If you live in the US and you want physical, there are tons of places you can get it at. One of the biggest sites is kitco, but B&M also works. Just make sure to get a price that's as close to the spot as possible. If you have doubts about the quality of the stuff you're being sold, simply buy a small amount and attempt to sell it somewhere else. If they take it, chances are it's legit.

That took a while.

Still expecting AG to rebound to $50+ and AU to go to $1700+ shortly. (currently $39.27 and $1594)

How do you find the current spot price?


edit:


what would be a good offer for 5 of these?
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...=STRK:MEWAX:IT

http://www.kitco.com/kitco-gold-index.html

i feel like someone ITT said don't pay over 5% over spot for bullion, think thats about right.

thx

I'm so bad at math

question. If there is a QE3, gold will rise, correct? So insta buy it before QE3?

The spot price would be $3.32 each, with a quick google search revealing that the grain-to-troy conversion is 0.002083 oz per grain. So somewhere around $17-$19 for the 5 would be fair. You'll pay a lot over the spot if you buy in quantities this small.

Gold will rise regardless of QE3 or not. It's actually next to impossible for the FED to stop monetizing the debt, but even if they do, it means the whole financial sector in the US will collapse, and with it the retail and real state sectors, as well as the public sector. All these circumstances are bullish for gold anyway IMO.

Gold may go down on the announcement of the end of QE2 and no QE3 on the horizon, but that's unlikely to last.

And with the Euro going down the drain as well, global inflation rates soaring, and the central banks of India, China and others increasing their gold reserves, I see the bullish trend accelerating rather than slowing down.

If gold returns to it's status as a global medium of exchange -and history tells us this is not at all unlikely to happen-, expect gold to be worth at the very least 20 times as much as it it worth today (in real terms, as you can't be thinking nominally when fiat currencies are all but extinct).

a gram of gold is smaller than your pinky fingernail.

a grain of gold is 1/15th of a gram.

if you dropped one of those onto your carpet, you're 50/50 to ever find it.

so it's not worth it to buy a little at a time and just stock up slowly?


what's the smallest amount someone should buy?

It depends on your expected ability to save, the different premiums you will be paying for buying smaller or larger quantities, and the expected average rate at which gold will go up compared to your currency.

So for example, if you expect you can save $400 a month ($93.33 per week, $13.33 per day); and the premiums are 1.5% for 10 oz, 2% for 1 oz, 2.5% for 1/2 oz, 3% for 1/3 oz, 3.5% for 1/5 oz and 5% for 1/10 oz; and you expect gold to appreciate versus your $ at an average rate of 3% per month, with the current spot price being $1595; then the higher EV move is to buy the 1/5 oz every 24 days.

If you bought the 1/10 oz every 12 days they would only appreciate an average of about 1.19% in the time it takes you to buy the 1/5oz, but you'd pay a 1.5% higher premium for them. If you waited 40 days to buy the 1/3 oz, you'd only pay a 3% premium instead of a 3.5% for the 1/5 oz, but it would take you an additional 16 days during which time you are expecting the spot price to go up by about 1.59% on average.

Someone smarter than me should do the proper math and come up with an equation for maximizing EV. You could even make a calc sheet for it so it automatically tells you what to buy when you input those factors. (savings rate, premiums, spot price, appreciation rate)

This all assumes that for you it's the same to hold tiny fractions of gold as it is to hold larger ones, which may not be the case. (Smaller ones are better if you expect to need to sell small amounts in the future, or for bartering; whereas larger ones take less room to store).

yes
sort of. Many investors will know QE3 is coming before it's officially announced. So the expectation of a QE3 announcement, will cause gold to rise.

I'm much like you LirvA... I recently became a libertarian and have been doing lots of reading.
I'm of the belief that QE3 will not come until the stock market takes a big dip and the public once again calls on the fed to save the economy with QE. This article (from Apr 6 2011) explains it all pretty well. Other more prominent people like Marc Faber and Jim Rogers seem to be of the same belief. Peter Schiff doesn't seem to be, unfortunately. Lots of them seem to be biased by their own companies/investments though.

If the fed holds off on QE3 for the next year or two, the stock market will decline as well as commodities, while the dollar will rally.

