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Bimetallic

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Everything posted by Bimetallic

  1. Hi all – There's been quite a bit of media coverage of Costco selling PAMP bars online. One article claimed that the price sometimes falls under spot. They're a major discount warehouse-style retailer in the US. Limit of two bars. They keep selling out apparently. They're 1 oz Lady Fortuna bars. Online only. When I first heard this I thought their margins must be razor thin – retailers are used to much greater markups than bullion dealers most of the time (how dealers make it work is still a mystery to me, @LawrenceChard). So it makes sense if they are indeed falling under spot occasionally – I doubt their website supports the constant real-time price updates tracking a spot price and other variables, but who knows. The coverage is weird. It's like buying a gold bar is unheard of, like who would buy one online, and with incompetent price comparisons. And what does this mean? "APMEX and JM Bullion sell gold by weight, quantity and price." By price? How do you sell something by price? Anyway, the reporters are all struggling to describe a market we take for granted. It reminds me of the recurring lesson that when the media reports on something you know a lot about, you notice severe errors. Depending on the rate, it implies they're just as bad at other topics...
  2. Sorry, I'm surprised I missed that. I must've mentally inserted Canadian between Royal and Mint. Maybe a North American bias, since I'm in Arizona. I've never seen RM carded products, just the Canadian cougars and moose and other wildlife. Gold Brits are inexplicably cheap in the US, with a ≈4.4% premium, so I like them a lot.
  3. 1. Are you sure the loose coin and carded coin are the exact same product? The only carded RCM coins I've seen are their special 99999 fine gold, not their normal 9999 fine grade. That's five nines vs four nines. Regular Maples are four nines. RCM is the only mint in the world that even offers five nines gold. Those always sell for an extra premium. 2. There's an interesting potential unintended consequence of moving toward carded gold, which is most common with bars. It makes fraud easier, since people are no longer interacting with their bullion directly if it's sealed in a plastic bubble in a card. This reduces the available counterfeit testing methods. I think Sigma is supposed to work, but not any other method like XRF, ultrasound, specific gravity, and simple measurements and mass become more difficult. If counterfeits in cards blows up in the future as a big issue, they'll probably lose their premium and any sense of value added. Just a possibility to keep in mind. It would spark a return to direct reality kind of movement, and dealers and buyers will cut the plastic first thing.
  4. If you have to post the value on the package, I would misdirect on the contents to deter thieves. The contents should be implied as something hard to sell, fence, etc., unlike bullion or jewelry. In the US all of the online dealers label their shipments as coming from fictitious merchants like Joe's Machine Parts, M&J Bearings, etc., or just a generic "Fulfillment" followed by an address. But given the value declaration, the fiction should be something like Nova Biotech, Star Electronics, Chavez Labs, etc. High tech that explains the value, but isn't going to be liquid financially, no one to sell it to.
  5. Does the Royal Mail have a monopoly in the UK? I know they were privatized some years ago, but there are many forms of privatization, including ones where there is still a coercive (government-enforced) monopoly. How do they get away with such brazen employee theft? Do their employees still have the artificial level of job security they had before the privatization? I thought you lot had CCTV everywhere these days. I realize the RM can't have a monopoly on international package shipments, but national monopoly mail carriers often use their monopolies on letter mail to offer lower prices for package shipments than private carriers can offer (the mail monopolies have nearly fixed route costs already, and can throw packages onto the routes for very little marginal cost). Is the RM the cheapest for international too?
  6. The video I see from the thread on questionable Sovereigns is by some bloke named Christopher Collects. Are he and Backyard Bullion one and the same?
  7. @LawrenceChard It wasn't you – it was Robert Matthew, the author of the article that you republished on your site. He said "...it contained £2-18 shillings of gold but sold on the continental markets from between £4 and £10." I didn't understand his shillings bit, but I assumed that his number came to less than £3.00, so 2x to 4x premiums (or rather up to 3.33x, conservatively, with £10.00/£3.00). By the way, this bit from further up the thread is off: There's an extra zero in your copper figure, and a slightly incorrect number – it should be 0834, not 0084.
