look at it like this:
post apocalypse, two fully armed men break into your home in the middle of the night. do you think they'll be looking for your Silver and Gold??
@keets said:
look at it like this:
post apocalypse, two fully armed men break into your home in the middle of the night. do you think they'll be looking for your Silver and Gold??
No. They'll be too dead to look for anything.
Worry is the interest you pay on a debt you may not owe.
"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value---zero."----Voltaire
"Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said."----Voltaire
Silver bullets seems to be the answer to all our problems.
m
Walker Proof Digital Album Fellas, leave the tight pants to the ladies. If I can count the coins in your pockets you better use them to call a tailor. Stay thirsty my friends......
If we experience hyperinflation, stacking gold and silver will have been a really good idea. If not, other things are better investments. Place your bet, take your chances.
You know what I've learned? You can't convince people to stack precious metals if they've already convinced themselves not to stack precious metals. Just like you can't convince some people to buy life insurance to protect their wife and kids, and you can't convince some people to save money for their kids' education.
@Tom147 said:
Two armed men break into my home, it won't be the metals silver and gold they get. It'll be lead. 240 gr JHP
Everyone's a tough guy. Unless you watch TV with a loaded 45 in your lap, when they crash through the door, you may be full of lead before you can reach for the gun.
@Tom147 said:
Two armed men break into my home, it won't be the metals silver and gold they get. It'll be lead. 240 gr JHP
Everyone's a tough guy. Unless you watch TV with a loaded 45 in your lap, when they crash through the door, you may be full of lead before you can reach for the gun.
I'm a past competitive shooter. Loaded handgun hidden ( but with easy access ) in two places down stairs. Another at bedside. Steel entry doors which are always locked so they're not exactly " crashing " in. Somebody breaks in, I like my odds.
@thefinn said:
When China announces that they have 20,000 tons of gold (12,000 more than the US), which currency will be the world's reserve currency? Then all of that paper with dead presidents on it will be flying home to roost.
This is a circular argument. You think that currency needs to be backed by gold, so you think the currency with the most gold backing matters.
Currency is backed, 1st and foremost, by the faith of the public. How much faith does anyone have in the Chinese currency? No one believes their coronavirus numbers. Why would anyone believe their economic numbers?
Currency is also backed by the underlying economic assets of the entire country, not just gold. What is the total value of ALL Chinese assets, not just gold, and ALL U.S. assets?
Perception is reality. Russian, Chinese and North Koreans have believed their leaders that they are better off than we are. That is why they fight like hell to prevent Western news to get in.
@Tom147 said:
I'm a past competitive shooter. Loaded handgun hidden ( but with easy access ) in two places down stairs. Another at >bedside. Steel entry doors which are always locked so they're not exactly " crashing " in. Somebody breaks in, I like my >odds.
I have a small secure room where I keep stuff.
In it is a 20# Halon 1211 auto-deploy extinguisher on the wall w/ pull cord.
I figure I'll just manually activate it and grab my SpareAir (I used to use It when I free-dived wrecks/caves)
No guns required
While almost everyone here seems to want to arm themselves more with PM's, lead and other provisions during these times (and have probably been doing this for ages), I look at my photos and magnets from the places I've been and am glad that I actually lived before we as a society got clamped down. I'm sure things will eventually get back to some sort of normal, but it may not be as easy to go places for quite some time.
It's good to be prepared, but not at the expense of actually enjoying life and living it, Decorating a bunker doesn't count IMHO..
It's all about having a well balanced portfolio. One significant component is preservation of capital. Currently we have experienced close to a 30% correction in the DJIA...And some may argue that the correction started from significantly overbought territory. And it is not clear when or where the market will hit the bottom. To complicate this, seems we are on cusp of negative interest rates. Gold has had some significant swings, but it is still viewed as more of a safe haven. So the role of gold, as long as there is not a depressionary spiral for everything, is more of a strategy of spreading risk to preserve capital.
Experience the World through Numismatics...it's more than you can imagine.
@coinkat said:
It's all about having a well balanced portfolio. One significant component is preservation of capital. Currently we have experienced close to a 30% correction in the DJIA...And some may argue that the correction started from significantly overbought territory. And it is not clear when or where the market will hit the bottom. To complicate this, seems we are on cusp of negative interest rates. Gold has had some significant swings, but it is still viewed as more of a safe haven. So the role of gold, as long as there is not a depressionary spiral for everything, is more of a strategy of spreading risk to preserve capital.
