adjusted dollars.
—and the old commie, Armand Hammer was selling them future silver from a mine in Nevada which was producing it probably as cheap as any on the North American continent—