Gold & Silver: Is This It?

W1 - that is why they do call it speculation. If we all knew the answer we would all be rich. In addition if you do not speculate you can not make money either.

In this ever changing market your assessment is as good as any others. I can look back and say wow if I held all my silver purchase for this year and made them now look how better off I would be for the year.

I am bullish on pm's even in a bear market. I keep buying and I like buying on the down side more than the upside. I would suspect it is harder for those that are new to PM's. They never had the ability to buy the sub $10 silver.

If you have the will and ability to take downturns with the possibility of large gains then speculation in PM's is fun.

I separate my Pm's into two categories. The first is sound safe money management. This is my belief that holding some pm's will help me through the worst of times in the economy.

The second is trying to out gain the market which means I actually sell large amounts for a profit then re buy low. The past 14 months have been very good.

Call it luck or call is foolishness but it has worked for me. Then again the record highs this year made it easy, like I said you can hold PM's too long or sell to soon.

I agree, Merlin. For the metals to go into a bear market would indicate that there were other markets out there that were much better places to put money. As far as I can see, we still have the same financial and economic problems that favor PM ownership. The US dollar has a little temporary (in my view) strength that comes from a visibly weaker euro and quite a number of Europeans converting their euro denominated assets into dollar denominated assets. I do not believe that this effect will last for longer than about another 2-3 months.

I agree completely. The recent bull market in Gold and Silver is based on fear of economic collapse. When the economy recovers, Gold and Silver will plummet. In my opinion Silver should be about $20 / oz and Gold $800-$1000.

That is hard to tell. My gut tells me we will have another run up in silver prices in 2012. My brain tells me to get out now and cut my losses.

The problem for me is how to get out. I'm finding physical silver is hard to sell right now. Dealers don't seem to have any interest. If I sell on ebay, I loose 13-15% in ebay / Paypal fees.

@JSH, ride this out. In my opinion, your only fear should be missing this market curve. It is a shame that you will not be able to buy in January 2012, but wait 6 months for it to come back and make your sale then.

Do you realize some people right now are on margin with paper silver? Life for us stackers is so much better!

thanks mmerlinn for the technical charts

I have $10 face in 90% Washington quarters and the rest in US Mint silver proof sets. I plan to keep the proof sets but have little interest in the quarters. I bought them to "roll hunt" when I was thinking of trying to complete full sets of coins. I was curious to see what condition "junk" 90% coins would be. While many of these coins were well worn, 6 were in excellent condition. I have since decided I have no interest completing albums of coins. I'm just not interested in them as they have little variation from year to year. I can't get excited about 50 coins that are identical except for the date. I have since decided to purchase a nice example of each US coin design going back to the Barber coins. It will make for a much smaller collection as well.

Where would one find a "bullion dealer"? Last year we shopped around some gold jewelery we had to just about everyone with a "we buy gold" sign. What we found was almost criminal. Most offered the 30 to 50% of spot. We ended up selling our gold to our jeweler who paid 95% of spot. I don't have many coin stores in my area but the one close to me offered 63% of spot for the Washington quarters.

I haven't bet the farm, this is just fun money. However, I would rather have my fun money tied up in coins I'm interested in.

@mmerlinn: The US federal debt and a family's credit card are two very different things. It is impossible for the US to default on our debt. Our debt is in US dollars that the US has complete control of. The real threat to our economy right now is not our current debt but the possibility that we may not be able to borrow in the future.

Your chart starts in 2008 or when silver prices really started taking off. If you project prices based on the past 10 years, silver should be in the $15 to $20 range right now.

Oh well, that's not that bad. I thought you were talking about buying 2011 silver eagles or such at peak price + premium, and looking to sell them right now.

Have you considered auctioning those coins on ebay . co . uk? You might not get good prices for the quarters in the US, but I think you will get more than the current spot price in the UK. I would probably be interested in many of those quarters, for example -depending on the year and grade-.

EDIT: ebay has changed from .co.uk to .com when I posted the message.