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On 2/25/2022 at 8:52 PM, RDCanecutter said:

If you sell anything, they'll go up more after that. Always works for me.

On the flip side, if I buy any silver, they'll go down after that. My average buy price from almost 10 years ago was $29/SF.

Still waiting for it to get back to that level so I can sell a majority of it, maybe keep a hundred ounces or so for sentimental reasons. But every proceed will go into gold.

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YTD Scoreboard Update as of 17 FEB (@1230):

$GLD: +5.4%

$GOLD: +25.4%

$DJIA: -5.6%

$SPY: -7.8%

$RUT: -9.9%

$NDAQ: -14.5%

$BTC: -13.8%

$ARKK: -28.6%


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

With over two full months now in the books, updated YTD results are below as of COB Fri 3/4:

$GLD: +9.1%

$GOLD: +30.53%

$DJIA: -8.1%

$SPY: -9.5%

$RUT: -11.5%

$NDAQ: -15.3%

$BTC: -18.2%

$ARKK: -37.9%


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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Nosing around online, common gold coins are becoming common again, wonder why? Maybe dealers were tucking them away until the price went as high as it has. Premiums not too brutal at least.

Silver availability online not bad either.

I haven't set foot in a real coin shop for about two months, wonder how their stock is. I don't plan to buy right now unless money falls from the sky. If I did it'd be silver, something bland and easy to resell.

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Bought my first metal yesterday. $100 of silver.  Who's the big spender???   Made $4 already.  Bumped my retirement up 2 minutes.

On a serious note, I'm just getting started.  Got investments in a restaurant, several cryptos, several stocks + 403b.  Wanted to try something different.

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5 hours ago, Knoxtnhorn said:

Bought my first metal yesterday. $100 of silver.  Who's the big spender???   Made $4 already.  Bumped my retirement up 2 minutes.

On a serious note, I'm just getting started.  Got investments in a restaurant, several cryptos, several stocks + 403b.  Wanted to try something different.

Where'd you get your silver?

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5 hours ago, pantone159 said:

Hey nickel prices are going through the roof now!

I do have some old Canadian coins that are pure nickel, maybe I will get a chance to sell them for their metal content.

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-08/chinese-tycoon-behind-big-nickel-short-faces-billions-in-losses

Quote

A Chinese tycoon who built a massive short position in nickel futures is facing billions of dollars in mark-to-market losses after this week’s unprecedented price spike, according to people familiar with the matter.

Xiang Guangda -- who controls the world’s largest nickel producer, Tsingshan Holding Group Co., and is known as “Big Shot” in Chinese commodity circles -- has closed out part of his company’s short position and is considering whether to exit the wager altogether, the people said. Nickel rocketed to a record high above $100,000 a ton on Tuesday, driven in part by Tsingshan and its brokers’ activity, before trading was suspended.


While the exact scale of Xiang’s losses is unclear, Tsingshan’s short position on the LME is in the region of 100,000 tons of nickel, people familiar with the matter said. It could be even larger than that when positions taken through intermediaries are taken into account, people separately said. That means it would have suffered well over $2 billion of daily losses at the most extreme point of nickel’s surge on Monday.

 

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18 hours ago, Knoxtnhorn said:

US Gold Bureau.

Cool. I don't know them but their prices look similar to other online places I use.

Are you still in Knoxville? My local guy who has the best prices I ever found goes to lots of shows, he might know a shop near you with a similar strategy to his. I can ask him if you like, no problem.

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25 minutes ago, RDCanecutter said:

Cool. I don't know them but their prices look similar to other online places I use.

Are you still in Knoxville? My local guy who has the best prices I ever found goes to lots of shows, he might know a shop near you with a similar strategy to his. I can ask him if you like, no problem.

Nope.  Moved back to DFW 4 years ago.  Thanks.

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On 3/8/2022 at 8:26 AM, pantone159 said:

Hey nickel prices are going through the roof now!

I do have some old Canadian coins that are pure nickel, maybe I will get a chance to sell them for their metal content.

Heard on NPR last night that the nickel and copper in a US nickel is worth more than 7 cents now. Time to melt those nickels. Is it possible to separate the 2 metals? Asking because I really don't know.

 

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Memory lane! I bought my first gold and silver (outside of jewelry & such) back in 2012.

If these 2 silver Libertads were not the exact first, they are close enough. Paid too much but no ragrats.