I will be diversifying back into the stock market as I am overweight in coins.
Age and risk toleration should be given adequate consideration as well. It's easy to invest in mutual funds if you are young and have the benefit of dollar cost averaging. The risk tolerance for someone over 60 and close to retirement becomes more problematic
Experience the World through Numismatics...it's more than you can imagine.
@coinkat said:
Age and risk toleration should be given adequate consideration as well. It's easy to invest in mutual funds if you are young and have the benefit of dollar cost averaging. The risk tolerance for someone over 60 and close to retirement becomes more problematic
It's only a huge problem if you're going to cash it all in and spend it on the day you retire. If you take it out slowly between ages 65 and 85, there's plenty of time to dollar cost average on the spend side too. Many people get too conservative when they get close to retirement. JMHO.
@coinkat said:
Age and risk toleration should be given adequate consideration as well. It's easy to invest in mutual funds if you are young and have the benefit of dollar cost averaging. The risk tolerance for someone over 60 and close to retirement becomes more problematic
It's only a huge problem if you're going to cash it all in and spend it on the day you retire. If you take it out slowly between ages 65 and 85, there's plenty of time to dollar cost average on the spend side too. Many people get too conservative when they get close to retirement. JMHO.
I see your point to a degree. OTOH, contributions to investments are voluntary while withdrawals often are not. The implication is that a person near retirement age should have a reasonable percentage of total assets in lower volatility categories so as not to be forced to sell at highly depressed prices in a serious market correction.
@coinkat said:
Age and risk toleration should be given adequate consideration as well. It's easy to invest in mutual funds if you are young and have the benefit of dollar cost averaging. The risk tolerance for someone over 60 and close to retirement becomes more problematic
@coinkat said:
Age and risk toleration should be given adequate consideration as well. It's easy to invest in mutual funds if you are young and have the benefit of dollar cost averaging. The risk tolerance for someone over 60 and close to retirement becomes more problematic
It's only a huge problem if you're going to cash it all in and spend it on the day you retire. If you take it out slowly between ages 65 and 85, there's plenty of time to dollar cost average on the spend side too. Many people get too conservative when they get close to retirement. JMHO.
I see your point to a degree. OTOH, contributions to investments are voluntary while withdrawals often are not. The implication is that a person near retirement age should have a reasonable percentage of total assets in lower volatility categories so as not to be forced to sell at highly depressed prices in a serious market correction.
That would be bonds yielding 2% or PMs yielding 0%?
Silver dropped $5 in a week. Not exactly low volatility.
I will be diversifying back into the stock market as I am overweight in coins.
I can't seem to pull the buy trigger tho.
When you buy back into the stock market, your hard-earned dollars will be competing with the Fed's newly-created imaginary dollars and the Fed's trading desk that is buying everything at the moment. Which kinda illustrates exactly what the Fed and the politicians think of your diligence and frugality over the years.
Q: Are You Printing Money? Bernanke: Not Literally
@coinkat said:
Age and risk toleration should be given adequate consideration as well. It's easy to invest in mutual funds if you are young and have the benefit of dollar cost averaging. The risk tolerance for someone over 60 and close to retirement becomes more problematic
It's only a huge problem if you're going to cash it all in and spend it on the day you retire. If you take it out slowly between ages 65 and 85, there's plenty of time to dollar cost average on the spend side too. Many people get too conservative when they get close to retirement. JMHO.
I see your point to a degree. OTOH, contributions to investments are voluntary while withdrawals often are not. The implication is that a person near retirement age should have a reasonable percentage of total assets in lower volatility categories so as not to be forced to sell at highly depressed prices in a serious market correction.
That would be bonds yielding 2% or PMs yielding 0%?
Silver dropped $5 in a week. Not exactly low volatility.
Cash is also an asset which yields nothing, but you'd be real happy to have a bit of that lately if you rely on retirement savings. PMs and bonds are typically uncorrelated to the market and you conveniently chose silver instead of gold. Who puts silver in a retirement portfolio?
@coinkat said:
Age and risk toleration should be given adequate consideration as well. It's easy to invest in mutual funds if you are young and have the benefit of dollar cost averaging. The risk tolerance for someone over 60 and close to retirement becomes more problematic
It's only a huge problem if you're going to cash it all in and spend it on the day you retire. If you take it out slowly between ages 65 and 85, there's plenty of time to dollar cost average on the spend side too. Many people get too conservative when they get close to retirement. JMHO.
