precious metals and such (in Off-topic)

i bought this coin:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=140537618780&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT

in 2002 for less than five dollars per ounce of silver. due to the economy and politics, this week precious metals have peaked at their highest ever prices.

i just wanted to give you guys a heads up in case you missed it and gold is doing even better than silver! ; )

What a weird coincidence. I was at my dad's house today and he showed me a "coin" he was given in the '90s. It's 1 kilo of silver that's made to look like a giant British coin. It was given to him as a business gift back when silver was trading low. He guessed it's worth $1450 now, but neither of us checked the commodity rate.

due to the low mintage on that coin, it went for quite a bit above melt value...the final bid was 760 bucks! ; )

1 kilogram is roughly 32.15 troy ounces (a tad bit more, actually).

Silver price peaked at around 49$ per troy ounce and might get even higher, so call it 1575$ per kilo.

Gold is at almost 1540$ per troy ounce now, so a kilo of gold would be worth almost 50k USD. In fact, it might go over that soon enough :)

...

By the way, one kilo of pure gold if molded into a "brick" shape would actually be SLIGHTLY SMALLER than an iPhone 4.
One kilo of silver would be almost twice as large. Not quite, but almost.

And a kilo of copper would be about 2 times as big as the lump of 1 kilo silver :)

In early 2009 I had my investment adviser take 1/3 of my portfolio and put it in precious metals, including a heavy proportion of gold.

It was quite easy at that time to see what the future would hold, given the current administrations policies to devalue the US greenback.

My portfolio has never been better.

This is one area which I highly praise our current president. His predictability and love of Keynesian policies.

my sep has been in a precious metals fund since around 2001! :insert soapbox comment regarding our leadership at that time here:

; )

just buy nuts amounts of gold and sell it like 6 years later when its twice/triple time as muchworth

I don't think the current level of prices is sustainable, it is quite likely that we're in a panic-induced upwards bubble.
It should go up a couple of years more for sure, but then it will most likely pop.
I'd say the stable price would be somewhere in the vicinity of 1k USD per troy ounce (and then you'd also have to adjust for inflation from now to the moment it pops).

we are definitely in a bubble in my opinion. it is also a finite resource though, like oil and it will only go higher over time. once this bubble bursts, prices will only rise again over time. in effect it will always be a good investment but now is likely not the best time to buy.