  8. Fascinating, @LawrenceChard, I had no idea Sovereigns used to sell at greater than 100% premiums over melt value. I'm not sure what a shilling is, but it looks like prices even reached 3x or 4x their melt. (When he says "£2-18 shillings", does that mean two pounds plus some fraction of a pound?) I don't think we've ever had 2x to 4x premiums on old American gold coins in the US, like the pre-1933 gold, but I don't think there was much of a gold bullion market here from the 1930s to 1970s, before lots of government mints worldwide started producing bullion again, followed by the economies of scale provided by web-based dealers. It's interesting that the British government couldn't get enforcement action by other countries initially because Sovereigns were no longer legal tender. By the way, do you have a definitive test for genuine/fake Sovereigns? Since they're made of the same stuff, are you just looking at the quality of the strike? It doesn't seem like a very difficult thing to reproduce, just standard coining with good dies. How do you know for sure that someone didn't hit Royal Mint levels of quality and detail? It sounds like the Italians and Swiss might have been capable of it. Since coins don't have individual serial numbers, it would be easier to fake them than banknotes (also because they're much less complex than notes). I assume that even an excellent fake note would risk discovery by either having the same serial number as another (genuine) note, or by having an invalid serial number. But coins face no such obstacles. It's an interesting question whether a superb fake Sovereign that is indistinguishable from genuine Sovereigns is in fact much of a fraud. If it's impossible to know that it's fake, then it's like Schrödinger's cat in a box that can never be opened...
  9. Black only calls him "Fred" and states that this is a made-up name to protect his identity. Fred is depicted as a great, encouraging boss, but also someone who would kill people who threatened him. (He once killed a member of a criminal syndicate who came to his office with demands that Fred pay for "protection".) Black notes that Fred was a London nightclub owner (not sure what kind of club, like a strip club or a disco), and they were active around 1970 - 1975 or so. Fred paid for Black's shopping list of extremely expensive offset presses, platemaking machines, process cameras, inks, fine cotton papers, etc. I've never heard of fakes made of solid gold before. That seems like it would ruin the margins of such an enterprise. The only fake gold bullion I've heard of is tungsten plated in gold, since tungsten has essentially the same density as gold (less than a 0.2% difference), particularly with PAMP Suisse and other bars. Those silver readings are fairly trace level, if the numbers are millesimal fineness. 3 means 003? So 0.3% silver by weight? And then the fake is 0.9% by weight. I wonder why they bothered adding such a tiny amount of silver, and why the real Sovereigns had even 0.3% silver. That seems a bit high for unintentional trace level, and too low to be intentional or esthetically relevant. When silver is included in Crown gold, it's normally several percentage points, like the 3% silver in US Gold Eagles, which makes them so much brighter and prettier than Krugs and Sovereigns. I think other countries also included significant silver in their gold bullion, maybe Mexico a long time ago. I could've sworn I read about a Mexican coin that was all silver, no copper, as the alloying metal, so 90/10 or 91.67/8.33 with no copper at all. That post by Jon Clarke relies on weight measurements that come down to less than a thousandth of a troy ounce difference. Both samples weigh 0.235... troy ounces, with the difference coming in the subsequent decimals. He doesn't mention the tolerances and accuracy of the scale used though, so it's not necessarily valid to assert that the fake sovereign truly weighs more than the real one. Most scales aren't accurate to that degree. The difference here is about 12 mg, for objects weighing about 8,000 mg. Are your scales that accurate? As far as sources on Crown gold, I found Dodd's 1911 book History of Money in the British Empire and the United States (free online at Google books), and this article by Heather Darsie. It seems like Crown gold is defined by its gold fineness of 9167, not by the alloying metals. The balance is typically copper, but there's nothing that says there can't be some silver. I've attached a screenshot of some of the snippets from Dodd's book.
