http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-12-01/chart-keeps-ben-bernanke-night (Source: US Mint) (h/t Alex Gloy of Lighthouse Investment Management)
Woah..... this is looking extreemely positive.... That's parabolic 100%......Is it all the fiscal cliff bad news becoming mainstream?
Wow! That is very bullish. But the bulls should keep in mind that these sales are small-change compared to the huge paper markets - and it is the paper markets that move the price. I wouldn't expect this increase in sales to affect price at all personally. However the very fact that people are buying physical coins is a sign that someone is seeing the light. At some point this attitude change towards gold will reach a critical mass and it will start dictating the price.
Its a touch misleading. Gold eagle sales haven't been particularly strong compared to the last couple of years.
Good point Silverthorn, thank you. I did a bit of hunting and didn't find much (someone else might have more luck), and found some charts below. The biggest issue IMO is that the chart above shows $$ sales figures for the month, rather than ounces. This makes any comparison with previous years problematic. Chart 1 Shows that in recent years the average was around 100,000 coins per month - that's $170 million (average) A spike on this chart to 200,000 would equate to $340 million on the other chart - but we can see it only spiked to $250 million, which is around 150,000 coins sold in that month. Not really a massive change. From this second chart, we can see that annual sales for 2010/2011 were about $1.7 billion. Divide that by 12 (months) and we get an average of about $142 million per month - still significantly less than the $250 million on the chart above - but the increase was only by about 75% over the average, rather than double or more than the chart at the top of the thread suggests. I might be wrong on these calculations and i would appreciate that anyone might correct them if they are.
I much prefer your data source BB Also, i'd suggest that the spike was simply people holding off buying until the election was decided, or something like that.
Here's a chart in oz And here's one in USD calculated using average monthly POG November was a strong month
Police and Customs do the same thing all the time. Biggest* drug bust ever *in $$$ terms** ** not adjusted for inflation
Have done a search and could not pull up another source... whatever that means http://www.jsmineset.com/
http://www.jsmineset.com/2012/12/03/in-the-news-today-1388/ Wonder what the problem with the 2012 gold eagle is?
Another explanation is that alot sold silver to buy gold, due to the GSR drop 55 > 50. The futures market shows a decrease in gold positions (they thus prevented the gold price to increase more) combined with an increase in silver positions (they thus prevented the silver price to drop more). /Edit/ Here is the evolution of the last two weeks of november (date - ounces silver - ounces gold) 2012/11/17 2,265,500 56,000 2012/11/21 2,359,500 63,000 2012/11/22 2,584,500 67,000 2012/11/23 2,659,500 67,000 2012/11/27 3,059,500 75,500 2012/11/29 3,059,500 120,000 2012/11/30 3,134,500 131,000 2012/12/01 3,159,500 136,500 You can see that in the beginning of the month the silver sales were high. For gold, the last 4 days sold 61000 ounces, almost as much as the entire rest of the month together. So on 28 or 29 november, something caused alot gold demand at the US Mint, and affected only the 1 ouncers.
Silver sales increased by about 45% and gold increased by about 100%. Not sure how significant that actually is? I think the answer is probably here:
Increased relative to when? US Mint silver sales are roughly the same as in the past months, gold sales showed that remarkable increase that was concentrated over a single or a couple days. I searched for that error story, couldnt find it so far, which is Weird, because if so many (?) people bought gold coins due to that, they should have read about that socalled error SOMEWHERE. That Jim Sinclair doesn't give any source either. The US Mint (so far?) didnt mention it. Are there other Mints that publish their sales alike the US Mint? Canadian Mint? Mexican? Etc?