I see your point to a degree. OTOH, contributions to investments are voluntary while withdrawals often are not. The implication is that a person near retirement age should have a reasonable percentage of total assets in lower volatility categories so as not to be forced to sell at highly depressed prices in a serious market correction.
That would be bonds yielding 2% or PMs yielding 0%?
Silver dropped $5 in a week. Not exactly low volatility.
Cash is also an asset which yields nothing, but you'd be real happy to have a bit of that lately if you rely on retirement savings. PMs and bonds are typically uncorrelated to the market and you conveniently chose silver instead of gold. Who puts silver in a retirement portfolio?
This thread was about PMs. Retirement and stocks were mentioned and then stocks were criticized as volatile. So, throwing cash in here as an alternative to stocks which were an alternative to PMs somewhat derails the thread.
@ReadyFireAim said:
The prohibition against owning gold wasn’t uplifted until 1974.
It wasn't exactly worthless before that.
That's a simplification of what occurred. That gold prohibition was specifically pure bullion types of items...not so much gold coins minted by Sovereign nations. The govt in 1934 allowed a provision for the ownership of any US gold coins that were of special value or significance to collectors. In reality, that meant anything pre-1934....all US gold coins. One catch was that you couldn't own mass quantities of them. I believe 5 of any one dated coin/denomination was one interpretation/limitation...as was a total of $100 in face value. Regardless, big time collectors of that era day like Bass, Bareford, James Stack, Eliasberg, Pittman had large collections of US gold coins. And they were fully legal to own. But they did get chased down for any 1933 $20 DE they may have acquired. Pittman in the 40's and 50's was buying very scarce US $10's and $20's for a small premium to the coin's gold content (20-50% for example). One way to get your gold "cake" and eat it too. The general public never figured out this "collecting" exception. Oh, and yes, you can "eat" gold. It's not uncommon to find gold flakes on very high end ice cream sundaes and deserts costing $1000 each. Gold does have medicinal and beneficial properties in the health field/genome.
By the mid-1960's additional exceptions were made by the US govt to the ownership of many foreign gold coins as well. Piles of common date US $20 double eagles were frequently seen at coin shows in the 1960's to 1971 at $38-$45 per coin....not a big premium vs. the $35.00/oz stated US govt fixed price. In reality you could own almost all the gold you could afford long before Dec 1974. Once gold was floated world-wide it rallied considerably from summer 1971 to Dec 1974. Ironically, the US govt released the "ban" on owning pure bullion bars/coins at the exact time that the US gold price peaked at around $195/oz. Very smart of those guys....and what a way to teach US citizens that gold ownership is not a good idea. Those new bag holders saw gold drop in price from $195 to $103/oz into summer 1976. If they had the fortitude to hang on they saw it recover to $800+ in January 1980.
Gold is not an anti-armageddon asset. It is a good asset for maintaining purchasing power when govt's and paper monies go way off course. It is a safe haven for many economic ills, apparently for pandemics as well. If the govt's of the world (specifically the G8) hadn't become so involved in keeping the price of gold contained following their 1970's experience, it would have more closely the money supplies over the past decades. But with the advent of gold futures/options (1970's), and then gold and silver over-the-counter derivatives in 2000/2001, then the SLV and GLD "semi-physical" metal funds, the big banks and govts wouldn't have such an easy time pushing around the "paper" price of gold at will. The Bank for International Settlements reported approx $650 BILL in opaque, paper gold derivatives....approx 3-4 yrs of annual world gold production - 9000 to 10,000 metric tonnes....about 1/3 of what the US govt claims to hold in their gold reserves.
Any stacker worth their salt isn't relying on large gold coins to buy loaves of bread when the asteroid hits. That's what pre-1965 US silver dimes and quarters are for. If there is a money crunch down the road, or you can't access an ATM for days/weeks, those small US silver coins might come in handy for small purchases. And even Warren Buffet back in 1996-2006 felt that hoarding 120,000,000 ounces of silver ($1 BILL in value) was a good market play....for whatever his specific reasons. He surely wasn't going to eat it or trade it for bread. And it would have been an outstanding play had he kept it all through the 2008 peak. From 1971 when gold was "freely" allowed to float in price to the 2011 gold peak....40 yrs....gold increased 55X.....silver 27X....far out-distancing stocks, real estate, etc. Same comment even from 1971-2020....where gold is up 48X. Gold has a way of eventually balancing out to other financial assets.....even when big boyz continually try to keep gold down in the dungeon. If gold has no real value why do the US, China, Russian, German govt's own so much of it? Why are the physical gold transactions between countries kept under more secrecy than the movements of nuclear weapons? It would be easy to discredit gold if the reasons and proof were there.
