Libertad's Last 20 Posts
| Counterfeit Toonies Are Going To Be A Significant Problem
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Libertad
Pillar of the Community
Canada
3692 Posts |
 Posted 08/17/2020 07:06 am
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| I spotted a fake 1996 this week, same as the one posted above. The dead giveaway is the maple leaf isn't even correctly straight. It's wavy and crooked and doesn't look like the official maple leaf. At first I thought I'd scored a German planchet. Also the polar bear has details on it as if it were just minted yesterday. Doesn't sound dull like older counterfeits were. |
| | Forum: Canadian Coins and Colonial Tokens |
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| Where Does Canadian Pmx Get Their .9999 Fine Sliver?
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Libertad
Pillar of the Community
Canada
3692 Posts |
Posted 07/07/2020 07:59 am
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| They buy all sorts of silver from estates, not just bullion. They send it to their refiner and they have a deal where they put their branded logo on their bullion. Refineries also have the license to melt old silver coins. It's like they say, that the gold in your ring may have possibly been worn by an Egyptian pharaoh. The same goes for silver and all recycled stuff (iron, steel, plastic, whatever). |
| | Forum: Precious Metals and Bullion - Gold, Silver, Copper, Platinum |
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| Why Are Premiums Over Spot Getting So High!?
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Libertad
Pillar of the Community
Canada
3692 Posts |
Posted 04/10/2020 06:51 am
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In my opinion (not worth much), I think that the current price is still getting accustomed to the new market. Not until we have some normalization will we see a stable "real" price. I can't understand why people want to buy silver when there are way bigger priorities to take care of right now. I wanted to buy metals back in early to mid-March and even then nobody had stock. Like everything else you can buy in this world, you had to stock up months before and not in the heat of a panic. There are tons of products on backorder and restrictions per family (e.g. limiting quantities for hot commodities). The places where I buy you have to put in your order and just wait for them to get a shipment so they can ship it to you. Another place just doesn't have any. Other places jack up the price because they don't know when they're getting their next shipment. Same with basically every general store right now. Has anyone bartered with metals here before?
You guys remember April 2013, I think it was? This was right after the all-time high. Price went from $48 to $36 and bounced around for months, then to about $27ish but rounds were being sold at $32-$34 because of sudden dips. Unless you're plugged into the electronic market these prices make no actual sense. You can't force a person to sell their metals to you just because you want them now. |
| | Forum: Precious Metals and Bullion - Gold, Silver, Copper, Platinum |
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| Truly The Gold To Silver Ratio Is Trash ! ! !
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Libertad
Pillar of the Community
Canada
3692 Posts |
Posted 03/25/2020 5:24 pm
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"But gold will always have a special place since its use in jewelry and for its artistic appeal."
And... no jewellery is made of silver? One can make the argument that either metal is better for jewellery manufacturing, and it depends on a lot of things which I won't go into, but the bottom line is that it all comes down to price, always. The typical jewellery customer is very demanding and unforgiving because of the amount of money on the table and the skepticism due to ignorance. If the public wants to pay less, they always have options, and those options get debased the less money they want to spend. Obviously a jeweler isn't going to GIVE AWAY his/her precious and scarce work materials just to make a single sale. If your work is undervalued then so is your reputation as a jeweller, and I think that applies to most trades.
I used to say that gold is money, but not anymore. Why: because gold is not currency. It assumes that position because of everything intrinsic to gold (the rarity, the way that people value it, etc). Mostly, gold is valued so high because there are relics and priceless objects that people do not want to melt because of historical significance, therefore that gold never sees the market for hundreds if not thousands of years. King Tut, death masks, Celtic pieces, Roman pieces, Etruscan pieces, et cetera, and scepters, crowns, millions of rings, necklaces, et cetera, that people value because it belonged to their great-whoever.
Why fret over the ratio at all? Both metals have zero monetary function. Try spending silver or gold even today, you just can't. Those historical ratios were based on conquests and supply. There's no return to those fixed ratios.
