Where might one find what is the best price paid on any given day for junk silver. How much times face. The closest coin dealer the other day told me "12 X face", but I feel like it sould be more. Thanks!
i cant imagine apmex paying anything above spot for silver. best bet would be to just sell the coins on ebay or here or...well where ever really. you could try coinbug.com. they dont charge anything for the first 5 listings and are nothing like ebay, the price you set is the price the person pays or they dont buy it. that might help to ensure you get your money's worth in the coins you want to sell. i prefer coinbug for buying coins, i like the prices of a couple of the sellers and its really easy to browse and get what you want. it also gives the little guys like me a chance to buy up some silver coins.
That's a very honest offer and if you are really interested in selling you could take it with a clear conscience.
BUT on eBay, you are going to pay ~10% in fees etc. If he sells a large enough lot to decrease the fees, maybe.
I figure silver like this. Each bag of $1000.00 Face silver has 715 pure oz of silver in it. So take spot times 715. At $18.00 per oz that would be $12870 per bag or $12.87 per dollar. That would be full melt though and not what anyone would get paid other then the large dealer selling bags everyday. I sell to a huge broker that figures out what he pays by subtracting 50 cents from spot then multiplying that by 715. Then he knocks off about twenty cents per dollar. At $18.00 silver he would pay me 12.3 times face. I hope that helps people understand just how much silver they have. edited
One thing I would like to add, but that is difficult to explain, is that silver coins should not necessarily sell at or slightly below spot. The spot price is basically for large Comex-eligible silver, much of which is for industrial use. A case could be made that coin silver is more valuable. It is already processed into small, convenient denominations with a known weight and purity. It is difficult to use 1000 ounce bar silver for much of anything, especially when the bars don't even have to be exactly 1000 ounces. Storage, insurance, and assays are a problem. I believe that as the price of silver climbs, and more people begin to accumulate both bullion and numismatic silver coins, even the most common circulated silver coins will begin to command a premium to the spot price as people realize that coins are more valuable as coins than they are as melted lumps of metal. It could be argued that coins are the highest and best use of silver and selling them for prices that permit melting them into bullion doesn't make much sense any more than melting your wifes jewelry or grandma's tea set makes sense. There. I said it. Now I feel better.
The only problem with your scenario Cloud is that most coins are not melted. They remain in the marketplace and are continually re-sold over and over for the very same reason you mention - because they are a very convenient and trusted form of silver.
My point, which I admit is difficult for me to adequately explain, is that it seems that most people have it in their minds that "junk silver" or lower grade circulated silver coins are only worth melt value or slightly less, when as you say, the coins will probably not and should not be melted because silver in coin form is already more valuable than scrap silver BECAUSE it is in coin form. Hopefully the day is coming when people will wake up and refuse to sell any coin for anything less than a reasonable premium to melt. I think this will happen but only after silver prices go up a lot more. Hopefully that makes sense.
I understand what you are saying, but it is never going to happen that it will be worth more than scrap silver because that's all it is - scrap silver. It is a convenient form of scrap and that's all you can say about it. Now of your argument were about pure silver rounds or bullion coins - then it makes sense. And that of course is why these items do sell to individuals for above spot.
I understand what you are saying. And I do agree that even these dateless SLQ's will go into another bag to be resold rather than melted. I'm not selling anything now. It will have to get a lot higher to tempt me. This morning I ran across a bag that I had labeled "Junk". Well...since I have been sorting, re-sorting and then re-sorting again, I thought I would check these again. Low and behold...there were some great cons in that bag!! I hate to admit it, because I really don't know what I was thinking when I put these coins in the "junk" bag, but they included: Walking Lib. Halves: 1916 AG- date barely visible 1917 AG 1917 D Obv. (date was completely gone but mint mark there) 1918 G 1933 S G 1919 D 1918 D AG Standing Lib. Quarter 1920 S AG Now that I have confessed this I feel better. Don't I feel like a total idiot!!:headbang: I will check again all those bags labeled "junk" before they go ANYWHERE!!!!
I admit that there is a very good chance you will be correct and I'll be wrong because that's the way it has always worked. It just doesn't seem to make sense to me that an ordinary ASE or silver round should sell for more money per ounce of silver content than heavily circulated half dollars.
Now that's what I don't understand - why you don't think it makes sense. It seems perfectly obvious to me - it's because the silver is already pure and everyone knows it. Therefore there is no cost to incur like there is with coin silver to turn it into pure silver.