@ReadyFireAim said:
The prohibition against owning gold wasn’t uplifted until 1974.
It wasn't exactly worthless before that.
That's a simplification of what occurred. That gold prohibition was specifically pure bullion types of items...not so much gold coins minted by Sovereign nations. The govt in 1934 allowed a provision for the ownership of any US gold coins that were of special value or significance to collectors. In reality, that meant anything pre-1934....all US gold coins. One catch was that you couldn't own mass quantities of them. I believe 5 of any one dated coin/denomination was one interpretation/limitation...as was a total of $100 in face value. Regardless, big time collectors of that era day like Bass, Bareford, James Stack, Eliasberg, Pittman had large collections of US gold coins. And they were fully legal to own. But they did get chased down for any 1933 $20 DE they may have acquired. Pittman in the 40's and 50's was buying very scarce US $10's and $20's for a small premium to the coin's gold content (20-50% for example). One way to get your gold "cake" and eat it too. The general public never figured out this "collecting" exception. Oh, and yes, you can "eat" gold. It's not uncommon to find gold flakes on very high end ice cream sundaes and deserts costing $1000 each. Gold does have medicinal and beneficial properties in the health field/genome.
By the mid-1960's additional exceptions were made by the US govt to the ownership of many foreign gold coins as well. Piles of common date US $20 double eagles were frequently seen at coin shows in the 1960's to 1971 at $38-$45 per coin....not a big premium vs. the $35.00/oz stated US govt fixed price. In reality you could own almost all the gold you could afford long before Dec 1974. Once gold was floated world-wide it rallied considerably from summer 1971 to Dec 1974. Ironically, the US govt released the "ban" on owning pure bullion bars/coins at the exact time that the US gold price peaked at around $195/oz. Very smart of those guys....and what a way to teach US citizens that gold ownership is not a good idea. Those new bag holders saw gold drop in price from $195 to $103/oz into summer 1976. If they had the fortitude to hang on they saw it recover to $800+ in January 1980.
You can't eat gold metal and have it absorbed by your body. You' d have to eat a gold salt like gold chloride or gold nitrate.
@ErrorsOnCoins said:
I finally bought my first stock yesterday. SDOW
Lost 12% on it overnight so I doubled up.
I might be crazy.
You might be since the Dow has a number of gaps pulling higher at 23,300, 25,250, 26,900. All are likely targets within weeks, months, maybe 1-2 yrs. The first one just filled today. Based on the short term pattern in play I'm sort of leaning towards that 26,900 target in the near future - 15% higher. No position though.
The boundary gaps at 18,800 and 28,900 I think are safe for a while. With CoVid19 apparently lessening around the globe, and huge QE injections everywhere, I'd be afraid to short the stock markets. Where's the next round of very bad news going to come from? There will be lots of peaks of valleys between now and July. Maybe the old adage of go away in May (late May?) still holds some weight here. Gold is now in month 20 of the current cycle. They have not gone longer than 22 months since 1999. The numbers 20,21,22 show up very often in gold (days, weeks, months).
@ErrorsOnCoins said:
I finally bought my first stock yesterday. SDOW
Lost 12% on it overnight so I doubled up.
I might be crazy.
You might be since the Dow has a number of gaps pulling higher at 23,300, 25,250, 26,900. All are likely targets within weeks, months, maybe 1-2 yrs. The boundary gaps at 18,800 and 28,900 I think are safe for a while. With CoVid19 apparently lessening around the globe, and huge QE injections everywhere, I'd be afraid to short the stock markets. Where's the next round of very bad news going to come from?
Most gaps get filled and there are three below.
This is a very short term hold of a few days at most.