Got the gold 2 Peso a little while later at what would be a bargain price now. I remember the seller that I had been buying silver from suddenly treated me like he thought I was James Bond. Everything suddenly shifted up a level. He was a good actor.

[Edit: I'm a MO-ron, that's not a 2 Peso, it's either a 2.5 or 5 peso. Wish I still had guitar calluses.]

DSC00090.JPG.292069d04fc4dbc76a95c484c068ac2c.JPGP1010868.thumb.JPG.d1ea4f3a2d4681aec27c22e4a82295f5.JPG

Edited by RDCanecutter
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2 hours ago, Superhero said:

Heard on NPR last night that the nickel and copper in a US nickel is worth more than 7 cents now. Time to melt those nickels. Is it possible to separate the 2 metals? Asking because I really don't know.

 

Well see what you do, is you go down to the bank and withdraw $10,000, but tell em you want it in nickels. Then you take those 1000kg of nickel rolls in your truck and you run across the state to the refinery, and after fees and kickbacks you oughta still have close to $14,000 cash. So you jet back to the bank and deposit 10,000 of it, and set aside the rest for scrippers and blow and VD treatments. Then you just do the same thing again every single day and make a cool $4,000 profit a pop.

(I am assuming you'd limit it to $10,000 in nickels every day because it's ridiculous to think that a bank would have $11,000 worth.)

Edited by RDCanecutter
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5 hours ago, Superhero said:

Heard on NPR last night that the nickel and copper in a US nickel is worth more than 7 cents now. Time to melt those nickels. Is it possible to separate the 2 metals?

It is not legal to melt US nickels, apparently. It is definitely possible to separate the copper and nickel, but I have no idea if it is economically worth it.

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6 hours ago, RDCanecutter said:

Well see what you do, is you go down to the bank and withdraw $10,000, but tell em you want it in nickels. Then you take those 1000kg of nickel rolls in your truck and you run across the state to the refinery, and after fees and kickbacks you oughta still have close to $14,000 cash. So you jet back to the bank and deposit 10,000 of it, and set aside the rest for scrippers and blow and VD treatments. Then you just do the same thing again every single day and make a cool $4,000 profit a pop.

(I am assuming you'd limit it to $10,000 in nickels every day because it's ridiculous to think that a bank would have $11,000 worth.)

Smelting it is a federal felony tho

i read about some people trying to do this on large scale last time some of the raw metals price had a spike

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On 3/8/2022 at 11:04 AM, Knoxtnhorn said:

 Got investments in a restaurant, several cryptos, several stocks + 403b.  Wanted to try something different.

We have similar investments.  Best thing I ever did was purchase my first gold bullion in 2006.  Caught the gold fever BAD.  Addicted ever since with no regerts.  You'll probably catch the fever too.  RDCanecutter seems like the guru here.  Wish I had his metal buying skills.  His collection is interesting and pretty damn cool. 

Edited by Shaggy3.0
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12 hours ago, 52-80 said:

Smelting it is a federal felony tho

i read about some people trying to do this on large scale last time some of the raw metals price had a spike

Yeah, I wouldn't do it personally. But pre-1982 US Cents now have about 3 cents worth of copper in them. Mrs. Canecutter collects various modern coins, so when I turn my change over to her she picks through it all, and when I get it back there are usually 2 or 3 pre-1982 cents separated out for me, for a few cents theoretical profit, after a couple of minutes work by a a woman with an advanced STEM degree. :)

I think you could melt them in Mexico if you like committing your felonies there. One day in Nuevo Laredo I saw a scrap metal place that would buy demonetized Mexican coins, and probably US as well. It was a tiny hallway you got buzzed into from the street. The lady was nice and ready to answer all my questions. At some point it suddenly hit me that I was in a narrow hallway, in Nuevo Laredo, with barricades at each end, so I eased on out.

Anyway, Mrs. Canecutter informs me that the post-1982 cents have value too, as we can make batteries out of their zinc innards after the meteor hits.

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17 hours ago, Shaggy3.0 said:

Gorgeous.

Yep. I like two kinds of silver-- old grimy stuff that was once gripped in a hungry person's hand because it meant the family was going to eat, and shiny stuff like these where if you look into them it's like you're falling into the sky.

Also, the newer Libertads are cool too, but these older chunky ones are like crack rock.

