Meh. I'll try to fish out an old computer magazine from that era and post a couple of ads. The old days weren't good in every way. For bonus points, see if you can find a CDN from January 1980.
You would have done much better in the stock market. Precious metals hovered at these levels for many years. Besides, who had enough extra cash in the cookie jar for bullion?
Jan 1980 CDN $10 Ind XF/AU bid $450 ask $500 MS-60 $900/$975 MS-65 $5300/$5850 $20 St G XF/AU bid $670 ask $700 MS-60 $785/$810 MS-65 $1300/$1450 Dec 1969 CDN (Earliest I have with type gold prices.) $10 Lib XF $38/$40 Unc $43/45 $10 Ind XF $63/$66 Unc $70/$72.50 $20 Lib XF $61/$62.50 Unc $62/$63.50 $20 SG XF $60.50/$62 Unc $61.50/$63
Yep, gold only briefly touched $800 at that time, and spent a fairly short time over $600. If it wouldn't be too much trouble, could you check that issue for bid/ask on silver bullion bags, as shown in @Dancing Fire's first picture?
Sounds like the 1979 figures were well off the peak. I'm betting they were briefly north of $40K. And today, I imagine bid is down around $12K. A very speculative sort of "investment"...
Yes silver peaked in Feb of 80 but by January bid prices for "junk silver" were running about 25% BELOW melt value. The run up had been so great and so quick that people were nervous about the market and getting stuck if there was a correction that they were hedging their bets. And the smelters were getting so backlogged that they were lowering their buy prices as well.
Yeah, paper publications don't do a very good job of capturing extreme volatility. I was just looking through old 2011 and 2012 coin guides at the local show -- $7.50 for common silver halves in the 2011 guide, $14.50 in 2012. And I bought so much stuff in 2012...