@coinkat said:
Age and risk toleration should be given adequate consideration as well. It's easy to invest in mutual funds if you are young and have the benefit of dollar cost averaging. The risk tolerance for someone over 60 and close to retirement becomes more problematic
It's only a huge problem if you're going to cash it all in and spend it on the day you retire. If you take it out slowly between ages 65 and 85, there's plenty of time to dollar cost average on the spend side too. Many people get too conservative when they get close to retirement. JMHO.
I see your point to a degree. OTOH, contributions to investments are voluntary while withdrawals often are not. The implication is that a person near retirement age should have a reasonable percentage of total assets in lower volatility categories so as not to be forced to sell at highly depressed prices in a serious market correction.
That would be bonds yielding 2% or PMs yielding 0%?
Silver dropped $5 in a week. Not exactly low volatility.
Cash is also an asset which yields nothing, but you'd be real happy to have a bit of that lately if you rely on retirement savings. PMs and bonds are typically uncorrelated to the market and you conveniently chose silver instead of gold. Who puts silver in a retirement portfolio?
This thread was about PMs. Retirement and stocks were mentioned and then stocks were criticized as volatile. So, throwing cash in here as an alternative to stocks which were an alternative to PMs somewhat derails the thread.
I posted twice, each time with a direct response to what I quoted. If you feel the thread is getting off track, maybe the best thing to do is NOT REPLY to me. Or take it to PM.
@ErrorsOnCoins said:
I finally bought my first stock yesterday. SDOW
Lost 12% on it overnight so I doubled up.
I might be crazy.
You might be since the Dow has a number of gaps pulling higher at 23,300, 25,250, 26,900. All are likely targets within weeks, months, maybe 1-2 yrs. The boundary gaps at 18,800 and 28,900 I think are safe for a while. With CoVid19 apparently lessening around the globe, and huge QE injections everywhere, I'd be afraid to short the stock markets. Where's the next round of very bad news going to come from?
Most gaps get filled and there are three below.
This is a very short term hold of a few days at most.
I've played this game. It is very dangerous, especially to the short side. It is especially problematic for ultrashort funds.
The general overall direction of the market is up. So, if you are long the market and it drops, you can usually hold the position and eventually be whole. [In the Great Depression, it took close to 20 years, mind you, from the 1929 peak if you had bought then.] If you are short the market, odds are the longer you hold the more you lose.
Leveraged funds have a built in decay in price because they compound daily. So even if the market trades flat from your purchase, you lose money over time due to the ups and downs.
Comments
look at it like this:
post apocalypse, two fully armed men break into your home in the middle of the night. do you think they'll be looking for your Silver and Gold??
No. They'll be too dead to look for anything.
Worry is the interest you pay on a debt you may not owe.
"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value---zero."----Voltaire
"Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said."----Voltaire
OH! I get it now.
We're not talking about Private Messages...........
Pete
This conversation topic always turns silly, with 100 year old European and banana republic currency examples, and wanna be Mad Maxes. 😂
If your assets are diversified and your skills widely applicable, with a little luck you can withstand prqctically anything.
Some PMs are smart for everyone, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient for survival.
Liberty: Parent of Science & Industry
Silver bullets seems to be the answer to all our problems.
m
Fellas, leave the tight pants to the ladies. If I can count the coins in your pockets you better use them to call a tailor. Stay thirsty my friends......
except vampires. You need a sharp stake for that
Like blitzdude said, insurance against declining currency value.
Inflation is a result of declining currency value. PMs are the hedge.
Zimbabwe Trillion dollar notes are the result of declining currency value.
Storing PMs for the zombie days is a waste of dollars. Times like those only necessities will be tradeable or have value.
Gold has a world price entirely unaffected by accounting games between the Treasury and the Fed. - Jim Rickards
If we experience hyperinflation, stacking gold and silver will have been a really good idea. If not, other things are better investments. Place your bet, take your chances.
LIBERTY SEATED DIMES WITH MAJOR VARIETIES CIRCULATION STRIKES (1837-1891) digital album
Two armed men break into my home, it won't be the metals silver and gold they get. It'll be lead. 240 gr JHP
Since we're supposed to all practice social distancing, I recommend investing in garlic. Works on vampires too.
RMR: 'Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?'
CJ: 'No one!' [Ain't no angels in the coin biz]
The "underPRIVILEGED."
Everyone's a tough guy. Unless you watch TV with a loaded 45 in your lap, when they crash through the door, you may be full of lead before you can reach for the gun.
Better call the "Space Force".
The Martians are coming!
