Precious Metals

The gold : silver ratio has increased over the previous years.

This article (German) suggests that on this basis the high gold price is unfounded :

I don't know, but is this enough reason to go and get more silver - a sign that silver may "play catch up" soon

It takes up more space and weighs a lot, I have it in the form of large bars but may consider many small coins. I once saw a place selling them in tubes.

One interesting point - gold seems to have the thinnest margins for the dealers of all the precious metals, both in buying and selling.

Then there is the point someone made earlier in this thread about VAT on silver in many regions (at least UK and Germany) which will spoil the fun.

Buying silver in a country without VAT and bringing it across the border into another country where there is VAT on silver is possibly committing an offense. Not sure if it's serious though.

The dealers and the tax offices are not treating the precious metals equally, no wonder gold is doing better than the others.

The silver does get a brown tarnish on it, not that that is really harming the metal value. Probably worth polishing it before going to sell it.

A bit more on silver being underpriced :
Neumeyer's March 2023 triple-digit silver call is a long-term call, and he explained that while he believes gold will break US$3,000 this year, he thinks silver will only reach US$30 in 2023. However, once the gold/silver ratio is that unbalanced, he believes that silver will begin to take off, and it will just need a catalyst.
 
Gold is a better monetary metal. This is a basic thing the silver bugs haven't come clean on for years. I find it odd, but of course it relates to money and is also why goldbugs don't understand the digital counterpart.
 
I was walking past a shop and went in to ask about silver and VAT.

Indeed there is VAT on silver here, on one ounce coins, on regular bars.

However he showed me something called a coin bar

I find this most retarded but it is a bar of silver which is somehow branded legally as a coin and avoids VAT in the regions where VAT is charged on silver. There is some discussion of them here :


This was yesterday, the bar he showed me was a 1kg "coin bar". I asked how much : €1200.

Then, how much if I were to bring one in to sell it : €1000 !!!

What a horrible margin and that even without VAT!

It actually reminded me that I did once buy a large coin bar many years ago, had forgotten all about that, ie that it was a coin bar not a bullion bar.

This VAT on silver (and platinum, palladium, rhodium) is a bit ludicrous. To my thinking it implies that you are buying the coins as toys rather than investments and the bars to use the metal for something. What though, make a mirror with some glass and a silver bar.. make a solar cell (how?). A very shiny and valuable doorstop or paperweight..

It's probably technically illegal to melt down a coin bar so that part of their fragile argument on why one lump of silver has VAT on it and the other, not.

There is some really crazy stuff in this world, especially around taxation and intricate rules and exceptions..
 
I was walking past a shop and went in to ask about silver and VAT.

Indeed there is VAT on silver here, on one ounce coins, on regular bars.

However he showed me something called a coin bar

I find this most retarded but it is a bar of silver which is somehow branded legally as a coin and avoids VAT in the regions where VAT is charged on silver. There is some discussion of them here :


This was yesterday, the bar he showed me was a 1kg "coin bar". I asked how much : €1200.

Then, how much if I were to bring one in to sell it : €1000 !!!

What a horrible margin and that even without VAT!

It actually reminded me that I did once buy a large coin bar many years ago, had forgotten all about that, ie that it was a coin bar not a bullion bar.

This VAT on silver (and platinum, palladium, rhodium) is a bit ludicrous. To my thinking it implies that you are buying the coins as toys rather than investments and the bars to use the metal for something. What though, make a mirror with some glass and a silver bar.. make a solar cell (how?). A very shiny and valuable doorstop or paperweight..

It's probably technically illegal to melt down a coin bar so that part of their fragile argument on why one lump of silver has VAT on it and the other, not.

There is some really crazy stuff in this world, especially around taxation and intricate rules and exceptions..
Yes, have a couple of coins just for diversification, and make them gold. Otherwise you know my rec
 
Gold is a better monetary metal. This is a basic thing the silver bugs haven't come clean on for years. I find it odd, but of course it relates to money and is also why goldbugs don't understand the digital counterpart.
The idea of owning silver alongside gold is for diversification. No serious person is disputing that gold is a superior monetary metal to silver. The reason for owning silver is it has greater utility for small transactions in a barter situation should the monetary system collapse and also many people look at the industrial commodity angle of silver.

The industrial use of silver which in an average year is around half (with the other half being investment) matters a lot for two reasons.

One is that there is increasing industrial demand for silver over time (demand for technology, electric vehicles, solar panels, smart phones, etc) will grow.

Strong industrial demand eventually means that the paper market manipulation will collapse because if a company is manufacturing smart phones or solar panels they cannot settle the derivatives transaction in fiat they must take physical delivery of silver so eventually when a shortage of supply occurs due to increasing industrial demand that will break the paper manipulation of the silver price causing silver to surge higher. However in an average year for gold the demand is at least 80% investment demand meaning the price is easier to manipulate using derivatives without causing a run on the gold supply.
 
