Howdy, This is both bullion and coins, and they overlap so please forgive. All summer I've been buying gold and silver coins and bullion and in recent weeks, as the price dropped, have increased my pace. In silver I've been buying ASEs, 10 oz bars and world silver crowns. 10 oz. bars in name brand stuff (E or J-M) are almost impossible to find other than ebay. I ran my local coin shop (large outfit) out of them. This has really driven the premium up on these. Recently I've been buying 90% US junk silver. In gold its been world type - both modern and older as I already owned some AGEs. The world gold type and the silver crowns were both for the beauty, interest and history and this is one way someone can be both an investor and a collector although I know the purists will disagree. However, the pillar dollar I bought is a history lesson in itself for my grandkids and its cool and its silver. Anyway, as the price has dropped in recent weeks, the lines shifted from selling to buying at my local store - in a major way. They're now running out of most items and any order of size is backordered. Several weeks ago, I got an email from apmex telling me to be patient with any bullion orders as they were experiencing supply problems. If you go to their website check out the various categories for supply, other than a few items out front, the cupboard is bare. Just this morning they've got some smaller sizes of 90% available, but nothing in ingots or rounds. They do have AGE's but apmex has a surcharge on credit card purchases so extend the pricing. Anyway, I decided that I needed some more AGEs and got on the phone yesterday to call all the Coin World listees and I rec'd three "out of stock". Now all I was wanting to buy was 10 2008 AGEs. This is a large buy for me, but not a large buy. I finally got to Sims and she told me to wait while she checked on their supply. Came back and said if I would take 2008's and some mixed years, she could fill my order. At $848 btw. Folks, this is a major bullion seller. It's the same all over. I bought the last helvetia from my local dealer and while they've got some pretty stuff in the case, it's about all they have. And yet the POG and POS keeps dropping and supply keeps drying up. I'm not much of a conspiracy type, but this is a serious disconnect between the paper bullion and real bullion market that I'm having a tough time figuring out. peace, rono
Intersting post Rono... and I concur, the state of precious metals has a lot of people scratching their heads. It's almost as if someone is manipulating the figures to avoid a panic... maybe the same crowd that's trying to prevent a major crash on Wall Street...