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1 hour ago, Knoxtnhorn said:

Bought some gold yesterday as well.  Just a few grams.  No big deal.  But, it is kind of cool to have an actual piece of gold considering I've watched Gold Rush Alaska for years.  :)

 

And you didn't have to get all cold and wet to get it.

Those mining shows and panning videos always leave me feeling tired and chilled. One of the early pre-California gold rushes was in North Georgia and East Alabama, and it appears that you can pay to camp out about an hour east of where I live and pan for gold. I've got a friend in N.Carolina who does that and once in a blue moon he'll turn up a little nugget. Seems like fishing, where it's cheaper to just buy the fish or the gold, but people get hooked on the thrill of the find.

Same thing with metal detecting-- I once had a $300 detector, and barely made a third of that back, but if you like digging odd stuff up, hey. The thing is, I'd find the majority of the stuff just because I was staring at the ground, and would sweep the detector to get it to "beep" in confirmation after I had already seen it.

Our big find was when we didn't even have the metal detector on us, and my wife and I were poking around a running trail and Mrs. Canecutter spotted a gold earring that I sold for 50 bucks. 

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18 hours ago, tomahawk dunk said:

I've got some old gold and silver coins I need to sell. Would it be better to send to a smelter or go to a coin shop with them? It's some mercury dimes and a couple of Mexican gold 50 pesos. I'm in the New Braunfels/SA area. Thanks.

Call Royalty Coins on the Riverwalk 425 East Commerce Street 210-225-7431. They were a pleasure to buy from, and while I was there doing my "fly on the wall" routine, they were offering very fair buy prices to people.

My retired local guy knew the original owner of Royalty, said they used to send bags of coins back and forth as one of them would run short or have an excess. He said that the Royalty Coin guy started his business using winnings from a poker game. It doesn't get much more Texan than that.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I feel the bug again. My online vendor has almost all the gold Mexican pesos available, but under my self-imposed system (keep the $ value of the gold stack and the silver stack as even as possible*,) I am heavy on gold and should buy more silver. Cool. Except there's one thing I forgot to do...

...Get some more spare cash.

Oh well, I'm going to have a chance to sell some widgets this weekend so I'll pass my time getting fired up watching that speech from Glengarry Glen Ross, then we'll see what happens.

I like the idea of getting more 90% silver from a local guy. The online prices for 90% make it seem like rare collectibles, but local price is saner.

*Any plans/schemes/systems that I refer to are things designed not so much for profit as for personal amusement, and should probably be avoided by others.

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With over two full months now in the books, updated YTD results are below as of COB Fri 3/4:

$GLD: +9.1%

$GOLD: +30.53%

$DJIA: -8.1%

$SPY: -9.5%

$RUT: -11.5%

$NDAQ: -15.3%

$BTC: -18.2%

$ARKK: -37.9%


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

March brought reduced enthusiasm for gold, while the main indexes regained some momentum.

Bitcoin’s recent surge has safely removed it from correction territory, while Cathie Wood continues her bear market adventure.

YTD gain/loss as of 31 MAR 2022:

$GLD: +7.3%

$GOLD: +32.3%

$DJIA: -5.2%

$SPY: -5.5%

$RUT: -8.9%

$NDAQ: -12.0%

$BTC: -6.4%

$ARKK: -31.7%


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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Busted my slump by throwing down 50 bucks for 1.7 oz of silver at my favorite local dealer, because I am a baller.

Got a misspelled "Isreal" art bar by Great Lakes Mint, 1973. $29. I love this stuff, all these little mints that sprang up when Nixon took the dollar off gold, and people figured it'd go full Mexican Peso, like, right away, not over the course of decades.

I had one of these things before and sold it for almost double what I paid for it. If I see an art bar with guns, titties, or religion on it, I grab it because you can find that one person who treats it as a gift for their nasty old uncle.

("Religion" includes Harleys, Texas, and anything related to Israel. Or Isreal.)

Dude gave me a hideous vinyl folder to protect it on the ride home, which I promptly cast aside in contempt once I had it within the barricaded walls of my mansion. Vinyl boogers up silver over the long run, if you have things inside vinyl flips, might not want to keep them there.

