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Today's Boot Fair Bargains


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Well so far a washout today, picked up a few ps2 games to trade with cex, £1.50 spent gives me £3.60 trade in or £2.10 cash..

 

Picked up a etch a sketch for £1.50 , that's for the niece, 

 

Did manage to pic up a tiny 9ct necklace for a quid, its so light it weighs 0.8 grams and thats with a fairly large topaz stone, still a quid is a quid.

 

of to the next one soon.

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Right I'm back. Well the boot fair/flea market was a blow out. Nothing bought. Well, I say nothing, but I did get chatting to the guy that runs the Buy any gold concession. Turns out he is an ex-jeweller by trade, now out of the business, but doing the buy any gold stuff part time. Anyway, he has a few regulars that buy any sovs that come his way, and he only adds £5-£10 on top of the spot price to move them on quick. He makes most his money selling on the rest of what he buys (chains, rings etc) onto to the big dealers, keeping back the good stuff to sell on the concession stall. He doesn't change the price on the sovs no matter what the dates are, so a Queen Vic will be the same price as a Queen Liz. Well I'm more than happy to give him my business in the future at those prices.

 

Anyway I digress, by the time I got there, all his sovs were gone. (actually he only had 3 half sovs, and he'd already promised those), but he did have a Gold Prussia Willhelm II 1913 20 mark coin. so I decided to take that at £190. It's the European standard of 0.900 gold, 21.6k, so the £190 works out at about £10 over spot, which is about 5.3% over spot. Which to me is a very fair price. 

 

post-140-0-26474200-1405266241.jpg

 

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Again, no boot fairs for me today. I'm off to the Giant Flea market at the Bath and West Showground. .....

 

For those of you in the Midlands, there is also a Giant Flea market at the Three Counties Showground at Malvern. I've been to that one in the past, and picked up some cheap silver there.

 

But wherever you go today.   Good Hunting.... :)  

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Well, I should have stayed in bed myself. Got absolutely nothing, and kept my money in my wallet. I almost bought 12 of those european postmaster, sterling silver coins / FDC's. The coins are 20g. The seller wanted £10 each, I asked what he would want if I took all 12, and he still said £10 each. He just wouldn't budge, saying that is what he paid for them. Well, I think the fact that he was trying to sell them at "cost" should be giving him a big hint that they are over priced. If he'd given me a tenner off, he would have had a sale. But it's more his loss rather than mine. Because if I really wanted them I can pick them up on ebay for less than a tenner.

 

I swear that there isn't a single proper retailer in any of the 300 odd stalls I walked past. Everyone was moaning that no-one was buying, but at the silly prices people were asking I'm not surprised. It seems prices are governed by what is quoted in the guide/price books, rather than what people are prepared to pay.

 

There were plenty of silver items on sale, but with a minimum of a £1 a gram, nothing was selling. What is the point of these sellers bringing out there little display cases crammed with silver, costing them god knows what and tying up their money in stock, if they take it all the way back home making no profit what ever.

 

Not a single brain cell between them, and certainly no one there who has any handle on retailing in general. All they think of is the profit per item as opposed to profit created by regular turnover. No point selling one item a fair for £100 and making £50 profit, when you could reduce prices to £70, sell 5 items per fair and make £100 profit 

 

I've been in retailing on and off, in various guises, for nearly 30 years, and there was not a single stall I saw today that I couldn't double their profits with my eyes closed. I can guarantee there is a market out there for selling silver via a quick turnover. As a wholesaler / retailer, you could buy silver at cost, (although you could probably pick up bulk lots for less than spot), chuck a 20% margin onto it, and your stock will fly out. 

 

It seems no-one wants to make any money these days.

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Well I went to a boot sale this morning and I haven't been to one in over fifteen years and all I can say is... ''What a load of cheap plastic rubbish stuff people were trying to sell.  Not even suitable for the pound shop.''

 

I did three trips around over a hundred stalls and saw nothing of any interest.  On the final stall before I left I took a gamble on a bag of old cutlery for two pound.  I think it's going straight in the bin. 

