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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;-jeffB, post: 2055300, member: 27832&quot;]Well, there&#039;s at least one big problem here.</p><p><br /></p><p>Suppose you believe that gold is going to double in price, and you want to invest $100K in it (so you end up with $200K; let&#039;s ignore premiums for the moment). That would be a bit over 80 troy ounces of gold. Take it in $50 AGEs, and you&#039;d get a stack about 4 inches high, weighing a bit more than 6 pounds.</p><p><br /></p><p>Suppose you believe that copper is going to double in price, and you want to invest $100K in it. That would be almost 36,000 POUNDS of copper, 18 tons. (The standard delivery unit is 25 tons; it might be worthwhile to save up for that next increment.) It still wouldn&#039;t be overwhelmingly huge -- a single solid cube about 4 feet on a side. Get it in ingots, stack &#039;em up, and it would be a bit larger than a half-cord of firewood. But getting it delivered and stored is going to be a fair amount of work. Don&#039;t store it on an upper floor, not that you&#039;d want to carry it upstairs anyhow.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now, what I <i>can&#039;t</i> tell you is where to buy that copper without paying a substantial premium to the spot price. If you&#039;re buying in standard delivery lots, I suppose you&#039;d be able to get standard delivery terms, but you&#039;d want to rent a forklift for receiving it, and I&#039;d guess the freight costs would be a few thousand bucks at least.</p><p><br /></p><p>How will you secure it while you have it? I&#039;m not sure how much verdigris detracts from its market value, so I don&#039;t know how much you&#039;d have to protect it from the environment. Theft is another matter. If people are willing to risk their lives cutting live wires to steal copper, your stack of ingots would be a pretty tempting target.</p><p><br /></p><p>When it&#039;s time to sell, I imagine you&#039;d need to pay the same fees again. I don&#039;t know how hard you&#039;d have to work to convince a prospective buyer that your copper is good.</p><p><br /></p><p>Coins, though? No. Just no. Think about the logistics of getting tens of cubic feet of copper coins. It boggles the mind.</p><p><br /></p><p>If you&#039;re looking for a <i>hobby</i>, getting cents from the bank and sorting out the copper ones will pass your time for sure. You can even get copper below its &quot;melt value&quot; that way; melting copper cents is still illegal, but people will pay a premium for them, and that premium would go up if copper went up substantially.</p><p><br /></p><p>You won&#039;t get rich, though. Even if runaway inflation means that one day each cent will contain $1.00 worth of copper, that $1.00 will only have the purchasing power that 1 or 2 cents has today.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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