Well its mid-day on a rany saturday, and it has gotten me thinking. How cool would it be to have a software system that could search the internet for cheep precious metals. Idk their are a lot of potential kinks in anything like this, but at the same time if it would update real time it would be like printing money. Anyone know how to code? this could be awsome!
Cheap is one factor. But so are dealer integrity, shipping, condition, sales tax, return policy, quantity discounts, plus the fact that there can be slight differences in merchandise due to date, issuer, toning, etc.
your a 100% right, I think in the design of the system we could adjust for many of those things. As a for instance online out of state sales are not taxable. So that would be one easy way to correct for that concern. The condition I think we could factor into the discount that we set the system to buy at. Really just a thought expierement at this point. It would be intresting to know what the efficiancy in the online pm market is. I bet if you put a computer to it 24/7 we would find it is not close to a 100%
Dealer Integrity: The system would have to use the differnt online auction houses that are avalible. So their systems would be critical in the sucess and in case of a problem one would have to rely the problem resulotion chanels avalible. Quality. You would set it to search for diffenrt things...like junk silver at X % less then spot, ASE, buillion ect. It would all be in the way it was set up. I'm putting togeather a bid for a MM dollar gov job as we speak and I just think that their are tools that could do this if coded properly and it would be amazing
I don't think it is possible. Say you have two 2006 ASEs available from the same dealer at the same price. How does your system determine which is the better buy? Suppose they are $0.05 more expensive than a competitor. How does your system determine which is best?
I think it is a matter of discounting. The % that you set it to look for under spot would surly make up in the long run for any small individual losses in expected value with one particular purchase. With a nickle differance I don't think it would really matter. We could also set it up to send allerts so that a person ultimatly makes the decision on the buy thus a human could deciced which was better or I bet the ture thing is if they where only $.05 appart the system would recomend a buy on both because they would proboly be inside the discount we set it to look for
What your program can't handle is the difference in condition of the coins. This can be a significant factor in value -- even in the bullion world.
O.k. any other reasons besides your blind opinions why it couldn't work. Who cares about the quality of junk 90% silver coins and other bullion. I"m not talking about buying proof ase here. Its a simple ida make program that searches for any bullion forsale online for x % less then spot. If that is the best you can come up with I really like this idea. A better objection is Who would pay the thousand plus man hours it would take a team of developers to make it, or how would you get past the intelectual property of the people who own the websites. I'm glad that the only thing I have to wory about is getting ugly bullion
The only problem I see is the man hours it would take to write a program. Along with the man hours it would take to test it and make sure it is working. The people who have the knowledge to write these kind of programs would do better writing programs that look for arbitrage situations in the options market. They would only have one place they would have to look, and the information is readily available. I would love to see someone try to take on this program, but I feel like the trustworthy sellers probably correct their prices fairly quickly, so I'm not sure how much use the program would actually be.
If you think it is a good idea, then do it. If you think quality doesn't matter, then go ahead and collect based on that criteria. Just don't expect to find a ready buyer at full price when you go to sell.
