Silverlocks

Numismatics is a big old can of worms but I suspect I'll need to learn enough about Sovereigns to know what's what.

I sort of vowed to keep out of numismatics, but I do like the Gillick design for the pre-decimal queen's head.

I have a few dollaridoos as well (Koalas in this case) and the production on them seems to be a cut above most of the other silver bullion coins.

Maybe, although being close to 28 now, there is a little silver amongst the gold.

I get a similar problem in my old age (I'm nearly 28 now). My fingers are a bit addled with a lifetime of OOS and my hands are a bit stiff, so I fat finger the keyboard much more often than I used to.

Fair enough. Seems I'm not the only one fat-fingering my postings ;-} Don't worry. I've only just started and haven't purchased anything from any Balckpool dealers yet but when the time comes I shall definitely keep that certain well-known dealer in mind.

Who's the body parts model?

I think I will be in about 3 weeks when I get back from Indonesia, although I'm still cogitating on whether to get a purchase of silver or gold.

I think the silver forum has come through again with cogent answers to a question, even if in the nature of an informed guess. Well done all.

That makes sense. It's interesting to see that they are usually cheaper as well - I would have expected, other things being equal, that they would have sold it at somewhere about the going rate for the retail market. Maybe they're feeling a bit of a pinch from the Swiss outfits and trying to gain market share.

That is what I'm wondering. Am I just seeing a vendor selling retail a bit cheaper because they can do it without the dealer margin. Maybe they have some excess inventory they want to shift or something, although I saw another outfit (Betts) selling their own brand silver bars at a similar price.

I didn't really want to go calling out a specific vendor but something around £700 or so including VAT is more common on dealer websites (although this is not universal) where this was more like £660. I was really trying to find out if there was some reason for this that I was missing rather than start a bunfight about dealer's margins. Well, that was the £64,000 question. Is the difference in price just happenstance or is there some factor that I wasn't aware of at play?

I see a couple of UK outfits - notably Bairds and another outfit called Betts which I'd never heard of before selling 500g, 1kg, 100oz and similar size cast silver bars at a significantly smaller premium than the rates fetched by players like Metalor or Valcambi through a dealer. The catch (?) seems to be that these bars don't come with a certificate of authenticity but just a maker's mark. This seems like a too-good-to-be-true scenario - does this affect the resale value, am I looking at some sort of apples-to-oranges comparison that I've missed or is there some other reason for the price difference? Example - https://www.bairdmint.com/products/1kg-silver-cast-bar-jbr vs. 1kg metalor bars from your favourite dealer.

Fair enough - I used to get a fair rate of attrition in my attempts to get them off the frame.

This varies - the glue is strong enough that it can be hard to get them off the mu-metal frame without breaking them. The Neodymium alloy is quite brittle. Recovering old neodymium magnets from hard drives is one of my old guilty pleasures, now fading into the past as we transition to SSDs. Still, the ones you can buy off the interwebs are pretty cheap these days. Don't get your fingers pinched though - even small ones are stronger than you might think.

Ebay is my preferred supplier. I've bought just about all of my computer equipment through ebay since about 2001. If I want to go shopping for something (not just computers) I'll often hunt around on ebay in the first instance, even before looking at regular online vendors like Amazon. I've spent a lot more on computer equipment than I have on precious metals. A lot more.

A complete set of the 10oz coins would be a sight to behold.

So, I made the mistake of buying some dealer choice coins when I first tinkered in silver not so long ago, and bought some maples that were clearly the rejects from some exercise in grading; they all have milk spotting or some minor marks from handling. Not all pre-owned ones will be in this condition, but this dealer, at least, clearly had sorted out the B grade ones. You probably want to ask what you're actually getting.

Hi, I saw something about the Tudor Beasts series, which has the Lion in 2oz and 10oz bullion. The Royal Mint site also refers to another one called the Seymour Panther but there only seems to be mention of brilliant uncirculated and various proof coins. As far as my google-fu can tell, nothing else on the interwebs mentions bullion coins either - has there not been a gold or silver bullion release of the design, or am I missing something?

If you're talking about silver, pre-owned items don't attract VAT. Irrespective of their condition, this is the significant item W.R.T. sales. You might see something like 'our choice' or 'sellers choice' on a listing, which means that the condition may be less than pristine.

Well, I'm fortunate that nobody would ever confuse me with Homer Simpson, as nobody in their right mind would let me run a nuclear power plant.

Given that there's no VAT on importing the gold to the UK, and I presume one could export the bars from Indonesia sans VAT, I suppose it's not inconceivable that one could purchase 1g bars from PT Antam at a price that would make them worth importing here. However, I'm really not sure what the market for off-brand 1g bars would actually look like in the UK.

I don't think so per se; the prices of the bars seem pretty much in line with current spot prices.. PT Antam is a SOE that does mining and I think Logam Mulia is actually their online site for retail sale of bullion. They are LBMA good delivery accredited, however, so I imagine they have to play nicely with international markets.

I'm not really an anthropologist, but I think that's more of an Indian thing. I don't get the sense of that in Indonesia so much. The premium on a 5g bar is less than percentage point more than a 10g bar on the Logam Mulia web site, and not much more than 1 percentage point higher than the premium on a 50g bar. I doubt many folks would have enough money to buy bars in the 50g range - the average yearly household income in Jakarta is about 50m IDR (£2,500-3,000) and outside Jakarta or other large cities is more like half of that. I feel like Twoflower everytime I go there.