www.bullionvault-com

[Graham]

anyone used them, is gold worth a play with, although I expect now might not be the time to buy as the prices are high...

Im half tempted to bung a few hundred beer tokens in to see what happens to it.


min 4usd storage per month mind...

they bung you a gram to start to play with

[ginettag27]

This has been discussed before..

http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&a...

If you do a quick search on bullionvault in the forums, it brings up a number of threads..

[johnfm]

er, gold is peaking at mo, no?

[Graham]

johnfm said:

er, gold is peaking at mo, no?

could well be, seems quite volatile

[sa_20v]

This is an interesting article, looks like it could be a sound investment.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2008/10/02/7...

[Horse_Apple]

coyft said:

It's reassuring to know some of your wedge is stored in a Swiss vault as gold bullion.

That's what the Jews said in '39.

Edited by Horse_Apple on Thursday 9th October 13:03

[Goughie]

I would urge anyone looking to buy precious metals to take physical delivery of the metal - there is not enough metal to cover all the paper ETF's and other trading systems such as pool holdings, etc. ( I know, it's another scandal waiting to break). If you must go the paper route get an allocated account - where physical bullion is registered to you (i.e. bar serial numbers).

I've been investing in the PM market for a number of years and it's never been like it has in the past couple of weeks - getting any physical metal is really tough, mints have been suspending sales over the last couple of months due to shortages and demand is insane. The spot price for silver and palladium bear no relation to the physical market price. For example, silver has a notional spot price of c.$10/oz at close of US market on Friday (tonight). The 'normal' market would see you paying perhaps $1.50-2 over spot per troy oz. At the moment the bid price is at least £1.35 over spot, with the ask price being anything up to $6 over spot/oz. So the spread between the paper spot price and physical ask price is c. 60%. Palladium, which has a smaller market and therefore a wider spread in normal conditions of c. 10%, is currently trading at a spread of 50% over spot - a $200/1oz bar will cost you the thick end of £300. This is all pretty irrelevant however, because most dealers do not have any inventory of anything. Certainly I can't find physical platinum anywhere (and it's selling on eBay for 100% mark up on spot), the spreads on silver and palladium are insane and gold is near the top of it's historical values at present.

If palladium goes a bit lower I'm going to take an contract out and take delivery as a last resort to getting my hands on some. At least I'll not be paying a huge premium over spot.

If you can find it and have the ability to hold it, I'd go for platinum - it's very close to gold in it's price ratio, (which had been 2:1 for a while until gold shot up this year and platinum retreated from $2k/oz to it's price tonight of c.$1k/oz). With the car market being in the toilet for the next few years, platinum may well end up in surplus (it's main use is in catalytic convertors) at a price that makes it very attractive for the investor, especially given that it's price will turn around when car sales pick up again.

My reasons for going for palladium? I need to balance my metals portfolio out and I'm also a bit of a palladium 'bug'.

Edited by Goughie on Friday 10th October 23:24

[Fittster]

Goughie said:

I would urge anyone looking to buy precious metals to take physical delivery of the metal - there is not enough metal to cover all the paper ETF's and other trading systems such as pool holdings, etc. ( I know, it's another scandal waiting to break). If you must go the paper route get an allocated account - where physical bullion is registered to you (i.e. bar serial numbers).

I understand your point but unless you have a vault in your house you are taking quite a risk. You wouldn't leave on your savings as a big pile of cash in your house would you?

[Goughie]

Fittster said:

Goughie said:

I would urge anyone looking to buy precious metals to take physical delivery of the metal - there is not enough metal to cover all the paper ETF's and other trading systems such as pool holdings, etc. ( I know, it's another scandal waiting to break). If you must go the paper route get an allocated account - where physical bullion is registered to you (i.e. bar serial numbers).

I understand your point but unless you have a vault in your house you are taking quite a risk. You wouldn't leave on your savings as a big pile of cash in your house would you?