  10. Hi all – I've been reading a memoir by one of your countrymen, Charles Black. It's called Counterfeiter: The Story of a British Master Forger (1989). He was a banknote forger, probably the best around in the 1970s, mostly of USD, but ultimately also some British pounds when he says he reminded himself that he was an Englishman after all. How he faked the watermarks was pure brilliance. But he dropped something in passing that shocked me. He said his boss had a side hustle of selling fake Sovereigns to the finest bullion dealers in London. But, they weren't fake in terms of metal content. They were true Crown gold alloy coins, 91.67% fine, balance copper, just like real Sovereigns. The boss had them made in Switzerland with the help of some Lebanese forgers (Black says the Lebanese were the best overall forgers in the world). Black said this was profitable because of the markup, i.e. the premium. That's hard to imagine today, since the premiums before the pandemic were only 5-6%. And that's over spot, which doesn't account for any fabrication costs. Were the premiums on Sovereigns much higher in the 1970s? Were they mostly proofs or something back then? He doesn't mention anything about proofs vs. normal bullion, special editions, etc. @LawrenceChardHave you ever discovered fake Sovereigns that were made of Crown gold? Any other fakes made of the real stuff? This type of forgery is fascinating, almost like an unauthorized minting more than true fakery.
  11. I don't understand. You're saying there wasn't a burglary attempt? But this story was published? How would they get that wrong? Didn't they interview you? I mean they said Chard's staff were amused to find the tunnel or something, which would require them to have talked to you or your staff. Is this some fake paper? (I don't see anything about aliens or whatever on the cover.) I tried finding the story online but couldn't. I did find this though: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3483679/Hatton-Garden-gang-sentenced-14million-gem-raid-today.html Those geezers were also involved in something called the "Brink's Mat" gold heist. We have a Brink's armored car firm in the US, but I don't know what the "Mat" refers to. Somehow they got caught every time, which makes me a little bit sad. Why do these sorts of big-time heist crews always get caught? What's the point of doing something if you're just going to get caught? What happened to pride in one's work, in one's craft? I mean, I'm not condoning robbery, but jeez, if you're going to do something, do it right. In California, they had a similar big robbery of an armored car company cash depot – it was a seven figure haul. They got caught because one of them tried to pay a realtor for a house with cash still wrapped in the armored car company's branded cash straps...
  12. There's no benefit to avoiding printing. Paper is invariably made from privately owned renewable forests, that harvest the trees on a rotation, replanting each area in turn, and round and round they go. The trees used for paper pulp are young when harvested, no more than 20 years old. Fine paper is made of cotton, so no trees involved there anyway. Cotton paper is acid-free by default, so it's great for archival and storage purposes. (Most cheap office paper made from tree pulp is also acid-free these days, but not by default.) Moreover, I don't think environmentalist abstractions are rational or should be encouraged. There is nothing we do regarding paper that has anything to do with something any wise person would call "saving the Earth". Probably nothing we do should be characterized that way, or its opposite. Having an abstraction of "the Earth" as some sort of thing to be saved, and getting a boost from purification rituals tied to said salvation, is all optional. Humans don't need to be running around with such emotional and wobbly abstractions and mystical beliefs. When I exposed the fraud of the 97% climate consensus paper (the authors lied about their methods, broke experimenter blindness) to the journal publisher (IOP), the corrupt official at IOP sent emails with an appeal at the bottom to "Please think of the Earth before printing this email." Jesus. She was fundamentally ideologically compromised with respect to her ability or willingness to retract a fraudulent paper that served the agenda of this cult or ideology she was affiliated with. Of course she didn't retract the paper – they stuck their heads in the sand and covered it up. (And who prints emails? It wouldn't occur to me to print her ridiculous emails.) p.s. Is Chard's website supposed to be down right now? Because it is. Is it down "for the environment"?
  13. Are any of the coins in this thread made of silver? They're not marked as silver, and the links say that they're made of copper nickel. Well, the link for the first one says it's copper nickel, and the skeleton coin was listed for £4, so it must not be silver either. I don't understand what the point of these objects is – they're just copper-nickel right?