The dollar is doomed long term though and gold is strong long term, that is one thing that all libertarians agree on.

Unfortunately I'm not really in a position to invest in any gold at the moment, though I wish I was. I could buy a little here and a little there, 50 bucks a week or so, but from what I gather, you certainly won't be maximizing any EV this way.

I might talk with my mother and father and let them know that I think gold is a solid investment and now is the time to invest, and maybe they can end up making some good investments that pay off in the long run. They're in the position to invest a couple thousand if they wanted to.

Regarding myself, this is something I just posted in another thread. I have always shared ideals with the Libertarian philosophy, I just didn't know there was a name for that until 2004.

I voted for Obama in 2004 for a few reasons. The first, is a very very poor reason. I have been a registered Democrat my entire voting life, as has my father and the rest of his family. Growing up in a family of Democrats, sure, I'm a Democrat too! ... don't really understand what that truly means yet and don't really know myself yet, but hey, I'm a Democrat too!

The second was because of Bush. I certainly voted in opposition of Bush, but not necessarily in support of Obama.

... and I seem to have forgotten the third reason. ... I'm a bit koofy aorn on some lortab I took for my carpal tunnel :x

I did support Obama, though I didn't understand the ramifications of his policies and was still ignorant and uneducated on a decently wide range of issues, but I didn't really support Obama. I supported a facade.

Now, I'm older, more educated, and I know myself, certainly much much more than I did 5 years ago. I know what I believe in, and I'm willing to fight to the death to defend my ideals.

Also, 5 years ago I wouldn't have even considered voting for a Republican. If there was an R by your name, you were automatically my enemy. Now, that is not the case at all. Now, I am going to look for libertarian minded candidates in both parties, and support whoever I find, no matter what party they are in.

2009 Gold Price History

London Afternoon (PM) Gold Price Fixings

04/21/09 (the date OP created this thread) $888.75


Nice thread....

Yeah, it's gone up an average of 2.2% monthly (29.84% yearly) since then.

i started by buying grams off of ebay. they usually come in a credit card, anywhere from turkey, australia, switzerland, etc. with the spot price of a gram being about 50 itself, you're going have a hard time finding them under say 58 or so.

you could also look for gold nuggets 22k+, those are priced a little cheaper by weight (because they're only 90% gold tho) but i filled a decent sized mini-jar with them back a couple years ago when the prices were starting to fly on everything else.

can you go to a local coin shop? they'll usually have some sort of gold less than $100 or a 1/10thoz gold coin (160-180, depending).

to answer, i started off small for sure. grams purchased from ebay. then i started getting into silver eagles. then i found my local shop and fractional gold....

start small, it's fun. buy a $5-10 set of coins that interests you along with your coin when you find a store..

it definitely all adds up, and faster than when you think.

gahhhh cmon, just hit $1600 and get it over with, enough with the tease around $1597'ish. let's crack through this resistance level so we can get the next leg of this bull market started already

$1601 and $40.33

BOOM

LirvA -- if you got only tiny amounts of money to buy physical metal with, maybe think about silver instead of gold.

I disagree with this. You don't really get smaller premiums when investing a small amount of money into silver as opposed to gold. If anything, the opposite is the case. Silver premiums tend to go down more than gold's premiums when you invest large quantities as opposed to small quantities.

The only reason I can see why it makes sense to advise people who have less money to invest (in particular) to go for silver rather than gold, is that they are less likely to have problems with finding room to store it than heavier investors would.

Personally I think silver is a better bet right now EV wise, though I also think it's the one with higher variance.

Wahoo $1600! I'm buying myself a new pair of shoes tomorrow to celebrate! (No, I am not a woman, I've been needing a new pair of shoes for months)

I'm not an expert on gold prices for sure but my sense is that we're not really close to a top or anything like that. I base that on my subjective and qualitative reading of sentiment so take that FWIW.

Couldn't resist and bought some Jan '12 otm SLV calls today.
Also found a local guy selling a few tubes of 20 uncirculated ASE's for $3 over spot on CL. Hoping Ag has a slight pullback manana so I can save a few dollars

THE BOTTOM IS IN!

http://www.tfmetalsreport.com/blog/1...uprecht-return