Gold and silver have a tradition going back thousands of years for coinage.
In ancient times it was common to have both circulating as currency :

There's a list of metals for coinage in that first article, but copper also ranks quite high, but it is not valuable enough to be a precious metal, is worth a lot less than silver for the same amount.

Those other precious metals - platinum, palladium, rhodium don't have this ancient history that gold and silver have as far as I know.

Speaking of which - I just noticed that rhodium hit an enormous peak a few years ago - if I'd been watching I'd have taken out my one ounce piece of it and sold it - $30,000 per ounce! Can see it's still a lot more than I paid for it, currently about $5000. I think it cost something like $500 at purchase, I bought it more as a curiosity than thinking it would go up in value - it cannot be made into coins, it's too brittle for that kind of operation so it is a very small, cast bar. Not as shiny as some of the other metals.
 
South Africa is the world's leading producer of rhodium followed by Russia.

Some more trivia on the metal here :
..is quite comprehensive and well written.
 
It is somewhat surprising that this thread has not elicited more attention. Spot gold today hovers near $4,100 per troy ounce. The trajectory of gold—and silver, for that matter—this year has been nothing short of remarkable.

I contend that substantial upside remains. After encountering a lecture by Jayant Bhandari in the India subthread, I found his analysis both cogent and compelling. His prognostications from 2004–2007 have proven strikingly prescient. He provides an incisive discourse on emerging markets and the predilection of Indians for gold, all well reasoned here. Pay special attention to his analysis of why Indians buy gold, given the amount of grift and corruption in their economy.

Bhandari posits that in low-trust societies such as India, gold constitutes the sole reliable medium for wealth preservation. He critiques the Indian stock market as being saturated with companies whose intrinsic value is dubious, reflecting broader societal norms that tolerate systemic deception. We all know this is true, and a quick perusal of the India subthread will bolster that. This cultural and structural milieu incentivizes tangible assets over fiduciary instruments.

What are the implications for the United States? As widely acknowledged in discussions surrounding H-1B immigration, America is increasingly exposed to similar dynamics through policy decisions permitting substantial influxes of talent from panjeet central. Contemporary American enterprises—particularly in the technology and AI sectors—exhibit astonishingly high valuations despite limited tangible value creation. They resemble Indian companies more and more: companies built on hype and grift, intended as rent-seeking enterprises and not wealth creating ones. The juxtaposition of AI firms against foundational industrial entities such as John Deere underscores the asymmetry. Take Vivek Ramaswamey for example; He accumulated millions by scamming everybody on a fraudulent Alzheimer's drug. (And now he's parleying that into political power. Jeets never change, LOL) In effect, much of the American economy has increasingly assumed characteristics akin to rent-seeking and speculative overvaluation, which is mirroring low-trust economies like India's. This is only going to get much worse over the coming 30 years, so our future economic dynamic will resemble India more and more.

Consequently, these macroeconomic and structural factors appear to favor gold as a preservative of wealth. Given the constraints on achieving meaningful real returns in conventional financial instruments, the case for gold remains compelling. It would not be inconceivable for gold to reach $10,000 per ounce by 2030, barring extraordinary skill in equity selection—a feat notoriously difficult even for the most sophisticated investors.
 
Consequently, these macroeconomic and structural factors appear to favor gold as a preservative of wealth. Given the constraints on achieving meaningful real returns in conventional financial instruments, the case for gold remains compelling. It would not be inconceivable for gold to reach $10,000 per ounce by 2030, barring extraordinary skill in equity selection—a feat notoriously difficult even for the most sophisticated investors.
Interestingly enough, the RSI for gold right now is at an all time high (91) as one might imagine. Certainly, gold is sniffing out something, and that makes most people worry, but what I think is happening is that people still haven't' figured out what I've said for quite a while now: the bubble is fiat. Gold (I know this will sound funny) has only gone up 100% since 2020. I've personally picked several stocks that absolutely destroyed that over the last 5 years. I will admit the risk is much higher, though, I don't think it's what most people think it is. And don't get me started on BTC :p

The bond market is finished, which is funny. The more conservative people will stay in gold and do well until the rotation comes into BTC. That's not that far in the future, just so you're warned. What stock pickers will have to do is absolutely be careful into 2026. It doesn't seem we've hit anywhere near FOMO in any of these sectors; in fact, if any should pull back it should be gold first but it probably won't either. The tailwinds are here with the government shutdown ending at the end of the month and more juice coming in the system, another 25 bps cut by the Fed on Oct 29, etc
 
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