Sad, but true. Happened to many people who bought expensive silver coins ("rare editions") back in 2011, 2012, 2013: Lunar Dragons (the colorful edition), the Rwandan Snake series (can't recall the exact name, but there were 3 colored 3D coins) - are now selling for 30-40 % less than back then. Sad, very sad. Never go for numismatics. Unless you find 1-2 coins that you really find beautiful, interesting. Otherwise they're also more likely to lose value.
Investment is a tricky thing, it's not always possible to make money from property or stocks. For example, most people that bought tech stocks in 2000 would have lost money even if they held it until today. Look at the Intel and Cisco chart over 20 years, the price has just risen back to the late 1990s and 2000 levels. Not to mention dot cons. Likewise, there are people that bought property in Singapore in 1996 and today, the property sells just a little over what they paid for in 1997. How is this possible for a city with an area that is smaller than the city of Canberra but a larger population than Greater Sydney?
The problem I see with silver is that it is bulky to own, and if you don't own it you don't own it - a fat finger or MF Global can take it all. Assuming 10 kilos stored in a deposit box, over 10 years you've spent perhaps $5k on storage, or nervously looked for signs of digging in your backyard or wherever. Owning the paper promise is the way to get on the silver train, but that leaves you open to being robbed in a variety of imaginative, live and evil ways. Gold is complicated enough for me!
That's exactly why I sold my small 150oz hoard of silver, started becoming too hard to store. There is the risk of total loss with paper silver but I am a small fish and would never be playing with more than I can afford to lose. A few kg of unallocated silver would be enough to make me very happy if the GSR reversed enough for a swap and but also enough for me to not shed a tear over. Being unallocated I would also be able to swap it much easier than if I was chasing a buyer for physical silver at its peak.
That particular Lunar set(the colorful edition) was a big crap -very expensive-money grabbing set. I've almost bought it. They lost nearly 60 percent from issue price.
Silver is volatile, it can go up, so it has to be a long term thing - 10 years or more, so if it's going to be unallocated, then it must be a very trustworthy organisation like Perth mint. Entry price is also important, as TreasureHunter says, silver might be hit by a downturn.
After the gold & silver crash, you could buy them one-by-one for around 50 $ a piece. The big sets contained 11 coins, but I can't recall the price... was it around 800-900 USD? I remember it being sky high. Now those sets sell for around 500 $. And previous buyers are getting rid of them "on the bandwagon". Some are selling the coins one-by-one. That means you can buy the ones you like. Similarly: there was a White Dragon 1 oz coin - "Special Edition - ANA" with certificate and box. Very nice. But that one cost around 130 $ back in 2012-2013. Later, that same coin appeared as being sold only in the capsule (not certificate, no nothin') for mere 45-65 $. So much for the certificate & box version... People were selling the box and the certificate separately (!). So, basically, people are taking these sets apart and selling the nuts and bolts and trinkets one-by-one.
Use google and calculator. Gold underperforms inflation by 1 to 1.5% per year depending on base currency. Real example- the "$200" coin which was popular because of high inflation sold for $250 in 1980. 40 years later sells here for $600 including shipping. 10-20% premiums is just insane. Pure profit for someone else in the silver food chain. By contrast gold has no premium unless you want semi-numi and not uncommon to buy gold for 1-2% under spot price.
Here's a similar chart for gold. Compare with silver. If you look at the figures, Mine supply of gold from 2012 to 2018 has risen at twice the rate of silver. Demand for physical gold has actually fallen marginally while the demand for physical silver has risen slightly. This would correlate with the falling demand from India, the largest consumer of physical gold, due to higher gold taxes. So which is the manipulated metal? Is silver manipulated downwards or gold is pumped up? To me, it's more like the latter is being pumped up by countries that are trying to undermine the dollar, while silver is languishing due to weak demand, but if mine supply continues to fall, it won't be unnoticed in the long term. Regardless of statistics, one thing is undeniably true - the price of gold is more manipulated than the price of silver. The other truth is almost all the gold that is mined in the world is available for sale. Pirroco says that actual physical supply and demand don’t matter for the price of silver. It probably also applies to gold.
Perth Mint Depository is a government guaranteed way to own unallocated and allocated metal with small spreads and ease of buying/selling. Why would you bother (and take the risk of) using anything else?
Strong points you made there, how true. It's dilemmatic: basically gold and silver and jump up and down due to ETF's/market manipulation. Physical demand-supply has little to do with the actual price. Manipulation drives the price. Could it be that stackers are "fooling themselves" investing on the long term? Apparently stable stores of wealth, PM's themselves have no real market-determined price. If physical supply-demand plays little role, then stackers are fooling themselves. I can imagine gold's price climbing and then they'll slam it down again with "paper gold" only to launch a new crypto-fiat currency.
I've done this supply/demand research a year ago, before the 2018 data was available. The 2018 silver mine supply data confirms that silver supply is still on a gradual decline while gold production is slowly treading upwards as miners switch to more profitable gold. Silver demand remains flat. My conclusion then was the excessive mining of base metals to feed China's supertalls (see my earlier post on 2nd tier Tianjin's skyscrapers in the middle of nowhere), high speed rail projects and OBOR has dumped huge amounts of "by product" silver onto the market. This is clear not sustainable and will crash within the next few years. It will be interesting to see the 2019 production data by the way.
buy more gold thread is anti US, since it is killing the dollars dominance, it would not be fair deal not to have anti China, anti Russia, anti Europe etc etc or anti American in Asia no matter how you cut it, the world seems not being broken to pieces Jedi at work https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=827382451035599
These days anything is possible-they can make you broke if they want to...but if you are holding to much cash thinks can be even worse...
Sure, dollar dominance will end one day, but I think it will take another 20-30 more years, by which a lot of countries in the far east will be crippled by aging population, which means the new power will rise somewhere else, maybe the Middle east or Africa or Latin america. The new world order is not going to be something we can imagine today.
Africa is rising simply via birth rates. All of Europe and the west is falling below critical 1.3 rate of child per couple whilst Africa is at 6+
I think the yuan will play dominance role one day or Saudi riyal,but if this will happen I don't want to be around in this new world order...
A collapse of the SD will drag down the Saudi riyal as well. They have princes waiting to start a war over the throne anyway, no chance tribal nomads will ever be globally dominant.