Alloy
Active Member
Hi all -- Tomorrow I'll publish my article comparing silver online dealer prices in North America. In the meantime, you can check out the Google spreadsheet here. I notice a lot of people overpay for metal, hence the article and spreadsheet.
The prices were gathered on New Year's Day, when silver trading was suspended for most of the day, and the spot price hovered around 15.45 USD. The point of the spreadsheet is not to provide right now prices, since we'd need live feeds or APIs to do that in an automated way. Rather, the point is to show relative prices, comparing dealers to each other at a time when the spot price was stable.
These relative prices are consistent beyond New Year's Day. SD Bullion and Silver.com consistently offer the best or near-best prices for most items, especially coins like the ASE, Maple Leaf, Britannia, and Kangaroo (I call these the Four Eyes countries, which is the Five Eyes minus New Zealand).
The spreadsheet includes those four coins bundled into Order 1 (one of each coin), with shipping added. It then punches through the free shipping threshold of most dealers ($99) by showing some six ounce orders, then 10 ASE, 20 ASE, a monster box of ASE, cheapest 10 oz bar, 10 oz Royal Canadian Mint bar, 10 oz Britannia (which are a great value right now; low premiums), cheapest kilo bar, and a Freedom Girl round.
With the exception of the Freedom Girl, I skipped rounds because the brands and mints vary so much by dealer (or they have anonymous mintage), and they're not as prized as coins and bars. Freedom Girl was designed by artist Heidi Wastweet, and I think it's one of the most beautiful round/coin designs I've ever seen.
I earn affiliate commissions from some dealers, but I let the chips fall where they did regardless of affiliate opportunities -- for example, Silver.com has no affiliate program, but they did very well and you should always check in with them (and SD Bullion) when you shop around.
I still have some minor clean-up to do with the spreadsheet, but it should be quite usable in its current form. As you can see, some dealers don't offer all four of the above-mentioned coins. Some don't offer specific year, or current year coins -- they just sell random year, which is going to be secondary market (previously owned). I put NA in those cases. It breaks the spreadsheet's computation for Order 1, but that's fine – the computation should be aborted for any dealer that can't actually fill the order, though I wish I could figure out how to replace the error message with NA.
Thoughts? Feedback? Let me know what you think. Perhaps there are other orders I should include, or other dealers?
The prices were gathered on New Year's Day, when silver trading was suspended for most of the day, and the spot price hovered around 15.45 USD. The point of the spreadsheet is not to provide right now prices, since we'd need live feeds or APIs to do that in an automated way. Rather, the point is to show relative prices, comparing dealers to each other at a time when the spot price was stable.
These relative prices are consistent beyond New Year's Day. SD Bullion and Silver.com consistently offer the best or near-best prices for most items, especially coins like the ASE, Maple Leaf, Britannia, and Kangaroo (I call these the Four Eyes countries, which is the Five Eyes minus New Zealand).
The spreadsheet includes those four coins bundled into Order 1 (one of each coin), with shipping added. It then punches through the free shipping threshold of most dealers ($99) by showing some six ounce orders, then 10 ASE, 20 ASE, a monster box of ASE, cheapest 10 oz bar, 10 oz Royal Canadian Mint bar, 10 oz Britannia (which are a great value right now; low premiums), cheapest kilo bar, and a Freedom Girl round.
With the exception of the Freedom Girl, I skipped rounds because the brands and mints vary so much by dealer (or they have anonymous mintage), and they're not as prized as coins and bars. Freedom Girl was designed by artist Heidi Wastweet, and I think it's one of the most beautiful round/coin designs I've ever seen.
I earn affiliate commissions from some dealers, but I let the chips fall where they did regardless of affiliate opportunities -- for example, Silver.com has no affiliate program, but they did very well and you should always check in with them (and SD Bullion) when you shop around.
I still have some minor clean-up to do with the spreadsheet, but it should be quite usable in its current form. As you can see, some dealers don't offer all four of the above-mentioned coins. Some don't offer specific year, or current year coins -- they just sell random year, which is going to be secondary market (previously owned). I put NA in those cases. It breaks the spreadsheet's computation for Order 1, but that's fine – the computation should be aborted for any dealer that can't actually fill the order, though I wish I could figure out how to replace the error message with NA.
Thoughts? Feedback? Let me know what you think. Perhaps there are other orders I should include, or other dealers?