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Gave it all a miss today, as I got a phone call from my new sovereign dealer. He'd put by 8 sovs for me to choose which ones I wanted. So I trundled on down there, and picked out a 1873 Victoria Young Head, and a 1898 Victoria Old Head (Melbourne Mint) for £195 each. Very happy with that

 

I now have over an ounce of gold in Sovs..

 

I'm getting there....... :D  

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Ok, so I tried a new boot fair today, and well i thought I'd done good, but it turns out I only did half good.

 

Bought two silver spoons. One marked up as hallmarked silver, and one as Siam 925 Silver. A cursory glance and yes I could see the lion hallmark, and what looked like the word SIAM on the other spoon. He wanted a tenner each, I paid £15 for the pair.

 

On getting back home, had a much better look and the English spoon turns out to be a Sheffield 1920 Cooper Brothers & Sons Ltd Spoon Engraved with the initials AMW and weighing in at 28.5g. So far so good.

 

But the other spoon turns out to not be SIAM but SFAM, A mark from the French Paris silversmiths Chambly Silver Co. and I discovered a tiny 18G mark in the bowl, which i couldn't make out at the time of buying, which is a sure sign of a silver plated spoon. It also took me a while to work out the other mark in the bowl and with the help of my loupe. dodgy eyesight and google it turns out the words are "METAL ALLIAGE BLANC". Which makes me almost certain it is silver plated. It weighed in at 28g and if it had been solid silver, the two spoons would have come in at just under 25% UNDER spot. A quick basic SG test came in as bang on what you would expect from a silver plated copper nickel spoon.  

 

As it is, I have one silver spoon and one silver plated spoon. But all is not lost the silver plated spoon is very ornate, and looking at ebay, I can probably get about £5-£10 for it. So all in all I've paid under spot for my sterling silver spoon.

 

After that I popped down to see my new best friend  :D the Buy any Gold guy who is doing me some good deals on Sovs, and picked out an Edward VII 1909 Melbourne Mint Sov. for £195 and a QE2 1982 1/2 Sov, which I am 99.99999999% convinced is a proof, as the coin is exceptionally crisp in appearance, for £95. (Both prices under what I could have got from Atkinsons). Also done a deal for 6 1/2 Sovs, (a mix of Edward VII and George V) for £95 each, which I'll pick up and pay for over the next few weeks.

 

Happy with what i got today.....   

 

 

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I looked round a car boot this Sunday i found one stall with some silver, i was not confident enough that i had done my homework as to what i should pay for each item.There was a nice sterling hallmarked bar necklace, they wanted £28 i thought it was to much so left it,can't buy it for buying sake,i would of liked the bar though.

I think the trouble is i compare every thing to .999 1 oz coin what i would pay for that.instead of a different rule of thumb

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I looked round a car boot this Sunday i found one stall with some silver, i was not confident enough that i had done my homework as to what i should pay for each item.There was a nice sterling hallmarked bar necklace, they wanted £28 i thought it was to much so left it,can't buy it for buying sake,i would of liked the bar though.

The bar was probably one of those 1oz ones, so you were right to leave it. £28 even with the necklace was far too high. I wouldn't have touched it unless I could have got it for about £14, about half that price.

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The bar was probably one of those 1oz ones, so you were right to leave it. £28 even with the necklace was far too high. I wouldn't have touched it unless I could have got it for about £14, about half that price.

Just as well i never offered £20 i nearly did,and i would of thought i did well,show's i need to study more before getting involved in this side of stacking.

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Just as well i never offered £20 i nearly did,and i would of thought i did well,show's i need to study more before getting involved in this side of stacking.

Just remember sterling silver is around 36p a gram. I usually carry around an old silver jubilee coin. I know it weighs 28g so if it was silver it would be worth about a tenner. Then I can see if a possible buy weighs more or less than my coin, so I know if its worth more or less than a tenner. Gives me a rough idea about values. 

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