If the price of silver keeps dropping, I may consider buying some physical silver. Has anyone had experience doing so? Good companies to deal with? Things to watch out for? Thanks, Dawn
i bought some silver for my sil's birthday some years ago. it more than tripled in value since then. this is where i got it... http://www.apmex.com/ i wasn't interested in the coins, just the raw material. bars and industrial grain/shot caught my eye. how cool would it be to have your precious items box lined with bb-sized silver shot as a bed for your gems, etc.? anyway, i got her the 100oz apmex branded bar. flat/satin finish, no frilly stuff. it's an awesome piece. looks like a desktop paperweight about the size of a long cigarette pack and weighs 6.5 lbs! paid online, they shipped it. a painless transaction. i shoulda bought more...a lot more. been waiting for the prices to drop further but i don't see silver dropping too much more. historically, silver prices top out at a 16::1 ratio to gold. it's way below that right now so even now is a good time to buy. if you did so, it would triple again before it reached the silver/gold ratio peak. (off the top of my head calculations).
I'm sure there's money to be made in Silver if you have enough to invest but I'm no fan of it. Just feel that it's very much a knee jerk investment playing off of the Gold bubble. A bar or two like Freddie bought would be cool to have though.
We sold about about 800 troy oz when it hit $40 an oz a few months back. It's all about timing it right and finding the best price. Dealers will all offer different percetages on the smae day, with purn not coins you can usually get 90-93% market price when you sell.
Commodities investing is a game only for pros and even they lose a lot. If you want to do it for fun... go for it. If you want to make money there are better ways. Look at the history of gold/silver. It has very rarely done well. It is also a HUGE red flag that there is tons of advertising for gold and silver. If everyone is saying to do something it is probably best to do the opposite. One of my customers is www.brockreport.com. He said he has made the most money he has ever made by shorting gold over the last couple of quarters.
Between silver and gold - I would say gold if you have the cash to burn. Silver is not as liquid as gold in terms of selling/moving it. There is always a market for gold if you need to liquidate it. Silver has been a better percentage gainer over gold in the last few years. It does depend on how much you're talking about. If you're talking a few K dollars, then fine. But anything over that in terms of investment - and silver is a bit unwieldy.