I also grabbed a dollar worth of 90% silver coins, which he was selling at 21.5 times face value, but since I've been buying from him since the Polk administration he let me slide on by at 21 per. Example #467 of why it's good to get to know a local guy.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Found myself running errands way out on the west side of town, so I dropped in on a family coin shop out there. Man had 90% silver at 22 to 1 (let drop that he'd go to 21 to 1 if somebody bought a "bag" which I took to mean way more cash than I was hauling,) and had generic rounds for $29 an ounce. Not bad, way better than on the internet.

What caught my eye were two 1978 Mexican silver 100 pesos, big (39mm) clean-design coins that are .720 pure and have 20 grams silver each. In true 70s style, Morelos is sculpted doing his best Lee Majors impression.

I looked at them, and the dude tossed out "Um, say $25 each for those." I have never known this guy to gouge, so I figured it was a ballpark offer based on their general resemblance to silver dollars. I asked him if he'd take 40 for both, he did, and they're mine.

Came in nasty vinyl flips with an abstract sun logo that I cast aside as is meet and right to do so.

These things are a time-capsule and I think the Mexicans' last stab at producing circulating silver currency. In the late 70s the Peso was pegged at 22 to a Dollar, so in 1978 these would have been worth about $4.50 US. So what, maybe about $18 in today's money? By sheer coincidence that's only a smidge over the silver value right now (and I ain't no Silver Standard dude, it'll go up and down some more like a yoyo.)

These are common and usually in good shape-- it wasn't long before the bottom fell out of the Peso and it took thousands of them to buy as much silver as these coins hold. Bet they spent most of their existence in sock drawers.

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Edited by RDCanecutter
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2 hours ago, Not that Bob said:

What do you recommend for storage Something that's not nasty.

For coins with extra value beyond the weight of the metal, I'd use PVC-free coin capsules. They make them in all sizes for coins and bars. I still have some left over from buying a bag of them for about 50 cents each on eBay. Here's something I just now googled:

https://www.amazon.com/Plastic-Capsules-Collection-Adjustable-American/dp/B07TXK6G8N/ref=asc_df_B07TXK6G8N/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=366315244042&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=17215578859765530250&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9012550&hvtargid=pla-819228996184&psc=1&tag=&ref=&adgrpid=80269928550&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvadid=366315244042&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=17215578859765530250&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9012550&hvtargid=pla-819228996184

Problem with these is they stack about as well as bars of wet soap, if you pick up a bunch at once, some WILL go flying.

For other stuff that's nice but not super-collectible, they make tubes, or you can have them banging around loose in a Crown Royal bag so long as it's sitting someplace dry.

The damaged stuff I have seen has usually been in a vinyl flip for so long that it "cooked" the surface wherever it touched the coin. Never really comes off. Other bad things are when lots of coins of different metals get stored together in some damp or hot area, there'll be green grot or odd interactions with some wood shelf etc.

Edited by RDCanecutter
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  • 2 weeks later...

March brought reduced enthusiasm for gold, while the main indexes regained some momentum.

Bitcoin’s recent surge has safely removed it from correction territory, while Cathie Wood continues her bear market adventure.

YTD gain/loss as of 31 MAR 2022:

$GLD: +7.3%

$GOLD: +32.3%

$DJIA: -5.2%

$SPY: -5.5%

$RUT: -8.9%

$NDAQ: -12.0%

$BTC: -6.4%

$ARKK: -31.7%


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

April’s shitshow has finally concluded, and Gold is not proving to be much of a “recession hedge”; with significant retreat occurring for mining stocks alongside a drop in bullion price.

That said, it’s certainly not cratering to the extent of many other notable alternatives.

YTD gain/loss as of 29 APR 2022:

$GLD: +5.1%

$GOLD: +20.3%

$DJIA: -9.9%

$SPY: -13.8%

$RUT: -18.0%

$NDAQ: -22.3%

$BTC: -18.9%

$ARKK: -51.4%
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  • 1 month later...
On 4/29/2022 at 7:27 PM, Muny_Tex said:


April’s shitshow has finally concluded, and Gold is not proving to be much of a “recession hedge”; with significant retreat occurring for mining stocks alongside a drop in bullion price.

That said, it’s certainly not cratering to the extent of many other notable alternatives.

YTD gain/loss as of 29 APR 2022:

$GLD: +5.1%

$GOLD: +20.3%

$DJIA: -9.9%

$SPY: -13.8%

$RUT: -18.0%

$NDAQ: -22.3%

$BTC: -18.9%

$ARKK: -51.4%

Why did these monthly updates stop?

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