Most banks will allow you to use their safes for a modest annual fee - £40 in my case. This is where I keep my metals.

[Goughie]

coyft said:

"We looked into the abyss if the gold price rose further. A further rise would have taken down one or several trading houses, which might have taken down all the rest in their wake. Therefore, at any price, at any cost, the central banks had to quell the gold price, manage it. It was very difficult to get the gold price under control but we have now succeeded. The U.S. Fed was very active in getting the gold price down. So was the U.K."
Eddie George, Bank of England, September 1999

Where did this quote come from? Memoirs? Newspaper article? Interview? I'd be interested to read the entire transcript. TIA

[Graham]

If you take possession of the metals do you have any problems trading it back do you need to get it assayed or validated again in any way and how expensive is the delivery / reproofing etc if you do sell on.

what sort of physical weights that you can take delivery of is it traded in ?

G

[Horse_Apple]

Graham said:

If you take possession of the metals do you have any problems trading it back do you need to get it assayed or validated again in any way and how expensive is the delivery / reproofing etc if you do sell on.

what sort of physical weights that you can take delivery of is it traded in ?

G

When people are referring to physical delivery, they don't mean to your front door.

If you had bullion delivered to yourself then it would instantly fall in value as it can no longer be guaranteed to be what it was when it left storage.

By 'physical' what people mean is that someone like Brinx actually holds the real stuff in their depot on your behalf.

Spot contracts, like paper money isn't necassarily backed by real tangible gold.

Of course, the fear of using one of these small providors for retail amounts of gold is that they are not regulated or governed in any way shape or form. There is nothing to stop anyone from moving all the deposits into their own name and moving to Uraguay to take up European Marching as a hobby.

Also, you need to ask yourself just how many times in the world the first time some new way of making money has appeared in the popular press just seconds before the game concludes.

[LivinLaVidaLotus]

though that's why a lot of people do actually take physical possession, as in delivered to themselves - either storing it in their own safe or at a bank close by. That way you know it's yours and no one should be walking off with it in their name. But we're not talking good delivery bars here, usually something easily traded back, like 1/4-1oz coins or 1/5/10oz bars.

[Goughie]

Graham said:

If you take possession of the metals do you have any problems trading it back do you need to get it assayed or validated again in any way and how expensive is the delivery / reproofing etc if you do sell on.

what sort of physical weights that you can take delivery of is it traded in ?

G

Contract volumes are "serious" volumes that are normally reserved for industrial users (although if you know the right people and had enough cash you could take a contract out no problem). If you're buying contract volumes on the LBM or via COMEX, etc then re-assaying is normally required (because the bars are so large). For palladium, a contract on the London market is 100oz. The smallest bar allowed for good delivery in the palladium market is 1 kilo (32.15 troy oz). For gold, London Good Delivery Bars are 400oz, which work out at c. $350,000 per bar!

Retail purchases which for the purposes of this conversation consist of gold, platinum and palladium bars from 1oz up to around 1Kg (although a kilo of gold is going to cost you the thick end of $27K at present) and silver up to about 500oz in divisions of 1oz, 10oz, 1 kilo or 100oz bars. There are normally no issues with re-assaying anything under a kilo (or 100oz in the case of silver) as long as it is from a recognised assayer (e.g. Credit Suisse, PAMP, Johnson Mathey, Engelhard, etc) and marked as such, or are produced as coins or bars by national mints (think gold sovereigns, American Eagles, Canadian Maple Leafs, South African Krugerands, etc).

PM's in volumes under an ounce are not really thought of as viable investments as these so-called fractional coins and bars have a minting cost that makes the spread over spot uneconomic for most investors. (It must be said however, that in the apocalyptic fervour that seems to have affected PM buying at present fractionals are being bought up as "disaster" coinage).

Edited by Goughie on Wednesday 15th October 20:44

Edited by Goughie on Wednesday 15th October 20:46