And I hope you weren't comparing the PRICE of two commodities to the HEALTH BENEFITS of others. That metric does not work. Nobody is hoarding/buying/selling/trading absorbic acid in the fear that oranges will go extinct or something, come on. That ratio is advertised on kitco to spike demand for silver, nothing else.
"Silver is almost essential to many real life applications and that says it is undervalued ! Gold is simply gold ; it has real world applications on planet Earth but could sort of get along without it . . ."
So if one can compare a cart of groceries (needed to live but affordable) to a pair of famous basketball shoes (can do without it and super pricy)... Do you think groceries ought to cost more and pricy running shoes should be a dime a dozen? Which of the two do you see people lining up for blocks? During good times, the shoes, and during bad times, the food market. I see your point but it's wrong. Some industries get bullied by the masses and get beat down in price over the bottom line, or these products are just so abundant that it's actually better for business to sell them in bulk.
But you're right, there's no sensical reason for us to still measure that obsolete ratio. |
| | Forum: Precious Metals and Bullion - Gold, Silver, Copper, Platinum |
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| The Best Silver You Can Stack?
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Libertad
Pillar of the Community
Canada
3692 Posts |
Posted 11/19/2019 8:30 pm
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Best silver is the largest bullion bar you can afford. The best bullion bar is the one without pretty pictures that you don't get attached to. The best bullion bars are square or rectangular so that they take up all of the room in your safe or hide-y hole. The bar should say what the product is, what the purity is, and how much it weighs. If your silver does not tell you what purity it is or what the weight is, then the next guy buying it will scrutinize it and maybe pass on it. That's not liquid. Sugar water isn't water.
I say this because I see bullion in the shape of skulls and whatnot, and I just feel that that style of stacking is for kids who are gripped by images and flashy stuff. Be smart. Pay the least amount possible. Purity should be .9999, otherwise you have to smelt the coin to get your actual silver. US coins are dumb because they rely on a face value for worth, and they never weigh the same from coin to coin, regardless of how many silverbugs can recognize silver (most people can't and are not aware that silver coins once circulated). Honestly, you'll be spending those coins at face value because most people just don't care enough to know what silver is. Nostalgia is one thing, business is another. |
| | Forum: Precious Metals and Bullion - Gold, Silver, Copper, Platinum |
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| New Collector Wants To Make Some Wise Investment Decisions.
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Libertad
Pillar of the Community
Canada
3692 Posts |
Posted 11/16/2019 3:09 pm
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Doesn't that also mean you pay more in taxes?
It's like having a sweet Ferrari but you pay more in insurance than in gas.
This topic is kind of a great question. Most Canadian coins are in the 2 to 3 figure price range. Gold gets into the 4 figures, but then the mint ruined the 1912-1914 gold pieces kind of recently. 1948 silver dollar? Newfoundland gold? What is good? Without a good solid answer to this topic we all know where coin collecting is headed in 10 years. If that's the case I hope we see another silver bull market so that the real collectors hold onto good historical stuff and just let the rest go.
And, say, how is the common man supposed to invest in a home when there are more cost-effective investments out there? Why put all your eggs into the same basket, for which you have to do repairs and upgrades? Simply put, why buy 1 unit of gold @1470 when you can buy 85 units of silver@17.30? The obvious reason would be because it's gold, d'uh, but silver has a lower cost-per-unit. It's easier to get into AND OUT OF silver than it is gold than it is Canadian coins than it is Canadian mortgages. Mortgages are liabilities. They are long-term debts. Silver is OWNED immediately. A house is not. |
| | Forum: Canadian Coins and Colonial Tokens |
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| Hyperinflation Notes
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Libertad
Pillar of the Community
Canada
3692 Posts |
Posted 11/03/2019 08:46 am
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@owatchman's post: That Mozambique note: I'd be pretty alarmed and terrified (!) if I lived in a place where the currency on my island was hyper-inflated and had army soldiers printed on them. Looks like a direct threat in my eyes.
And this Turkish note above me looks SO very sinister. It doesn't even look real, like it belongs in a dystopian horror film. |
| | Forum: World Paper Money and Banknotes |
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| A Few "New" Counterfeits That Are Concerning.......