  14. No coin condoms for me. Takes away all the feeling... 😊 In general, I just wash my... hands, erm. I guess I've actually gotten quite into hand washing since the pandemic started up. I've been vigorously washing my hands every time I return home from a trip to the market, or walking the dogs/checking the mail, etc. I've grown fond of vigorous hand washing. It feels good, and I probably should've washed my hands a lot more before the pandemic. So now, whenever opening new (to me, not necessarily to the world) silver, I always wash up like a surgeon. It's natural now, low friction. I think I was also mindful initially of COVID risk from packages and the surfaces of the actual silver, banknotes, or world circulation coins. I collect all three, and was still ordering stuff from Europe well into the pandemic. I don't really worry about COVID much anymore, since I'm vaccinated, boosted, and never got infected anyway, but I stick with the hand washing. The ultimate is probably thorough hand washing + cotton gloves, but the hand washing alone pretty much eliminates issues from handling. Sebum is the big contaminant coming from human hands and skin. It's the unique skin oil, really excellent lubricant actually. It's what banknotes are mostly contaminated with (along with cocaine...). Brief handling of coins with washed hands shouldn't do anything harmful. The sulfur in the air is the main issue with silver, so sealing off the air is the big thing. For super precious coins, cotton gloves do help prevent subtle scratches from grains of sand on the skin and fingernails.
  15. If you invest based on crude hunches, you'll probably lose lots of money. People have lost lots of money on silver. A crude hunch is something like: "Silver demand and price will go up because of solar panels, electric cars, etc." That's not a valid method of knowing anything about the world, and no serious investor would ever act on that amount of cognition. To know or predict that demand will go up because of those things, you have to do research. And math. You have to find out to what extent silver is used in various products, and calculate whatever increase you expect in those products, along with any changes in the amount of silver used in those products. That last part is critical because it's dynamic, not fixed. There's no law of nature that says you have to put X amount of silver in a solar panel. The trend in precious metals use has historically been downward in electronics and other products. Manufacturers are always trying to reduce costs when they can, and engineers figure out ways to minimize things like PM. So whatever amount is used today is not necessarily going to be the same in 2030. But the key point is that you have to do research to know anything of this nature about the world. You can't know anything about future silver demand by just asserting a vague hunch. That's not anything. And if you go that route, serious investors will seriously outperform you. They'll be on the other side of those trades. Hedge funds, for example, are extremely smart and rigorous about research and data. They will find out exactly how much silver is projected in various products, and model and update it accordingly. In general, silver is a small market. Gold is fairly small compared to lots of industries, and silver is quite a bit smaller than gold. You'd be surprised to know how little bankers care about it or think about it. It's not important to them. Relatedly, if you look at where and how wealth is created in this world, it's not in metals or commodities. It's in intellectual property, in starting new companies, based on innovative ideas. That's where the billionaires come from, at least the younger ones. The Airbnb guys are billionaires, created a whole new market. Same with Uber, Amazon, Tesla, etc. If you want wealth, you have to create value, or fund people who do. You can't count on just owning a metal as a path to wealth. Maybe crypto could work out for some people, the people who got Bitcoin at a dollar or whatever, but in general speculation is iffy. Silver isn't special. It's always second fiddle to gold, and at least with gold there's a possibility of it undergirding a future cryptocurrency. That won't happen with silver. It's more of cool diversity investment. I love owning it, but it doesn't need to be the key to my life or worldview.
  16. The processes aren't very secret at this point. You can just Google silver bullion mint and refining, and you'll find lots of videos. There are videos of the RCM, PAMP Suisse, etc. There's nothing fundamentally new in minting silver coins these days – it's just striking blanks with a die, and before that the supplier is melting and refining using standard processes. I don't understand your question about affordable for beginners. Mints are industrial operations. You can't have that scale of production equipment in a home. The dies are enormous and expensive. You can melt silver at home, and cast it, but that's a different process than what mints do. Look up "poured silver" – that's what you can do at home. It will be rough, lumpy bars, not the kind of precision you get in minted coins with radial lines and microprinting.
  17. Mylar is used by professional archivists for documents, photos, and other materials, and seems to be a known safe and inert material. I think PVC is the only identified problem material in the polymer category. And acidic paper was a problem in both documents and the enclosures used for them (sleeves, boxes, envelopes). But acid-free paper is pervasive now, so it seems like PVC is the only problem material.
  18. Ziplocs are LDPE, not PVC. Capsules are too expensive for silver – I like tubes these days since they seal and are free.
