Are we a rare breed?

[Finbinfin]

Apologies if this has been done already...

 

I want to know members' thoughts on how many people are interested in precious metals and coins in the UK.

 

The Royal Mint has 373k likes on Facebook but I would be surprised if that many collected PMs. Changes to circulating coins cause a spike in interest and I generally find people love to hold a new coin and if it's gold or silver their eyes light up!

 

My family love to see what my new arrivals are but would never buy anything themselves and friends just assume I am really wealthy when I mention owning (a very modest sum of) gold.

 

There seems to be a gap between some innate attraction to the shiny stuff and people actually going out to buy and own it.

[ApisMellifera]

I would say yes.

this old vid sums it up perfectly 

 

 

[breaktwister]

"Is the hersey bar real"? Lol

[Kman]

Somewhat rare yes

I would say it's the same rarity as people who have an entrepreneurial spirit 

@ApisMellifera I don't like videos like that because he could have talked to 1000 people, 990 could have said "yeah cool gimme the silver" but he only leaves the 10 people in who chose the chocolate

People can do what they like editing after the fact and create their own narrative 

[Uwink]

1 hour ago, Finbinfin said:

 

Apologies if this has been done already...

 

I want to know members' thoughts on how many people are interested in precious metals and coins in the UK.

 

The Royal Mint has 373k likes on Facebook but I would be surprised if that many collected PMs. Changes to circulating coins cause a spike in interest and I generally find people love to hold a new coin and if it's gold or silver their eyes light up!

 

My family love to see what my new arrivals are but would never buy anything themselves and friends just assume I am really wealthy when I mention owning (a very modest sum of) gold.

 

There seems to be a gap between some innate attraction to the shiny stuff and people actually going out to buy and own it.

 

I have to admit that even my wife does not know that I have a collection of gold/silver (albeit a small one), I work on the the principle that the fewer people that know...the better...or is it just me? I love to sit and stare at it with by candle light when there is no one else about 

[augur]

20 minutes ago, Kman said:

People can do what they like editing after the fact and create their own narrative 

Agree. But I didn't know about fake Hershey's bars 

[ApisMellifera]

@Kman yes off course and it could also be acted and faked.... totally agree on that. That video seem to be film somewhere suburban . i'm sure that the silver bar would be picked up if he filmed it in a major city. 

I can relate with @Finbinfin question. Most of my friends are not into PM's, only a few and some family members. But I rather keep it to myself, than talking about it.

 

24 minutes ago, Uwink said:

I work on the the principle that the fewer people that know...the better...or is it just me?

+1 Totally Agree!

[Mariner1961]

He's maybe a stacker and doesn't want anyone to know! :-)

[gkoogk]

anyone notice just before the video starts his next "victim" is standing 20 yards back waiting for her cue?

[Finbinfin]

I've seen him before, Mark Dice is it? He's a bit arrogant but get his point that most people don't think about what money is or the value of PMs

[whitesands1]

Good job he doesn't do this nearby the Silver Forum summer day out!

[Kman]

49 minutes ago, Finbinfin said:

I've seen him before, Mark Dice is it? He's a bit arrogant but get his point that most people don't think about what money is or the value of PMs

Mark Dice used to market himself as a "pick up artist" and offer guys advice on how to approach women (before doing what he does now obviously)

He had videos where he would approach random women and try and "pick them up" much in the style of the videos he does now, he also had a book

I feel uneasy about him, I feel like he is deceptive and manipulative and his only real goal is to make money, not spread any meaningful message. 

[Finbinfin]

Definitely don't tell the missus

[breaktwister]

I seen the full video before. In it he tells some of the folk that choose herseys there is a coin shop just behind where they could sell the silver for $100 or whatever spot was then. 

I bet most just thought "so, I got a free herseys"

[KDave]

It's a tough one to call, perhaps there are more of us than you think, because of the nature of the subject, especially with stacking. People don't normally talk about how much wealth they have got in person, certainly not physical precious metals. That said, if I judge by the superficial aspects of the people I see, then I would have to say no there are not many stackers or savers of any kind for that matter.

The majority of people I know are more interested in paying hundreds of pounds a month to drive a comfy car to work and back, spend a fortune on living life to the absolute maximum and don't generally save. Good for them, perhaps we are doing it wrong. But then the same people who earn far more than I, are amazed that I can afford a deposit on a house because of my bad habits. 

It wasn't until I had a decent sum of cash that I started looking at ways to get a better yield than the bank would give me, followed later by ways to diversify away from those said yield instruments that I found gold and silver. That's a lot of steps before I was even introduced to them as an investment. Given the average savings of the average person I would say from that point of view, we are a minority. 