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Libertad
Pillar of the Community
Canada
3692 Posts |
Posted 11/03/2019 08:38 am
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| Obvious pitting from casting the coins. Obvious plating from the colour alone. The designs look reworked and touched up, especially the smile on the lady. One glaring omission in most of these coins is that they were not minted in a press so there will be no cartwheel lustre on them. The fields are dull and obviously cast. Thanks for posting these! An interesting thing that they did in the 1st coin is the way the lip (edge of the coin) curls upward in some gold coins. They left that detail to try to pass it off as minted/pressed. Can we see the rims/edges? |
| | Forum: Canadian Coins and Colonial Tokens |
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| Counterfeit 1 Oz. Gold Credit Suisse Bar
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Libertad
Pillar of the Community
Canada
3692 Posts |
Posted 10/22/2019 09:16 am
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Best thing to do is learn the color of gold. It's mostly an orange-y yellow. This is just me, but I'm a cowboy so I bite my gold (24K!) bars and coins to test them. Do not trust the packaging! Packaging is easier to fake than gold itself as it doesn't require any specialized skills to print something.
Most fake gold bars that I've seen are too yellow and are visibly plated. It takes experience to spot plating, but once you sort out your colors in your mind it's like spotting emeralds and diamonds; it becomes a split-second decision. Anyone who spends a lot of time doing only one thing become really good at it, same with all of our hobbies.
Font is another big indicator. A letter isn't just a letter. They have certain aesthetic styles which please the eye or the opposite. In a lot of cases the counterfeiter couldn't be bothered to copy a bar straight up.
The reason that they overhaul the design altogether is because the volume of the bar must be a certain size (think of density of gold). You would think that a straight copy would be enough but that would mean that the bars would be underweight (debased metals are not as heavy as gold). Most fake bars are the exact size of real gold bars from the top-down, but the THICKNESS of the bar gives it away. It will weigh 31.1g or even more, but gold is DENSE. Take your bars out of the packaging and start FEELING your gold. BEND it. BITE it. If it's difficult to leave a scratch or dent on it then it's not gold. If you have a strong young hand it is not difficult to bend a gold coin or bar with just your fingers in one hand. Think of it as modern "chopmarks". Authenticators. This is bullion, not numismatic. The material that you're investing in doesn't degrade or become "lesser" if you dent the gold. That's a solid fact, but just don't do it to rare bars with collector value. Usually they won't come out of nowhere; they will come into the legitimate market with provenance.
Long story short: measure your gold bars with a ruler or calipers against known gold bars to make sure the volume and density is correct. Gold coins are smaller than one might imagine them to be (Scrooge McDuck had some massive gold coins).
The fakers are banking on the hope that the only test you do out of the package is weighing it on a scale. Please, I urge people to know what gold looks and feels like. |
| | Forum: Precious Metals and Bullion - Gold, Silver, Copper, Platinum |
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| Rhodium At An All Time High In 11 Years
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Libertad
Pillar of the Community
Canada
3692 Posts |
Posted 10/22/2019 08:59 am
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The only rhodium I've ever handled was in a black powder form for melting with platinum and in liquid form for plating nickel-white gold. I find it funny that people would want physical rhodium - to do what with it?
Rhodium is a very specialized industrial metal with few applications, but it's a rare metal. How would one stack it: in the yellow liquid that has cyanide in it, or in a black-grey powder that looks like soot? Your bullion would be in the wrong form for the people who need it. Rhodium has to be processed first by the companies who make products with it - these are your ready-made products like rhodium plating solution, or from refiners that give it to you as a raw powder ready to be melted. Those companies in that supply chain take their cuts.
Stick to gold and platinum? Why do I say that? Because in the bar form those metals are readily usable and recognizable as investment metals. (Silver, too, by the way.) Rhodium doesn't show up on the tickers on the news, but gold always does. Put rhodium and some random metal beside it and the common person could not tell you which is which.
The more removed from manufacturing a region/people get/s, the easier it becomes to debase their currency. (Working theory... :D) |
| | Forum: Precious Metals and Bullion - Gold, Silver, Copper, Platinum |
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