  19. Hi all – I've talked about Ziploc bags as effective storage for silver bullion, but I learned today that it's not working with some of my inventory. It seemed to work for a couple years, but I guess it just takes longer to tarnish in Ziploc bags compared to a no-enclosure situation. I knew that Ziploc bags were permeable, both through the main plastic bag sides and the zipper closure, but I assumed they were still effective compared to no enclosure – I was wrong about that. Here's a photo of the tarnish on the obverse of a silver Kangaroo (9999 fine), and on the left is a privately minted Hunter round from the Mason Mint (999 fine). They're both year 2017, and I've probably had them for 3+ years. Below that one is a shot of another Mason Mint round, and a Highland Mint bar, both 999 fine. Last is a bag that shows no tarnish. It's a 10 oz house bar from SilverGoldBull, and a couple of SD Bullion house rounds, both 999 fine. (By "house" I mean their own branded bullion. They're both big online dealers, not mints, and such dealers usually offer their own branded house bullion, made by some private mint they contract with. House bullion typically has the lowest premiums.) So it's not a consistent pattern. Not all the bagged silver is tarnished, but I'd say at least 60% is. The average time-in-bag is likely 3 years, but I didn't track it by bag. You'll notice the desiccant packs, which seem to be useless in preventing tarnish. I should've used specialized anti-tarnish strips, like the 3M brand strips on Amazon, instead of generic desiccants. The strips deal with sulfur directly, and they seem to work. It's possible that Ziploc bags + anti-tarnish strips work, and I'll probably test it with a couple of samples. But the bags don't work with desiccant pouches. A lot of this might come down to your local atmospheric environment, but I don't think anyone has researched it. Localized air pollution has dropped dramatically over the past three decades in developed countries because of much cleaner-burning car engines and industrial processes, but apparently there's enough sulfur to tarnish silver. Maybe there's enough sulfur in natural, unpolluted air – I'm not sure.
  20. @paulmertonis right about Hello Paris as the font. When he says lowercase, it's how that font does lowercase, which is actually uppercase forms. The Australian coin has strange kerning in the word Australia – notice the huge spacing between the first few letters, contrasted with the remaining letters. The Gairsoppa shipreck silver rounds have one of the best fonts I've seen. It's not a coin per se, but we see a lot more privately minted rounds in the US:
  21. That's hardly any. Currencies in rich or developed countries don't fail. Since WWII I can't think of a single currency in a rich country that has failed. Can you? Replacing a currency with a new one, especially a Euro type situation where it's a new multinational currency, isn't a failure. e.g. West Germany's deutschmark never failed. Fiat currencies don't all fail. It's not even clear that most of them fail. Dollars, pounds, Euro, Yen, Swiss Francs, all the Nordic currencies, etc – none of those have failed. So it's weird to make claims that are so easy to falsify. Inflation isn't failure – low inflation is a desired feature, and intentionally engineered. The target is usually in the 2-3% ballpark with modern central banks, and that's generally what the Fed in the US has delivered in recent decades. So a graph showing inflation over centuries doesn't really make any point. People end up with more nominal currency units as inflation unfolds, so saying that currencies lose their value doesn't make any sense, since it ignores the increase in volume. I think central banking and government currencies are a mistake, and I would eliminate that power in any country I help found. But it's not about physical vs something else – it's just about sound money, money ideally being a market good, and limiting government power. The future is money could be anything, and it might not be metal-based.
  22. Nothing I know of retails for under £300. The Fisch is good, as Mr. Chard mentioned. It's not a machine per se, but rather an inert measuring tool that verifies the size, shape, and weight of popular coins. It has depressions and slots in which to place the coin to verify its dimensions, and a carefully designed platform to set the coin and test its weight. The combination of precise dimensions and weight provides a high confidence of authenticity – most fakes won't pass. They go for about $200. The caveats are that they're designed for a specific set of popular coins due to the need for exact precision with the dimensions. There are several different Fisch models, some for silver coins, some for gold coins. Each model covers a specified handful of coins. A popular model in North America is the one that covers both Eagles and Maples. The weight test is discrete and binary. The Fisch is designed like a seesaw or pendulum scale, where when you place a coin weighing exactly one Troy ounce on the marked area, the Fisch balances or something, while any deviation from that target weight will yield a failing result. There might be Fisches for 10 oz bars, but I haven't checked. There's also a competing device costing a bit less. I forget the name, but it's generic sounding like "The Silver Coin Tester" or similar. It's essentially identical to the Fisch in its approach, with the slots and the carefully calibrated balancing for the target weight.
