For the record, when you look at where Silver had dropped from 1980 down to 1990 in the $3.50 - $5.50 range for over ten years, it wasn't hard to imagine it wasn't going to drop any lower and it was a safe place to park your money with a decent chance for some upside potential. While hardly anyone was buying Silver, it was practically given away in many cases to get rid of it. Not for free, but at the spot price was not unheard of and I even had my dealer hard sell 40 ten ounce Engelhard bars for the spot price instead of taking all 100 ounce Engelhard bars for around 25 cents over spot. Try and find any dealer willing to do something like that today or anytime in the past ten years with so many buyers out here and we think there is only a tiny percentage of the population actually buying Silver. I set out to invest $20,000 to start. $10,000 in one ounce Gold rounds and $10,000 in one ounce Silver rounds. I was afraid to order anything online at first so I set out to my local coin shops. The first one didn't have any one ounce rounds, but had one hundred ounce Engelhard bar he picked up a year earlier and hadn't been able to sell it. I didn't want it either and he showed me the online spot price which I knew was in the $4 range that day and it was right at $4 even and he said I could have it for $400 even. So my plan was off to a bad start from the beginning but I wasn't a fool either to look a gift horse in the mouth when there were no other options. My next and last coin shop didn't have anything but 100 ounce bars, but had all the one ounce Gold coins for something like $11 over spot each for around $300 a piece at the time and I bought 30. After that I was forced onto the internet as the local coin shop wanted too much to order one ounce rounds compared to what they were selling for online. But he was a great source for 100 ounce bars when I finally got around to buying them most of the time. He was also the guy that twisted my arm into buying a bag of 40% when I knew they were a bad investment, but the price was almost near the face value. How can you go wrong with a deal like that no matter what happens to Silver when it's real money at the bank.
In the late 90's there were a lot of people talking about the stock market taking a dive and then there was that potential Y2K fiasco. So a lot of investors were taking their money out of the stock market and investing in Gold and Silver and buying a boatload at the time. When you talk about buying thousands of one ounce rounds at a time today or especially when it was at $30 and $40 an ounce, people think your crazy, but it was really a steal at $4,500 to $6,000 for so many years. That is where Northwest Territorial Mint came into play for so many of us wanting a great product at a cheap price and they couldn't be matched anywhere on a consistent basis, especially in large quantities. You had to endure the long waits but they had the goods and the best price. There were no where near as many options back then as there are today with all these new stamping plants all over the country pounding out all kinds of different products and all these new mints like Provident putting out quality products for competitive prices most of the time. I remember one online survey when I was first starting about who had the best looking round and the number one round was the NWTM which is still the same today as it was back then, which will tell you something about the quality of products compared to today's options if you've ever seen one. It's not bad, but it can't be compared to some of the newer products. Yes the ASE was a better looking product but most investors were not buying it as it was far too expensive and they were only comparing generic rounds. Of course looking back in hindsight at the low production numbers for those ASE's and it was a smart investment as they are worth so much more above the spot price today, but who knew so many people would ever come into the market and start buying tens of millions of ASE's in a single year in the future making them a sought after product.
Then there was that problem selling 40% and 90% coins as the market was flooded with them and no buyers, so you could buy 90% for near or below the spot price for so many years and 40% was so much lower it was in the danger zone as a purchase. Of course the dealers always wanted to sell it for a tad more than they were willing to buy it back and today is not much different as the 90% is only fetching near the spot price at so many dealers when you try and sell. But like anything else, if you know where to look, you can find better deals, it always pays to shop around and it always pays to know where the best offerings are at to start. You never know when you might need to sell in a hurry or try and beat everyone else to the dealer when it's time to sell.
Kitco doesn't post the older charts any longer but here is the Silver chart going back to 1985. It isn't correct by any means as it's really based on the London fixed prices and the COMEX spot price could vary by a considerable amount on any given day. If you request an actual date on Kitco, they will pull up the Kitco spot chart for that day as you would normally see it but the history charts are based on Londons price. When you look at an individual month where you can see the prices by each day on the chart, it is so much different than our actual prices. I was comparing the prices I had paid on many of the day's I bought Silver and the chart was so far off on many of them and to my favor as it appeared. As you might expect, COMEX took a dip back then just as it does today and on other day's it bounces up much higher, but nowhere near the activity we see today with these 50 cent to $1.50 moves, which would have been a real problem for people buying and selling at $4 and $5 spot prices. A 50 cent move up in the price of Silver was a major move and you thought the world was coming unglued at any minute. Holy crap, those SilverSellers, excuse me, those few SilverSellers back then might be right for once!!!! But I can't complain about the price of Silver over the past 20 years as it's been a good investment and far better than any bank and safer than the stock market for my liking anyway. I had $40,000 in the stock market and it took me ten years to get it back out in the mid 90's. So Silver has been much better for me than the stock market, but I had it all in one stock and it went for a wild ride down before it came back up. Did I learn my lesson, apparently not as I have it all in one precious metal item as an investment. But remember, don't let anyone bull sh!t you, you can take it with you in a Silver lined casket!!!
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Originally Posted by valerb
