Gold bullion coins are probably your best bet. Eagles and Krugerands are 22K gold which don't scratch as easily, yet still contain a full troy oz of gold. If you want pure gold Maple Leafs and Austrian Philharmonics are good choices. Make sure you pay no more than 5% over spot. I think bars are cheaper in terms of premium over spot but obviously are not easily divisible, and if you choose to invest in these you're probably better off going with a 3rd party storage or buying into a fund that holds physical bullion (see the post from J.R. I posted earlier itt)

This. Also, Krugerands generally have the lowest premium over spot for coins, eagles are pretty good too.

Buy full 1oz coins, don't mess with the fractional stuff. If you're worried about real SHTF stuff, get some silver for smaller transactions.

1oz credit suisse bars have VERY low premiums, lower than krugerands.

Where did you get your gold? I am planning to get 2 oz of gold bullion from Monex.com. Have you ever bought from that site?

They're a bigger name so I suspect your experience will be relatively smooth.

Ill assume that the: after flyWF is implied.

Monex only sells units of 10 one ounce gold coins or 10 oz of bullion. Does this mean that I need to spend a minimum of 12k to buy gold?

i have 5 tenth oz coins for sale. buy buy buy!

the site I'm working with is goldline, think it was mentioned in thread.

Bumping this thread given the imminent launch of QE2 and Bernanke's unending quest to debase the dollars in your pocket. To put things into perspective, roughly one year ago when the last post in this thread was made, gold was about $1050/oz. At the moment we sit at $1378 and climbing.

How much of that increase is dollar debasement and how much is it just an increase in demand with pretty much everyone recommending buying gold right now?

It's just a fad, no systemic error to worry about here. Keep strokin' Phill.

Lol, wat, im honestly curious. Everyone knows the value of the dollar is dropping, but whether it is dropping by as much as gold is rising is a question worth asking.

Ignoring the fact that "pretty much everyone recommending buying gold right now" is nowhere near where we are, I see you providing one reason, not two. The insightful ones recommending gold do so because of dollar debasement.

Gold hasn't even begun to reflect the level of dollar debasement (aka credit inflation) that has already occurred, as they've been at it quite a while.

But the real treat comes when control of the price suppression scheme is lost and paper and physical diverge.

Its obviously nowhere near, yet.

Yet another bump on account of the following:


Dollar Index Falls Toward Lowest in Two Years on Rate Outlook

Gold also touched another all time high at $1520/oz while Silver continues to scream towards $50. Obviously nothing to see here.

The most interesting thing to happen over the weekend was China announcing that it intends to trim it's largely USD denominated reserves by roughly 2/3. The question you have to ask is why would they make such an announcement? As a rule of thumb, you would never announce that you are going to dump the buck before doing it. One theory is that it is brinksmanship, trying to get Ben Bernanke to stop destroying the dollar so that China does NOT have to sell and take (enormous) losses. But they will be selling at some point, otherwise it's all just been capital poured down the USG rathole. And they will be selling a lot and very soon to try to stimulate their way through their ongoing housing bubble collapse and the collapse of US imports that looms.

It's very curious.

As far as owning physical gold goes, isn't that a fairly large premium to pay on an investment (and probably taking another such hit when you sell it somewhere down the road)? Is it a better idea to invest in funds like CEF? How do you find out how a fund like CEF compares to, say, GTU/GLD/SLV (in recent history, CEF > GTU > GLD but I have no idea why)?

5% was pretty large a while back; I was paying +2.4% for physical 6 weeks back. But I don't know what the premia are since the moon shot began in earnest. I don't even know if my guy has metal at any price.

This came from an investment guy who was being interviewed on the radio a couple weeks ago. Something to the effect of:

"We don't own any gold. You can't make anything from it. You can't do anything with it. The only reason anyone buys it is in the hope that someone later on will pay more for it. It's kind of like the 'bigger sucker' theory".

BDD is apparently swept up in the gold bubble.

sad thing is you believe it.

HOPE for the bailout.

which Dollar Fish said this?

"You could take all the gold that's ever been mined, and it would fill a cube 67 feet in each direction. For what that's worth at current gold prices, you could buy all -- not some -- all of the farmland in the United States. Plus, you could buy 10 Exxon Mobils, plus have $1 trillion of walking-around money. Or you could have a big cube of metal. Which would you take? Which is going to produce more value?" ~

This is all true. Of course it's also all true of dollars. At least with gold you don't have to worry about geniuses printing trillions more to save the economy.

Nobody is advocating stuffing dollar bills in your mattress. Or even having a significant portion of your wealth in a savings account, unless you spend close to your total savings every month, in which case you shouldn't buy gold either.

Gold can be lent and borrowed just as dollars can.