  23. Interesting video. I just leave silver coins in their tubes. Capsules don't seem to provide any benefit over tubes, and they add considerable expense. To not lose money on silver it's important to be disciplined on cost minimization. With premiums and, for you lot, VAT, there's already enough of a "hole" or price risk to make me want to avoid capsules. For singles I just use plastic baggies or Ziploc snack bags (those are smaller than the sandwich bags). I bought a bunch of Plymor plastic baggies on Amazon for 8¢ per bag. They're "heavy duty" 4 mil plastic, 3″ × 4″. That's probably a bit too large, and I don't remember why I chose that size. 2″ × 2″ should work, since all one ounce coins are ≈ 40 mm in diameter, or 1.6 inches. Capsules are a pain to open, and as long you have some kind of closed storage it seems to prevent tarnish, which is the main concern with silver.
  24. It looks like the 20% hole can be avoided, but only if you buy from individuals or used or something. The Brit comments about dealers might have revealed a different premise on my part. In the US the best prices and selection are at online dealers, especially SD Bullion and Silver.com / JM Bullion. They're much cheaper than local shops, and shipping is usually free. It's probably the size of the US market, and the cheap shipping options. (You can't get the same efficient shipping in Mexico, for example – their postal service is even worse than ours, and everything else will be expensive.) Most states don't tax bullion, and it can be avoided by shipping elsewhere. So it's close to a free market. But I think the bigger issue in the UK is that stackers will die out – there won't be any replenishment from younger generations. This means the market will shrink over time, and that will make it harder to do anything with silver. This is an issue in the US too, but less so because of the market size and lack of VAT. It looks like stacking sort of picked up steam around the 1980s when various national mints returned to making bullion. For decades there was virtually nothing produced, say since WWII. In the 1970s it was just Krugs, and I think some erratic Sovereign production. Then Canada, the US, and others got into it, Mexico ramped up its production, etc. There's been lots of stacking since then, especially compared to the 1940s - 1980s period. But now it's clear that young people don't know or care about bullion. The example from that crackpot Maloney with the kids just reminded me that young people are not getting into bullion. His experiment is simply an artifact of choosing very young children – try it with teens and see what happens... This implies that the future of silver is industrial, which might inform one's strategies.
  25. I think the bar question is about value or price per weight. All silver bullion is definitely not equal, so everyone should really stop saying that. Bars are cheaper than coins of the same weight. They have lower premiums. A big factor is liquidity. Some bullion is more liquid, easier to sell. Some also has bigger premiums when you sell. One's own government bullion is usually the most liquid in a given jurisdiction. In the UK, it's Britannias. Other knee-bender countries' coins are fairly liquid in Britain too, like Maples and Perth and RAM coins – basically, any coin with the Queen on the obverse. But there's no point stacking in the UK since you lot aren't willing to get your VAT on investment precious metals abolished. A 20% hit is too large to reliably overcome for the typical investor. Silver doesn't move around enough to eat a 20% loss upfront – you'd have to be a genius with exclusive access to extraordinary data to be able to time silver purchases well enough to reliably profit in the end. You'd need hedge fund resources, drones flying over silver mines, hacks into mining companies and bank traders' computers, etc. Otherwise you'll very likely lose money on silver, given the VAT. With gold you can often avoid the VAT, so it's a normal investment. But not silver in Britain. If you do risk it, stick with pure 999+ silver. There's a small liquidity benefit due to other countries' laws. In Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and other jurisdictions they exempt precious metals from consumption taxes (VAT, GST, etc.) but they stipulate a necessary purity of 99, 995, 999 or similar. It's a terrible approach to tax law to pick arbitrary preferences like that instead of letting people decide what they want, but that's what they've done. If you buy Sterling silver, it won't be tax-exempt in most countries, slightly degrading its liquidity.
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