[Finbinfin]

Thanks for those wise thoughts! Wealth is not credit or consumption for me

[vand]

I think that we are probably a very small minority. 1 in 100 or more who have more than £1000 invested in physical PMs would be my guess. 

Think about how many people have any cash savings (the latest stats make grim reading); I would say that PM stackers are probably less than 10% of this, maybe a lot less.

 

[whitesands1]

2 hours ago, KDave said:

The majority of people I know are more interested in paying hundreds of pounds a month to drive a comfy car to work and back, spend a fortune on living life to the absolute maximum and don't generally save. Good for them, perhaps we are doing it wrong. But then the same people who earn far more than I, are amazed that I can afford a deposit on a house because of my bad habits. 

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.
 

[KDave]

10 minutes ago, whitesands1 said:

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.
 

Could not have put it more grimly or better myself 

I understand why people do it and I am not making a judgement about whether this is good or bad, if someone likes cars, clothes whatever, then spending money on the good stuff is worth it. Value is subjective.

[SilverSheriff]

2 hours ago, vand said:

I think that we are probably a very small minority. 1 in 100 or more who have more than £1000 invested in physical PMs would be my guess. 

Think about how many people have any cash savings (the latest stats make grim reading); I would say that PM stackers are probably less than 10% of this, maybe a lot less.

 

More like 1 in 10000! It's difficult to put an figure on the average savings per household in the U.K.  as often the stats used in quoted articles include pension and home equity.

Considering the savings rate fell to 1% last month and the rise in unsecured borrowing credit cards and PCP finance for cars since 2009 I wouldn't be surprised if Silver Forum members are in extreme minority. 

[jayboat]

I would bet that we are a point of a percent of the population that stack are even follow PM's. I would agree on a closer to 1 in 10,000 as said above. Based on that figure, there would be around 6500 stackers in the uk based on all ages.  I only know 1 other person who has gold but he didnt stack it the way we do, he just bought stuff from the royal mint and it built up. I never seen real .999 silver are gold until i bought it myself. I dont ever see a time were people are going to rush out to buy silver and gold the way they did property a few years back but i do guess there will be more spikes like 2011 again.

When you think about it more deeply, how many people do you know with shares, own bitcoin do matched betting are p2p lending? Most people i no do their savings in a credit union, premium bonds are ISA's. Most people i no save for things like holidays, xmas, new car etc and have no long term goals. I think the main problem is most people say they are going to save whatever is left over from their pay at the end of the week instead of taking out savings on payday. They end up saving nothing. 

 

[Vacendak]

Considering myself educated, with a Ph.D. and all, socialising mostly with people like me - trying to diversify but not easy -  one would be amazed to learn that the so called "clever" people have no clue whatsoever when I mention the odd Sovereign or silver Britannia. Just a few days ago, when saying I was buying a silver Brit to mark each of my son's birthdays, somebody replied to me that a Britannia was for him one of those commemorative coins with Charles and Diana on it. Ironically, my grandmother knows her bullions and carats without ever having been able to own much herself. Living through WWII in occupied France might have taught people about the difference between wealth and money I guess.

Basically: Gold/silver = pawn shops = places desperate people go to scrounge some money.
The other lines being "Then... What can you do with it?" usually followed by "...prefer to have cash in the bank... safer than having a burglar walking away with it".

That being said, having started stacking only about a year ago, my tiny pile of gold and silver has lost me far more money than if the cash had been slowly dying in the bank... "Buy high and hold low" is my mantra.

[vand]

You can do some back-of-fag-packet calculations for this..

 

According to the silver institute there was 207 million oz of silver allocated to investment coins & bars last year.
http://www.silverinstitute.org/site/supply-demand/

 

If you use an average price of £14 then you can calculate how many "average investors" this is divided up between depending on how much the average stacker allocates to silver stacking.

Thus,
if the average stacker spent £1000 last year on their stack, that would 2.9m stackers
if the average stacker spent £2000 last year on their stack, that would 1.49m stackers
if the average stacker spent £5000 last year on their stack, that would 580k stackers

 

Of course no one has any idea how much the typical stacker puts into their stack every year, but I don't think it's far fetched to suggest that it's somewhere between £1k - 5k.

so, somewhere between 500k - 3m would be my estimate. That's out of a total world population of 7bn or so.

then, of course, this is for just 1 year, but just because you have accumulated some silver in any year previous doesn't mean that you will continue accumulating it the next year, so you have to account for people who are sitting on a silver stack accumulated previously and are just sitting on it without adding more. This could... what, 5m? 10m?

So anything between 500k - 10m of total world population could be realistic. Even if it is 10m that would still only be 0.15%.