Silver mining stocks is a common way to invest in the silver market. Silver-based stocks are not as leveraged or as pure of a play as buying silver futures, but it is still a solid and probably more conservative investment approach than the more risky silver futures.

When trading silver futures, your only concern is the underlying price of silver. However, more factors can affect the price of a silver mining stock than just the price of silver.

Silver stocks can move with the overall stock market. If the stock market is trending lower, silver mining stocks could still be under pressure even if the price of silver is moving higher.

Silver stocks will generally move higher over a period of time if the price of silver is trending higher. The larger silver companies are typically the safer and better bet when buying silver mining stocks. The penny stocks with negligible revenues are highly speculative and often cause the investor more trouble than they expected.

Silver is considered an industrial metal as well as a precious metal. Therefore, it can move higher as the economy is doing well and it can also benefit from a safe haven type of investment. A highly inflationary environment is when silver performs the best and silver mining stocks tend to extremely outperform the overall market in this environment.

Below are the main publicly traded silver producers in the United States and Canada. They are the largest and probably the more conservative investments in the industry.

• Silver Wheaton (SLW)
• Silver Standard Resources, Inc (SSRI)
• Coeur D Alene (CDE)
• Hecla Mining (HL)
• Silvercorp Metals (SVM)