The Mysterious Egyptian Magic Coin
Coins in Movies
Coins on Television
Soylent Green.
I'm a past competitive shooter. Loaded handgun hidden ( but with easy access ) in two places down stairs. Another at bedside. Steel entry doors which are always locked so they're not exactly " crashing " in. Somebody breaks in, I like my odds.
This thread is making me hungry. Pancakes stack , too.
Perception is reality. Russian, Chinese and North Koreans have believed their leaders that they are better off than we are. That is why they fight like hell to prevent Western news to get in.
I have a small secure room where I keep stuff.
In it is a 20# Halon 1211 auto-deploy extinguisher on the wall w/ pull cord.
I figure I'll just manually activate it and grab my SpareAir (I used to use It when I free-dived wrecks/caves)
No guns required
My Saint Set
While almost everyone here seems to want to arm themselves more with PM's, lead and other provisions during these times (and have probably been doing this for ages), I look at my photos and magnets from the places I've been and am glad that I actually lived before we as a society got clamped down. I'm sure things will eventually get back to some sort of normal, but it may not be as easy to go places for quite some time.
It's good to be prepared, but not at the expense of actually enjoying life and living it, Decorating a bunker doesn't count IMHO..
10-4,
My Instagram picturesErik
My registry sets
It's all about having a well balanced portfolio. One significant component is preservation of capital. Currently we have experienced close to a 30% correction in the DJIA...And some may argue that the correction started from significantly overbought territory. And it is not clear when or where the market will hit the bottom. To complicate this, seems we are on cusp of negative interest rates. Gold has had some significant swings, but it is still viewed as more of a safe haven. So the role of gold, as long as there is not a depressionary spiral for everything, is more of a strategy of spreading risk to preserve capital.
Experience the World through Numismatics...it's more than you can imagine.
I will be diversifying back into the stock market as I am overweight in coins.
I can't seem to pull the buy trigger tho.
Age and risk toleration should be given adequate consideration as well. It's easy to invest in mutual funds if you are young and have the benefit of dollar cost averaging. The risk tolerance for someone over 60 and close to retirement becomes more problematic
Experience the World through Numismatics...it's more than you can imagine.
It's only a huge problem if you're going to cash it all in and spend it on the day you retire. If you take it out slowly between ages 65 and 85, there's plenty of time to dollar cost average on the spend side too. Many people get too conservative when they get close to retirement. JMHO.
I t> @BryceM said:
I see your point to a degree. OTOH, contributions to investments are voluntary while withdrawals often are not. The implication is that a person near retirement age should have a reasonable percentage of total assets in lower volatility categories so as not to be forced to sell at highly depressed prices in a serious market correction.
PMs are not a solution to this.
That would be bonds yielding 2% or PMs yielding 0%?
Silver dropped $5 in a week. Not exactly low volatility.
I will be diversifying back into the stock market as I am overweight in coins.
I can't seem to pull the buy trigger tho.
When you buy back into the stock market, your hard-earned dollars will be competing with the Fed's newly-created imaginary dollars and the Fed's trading desk that is buying everything at the moment. Which kinda illustrates exactly what the Fed and the politicians think of your diligence and frugality over the years.
I knew it would happen.
Cash is also an asset which yields nothing, but you'd be real happy to have a bit of that lately if you rely on retirement savings. PMs and bonds are typically uncorrelated to the market and you conveniently chose silver instead of gold. Who puts silver in a retirement portfolio?
This thread was about PMs. Retirement and stocks were mentioned and then stocks were criticized as volatile. So, throwing cash in here as an alternative to stocks which were an alternative to PMs somewhat derails the thread.
That's a simplification of what occurred. That gold prohibition was specifically pure bullion types of items...not so much gold coins minted by Sovereign nations. The govt in 1934 allowed a provision for the ownership of any US gold coins that were of special value or significance to collectors. In reality, that meant anything pre-1934....all US gold coins. One catch was that you couldn't own mass quantities of them. I believe 5 of any one dated coin/denomination was one interpretation/limitation...as was a total of $100 in face value. Regardless, big time collectors of that era day like Bass, Bareford, James Stack, Eliasberg, Pittman had large collections of US gold coins. And they were fully legal to own. But they did get chased down for any 1933 $20 DE they may have acquired. Pittman in the 40's and 50's was buying very scarce US $10's and $20's for a small premium to the coin's gold content (20-50% for example). One way to get your gold "cake" and eat it too. The general public never figured out this "collecting" exception. Oh, and yes, you can "eat" gold. It's not uncommon to find gold flakes on very high end ice cream sundaes and deserts costing $1000 each. Gold does have medicinal and beneficial properties in the health field/genome.
