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 :

Gold-Rallye basiert auf Angst statt Fakten – Inside Paradeplatz

insideparadeplatz.ch insideparadeplatz.ch

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 :
investingnews.com

Could the Silver Price Really Hit $100 per Ounce?

Will the First Majestic Silver CEO’s silver price prediction of more than US$100 per ounce come true? The silver spot price made waves in 2020 when it rose above US$20 per ounce for the first time in four years, and the precious metal has repeatedly tested US$30 per ounce since. Since...
investingnews.com investingnews.com
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.
Click to expand...
 
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..
 
stadtaffe said:
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..
Click to expand...
Yes, have a couple of coins just for diversification, and make them gold. Otherwise you know my rec
 
Blade Runner said:
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.
Click to expand...
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.

Coinage metals - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
In ancient times it was common to have both circulating as currency :
en.wikipedia.org

Bimetallism - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

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 :

Why Rhodium Is So Expensive - WHYIENJOY

“Because rhodium is both scarce and expensive to extract from ores, its value is almost certain to remain quite high,” it said. Heraeus Precious Metals says rhodium prices are likely
www.whyienjoy.com www.whyienjoy.com
..is quite comprehensive and well written.
 
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