By the mid-1960's additional exceptions were made by the US govt to the ownership of many foreign gold coins as well. Piles of common date US $20 double eagles were frequently seen at coin shows in the 1960's to 1971 at $38-$45 per coin....not a big premium vs. the $35.00/oz stated US govt fixed price. In reality you could own almost all the gold you could afford long before Dec 1974. Once gold was floated world-wide it rallied considerably from summer 1971 to Dec 1974. Ironically, the US govt released the "ban" on owning pure bullion bars/coins at the exact time that the US gold price peaked at around $195/oz. Very smart of those guys....and what a way to teach US citizens that gold ownership is not a good idea. Those new bag holders saw gold drop in price from $195 to $103/oz into summer 1976. If they had the fortitude to hang on they saw it recover to $800+ in January 1980.
Gold is not an anti-armageddon asset. It is a good asset for maintaining purchasing power when govt's and paper monies go way off course. It is a safe haven for many economic ills, apparently for pandemics as well. If the govt's of the world (specifically the G8) hadn't become so involved in keeping the price of gold contained following their 1970's experience, it would have more closely the money supplies over the past decades. But with the advent of gold futures/options (1970's), and then gold and silver over-the-counter derivatives in 2000/2001, then the SLV and GLD "semi-physical" metal funds, the big banks and govts wouldn't have such an easy time pushing around the "paper" price of gold at will. The Bank for International Settlements reported approx $650 BILL in opaque, paper gold derivatives....approx 3-4 yrs of annual world gold production - 9000 to 10,000 metric tonnes....about 1/3 of what the US govt claims to hold in their gold reserves.
Any stacker worth their salt isn't relying on large gold coins to buy loaves of bread when the asteroid hits. That's what pre-1965 US silver dimes and quarters are for. If there is a money crunch down the road, or you can't access an ATM for days/weeks, those small US silver coins might come in handy for small purchases. And even Warren Buffet back in 1996-2006 felt that hoarding 120,000,000 ounces of silver ($1 BILL in value) was a good market play....for whatever his specific reasons. He surely wasn't going to eat it or trade it for bread. And it would have been an outstanding play had he kept it all through the 2008 peak. From 1971 when gold was "freely" allowed to float in price to the 2011 gold peak....40 yrs....gold increased 55X.....silver 27X....far out-distancing stocks, real estate, etc. Same comment even from 1971-2020....where gold is up 48X. Gold has a way of eventually balancing out to other financial assets.....even when big boyz continually try to keep gold down in the dungeon. If gold has no real value why do the US, China, Russian, German govt's own so much of it? Why are the physical gold transactions between countries kept under more secrecy than the movements of nuclear weapons? It would be easy to discredit gold if the reasons and proof were there.
You can't eat gold metal and have it absorbed by your body. You' d have to eat a gold salt like gold chloride or gold nitrate.
I finally bought my first stock yesterday. SDOW
Lost 12% on it overnight so I doubled up.
I might be crazy.
You might be since the Dow has a number of gaps pulling higher at 23,300, 25,250, 26,900. All are likely targets within weeks, months, maybe 1-2 yrs. The first one just filled today. Based on the short term pattern in play I'm sort of leaning towards that 26,900 target in the near future - 15% higher. No position though.
The boundary gaps at 18,800 and 28,900 I think are safe for a while. With CoVid19 apparently lessening around the globe, and huge QE injections everywhere, I'd be afraid to short the stock markets. Where's the next round of very bad news going to come from? There will be lots of peaks of valleys between now and July. Maybe the old adage of go away in May (late May?) still holds some weight here. Gold is now in month 20 of the current cycle. They have not gone longer than 22 months since 1999. The numbers 20,21,22 show up very often in gold (days, weeks, months).
Most gaps get filled and there are three below.
This is a very short term hold of a few days at most.
I posted twice, each time with a direct response to what I quoted. If you feel the thread is getting off track, maybe the best thing to do is NOT REPLY to me. Or take it to PM.
I've played this game. It is very dangerous, especially to the short side. It is especially problematic for ultrashort funds.