silversky

GS.BE now saying five days before they can ship when you get to the checkout.  I'm guessing they must be really really busy.

Well, the COT report from Tuesday shows that the net long position on spot silver is now lower than it was back in December last year.  Its gone from a really high net long position back in April to below what it has been for a long time.  Bounce coming?

I notice that GS.BE have a notice in their shopping cart.  Its an update for May 2017 that there is a delay in shipments due to high activity and thanks for your patience.  I'm guessing that retail buyers must be backing up the truck with this massive whack down from mid April.

All of the official data from mint sales has been low so far for 2017.  Perhaps that is about to change.

I would rather that pm's do not fall much further.  If they do it is looking likely that they will spend a very long time much lower than they are just now.  Great if you are a perma stacker but I am not.  I actually want to make a bit of cash from them before I die.  Held other investments at a loss for long long periods of time and it's not a good strategy.  Anyway, bought 3 kgs in the hope that this is nearly the end of the bloodletting. 

I presume you mean as a contrarian indicator?  He does argue both sides but certainly seems to be leaning bearish.  Fair enough to argue both sides till we see which way we escape the current pattern.  I myself have doubts that the trump trade can continue for much longer also talk of the housing market going on up for another 4-5 years all over the net is another contrarian indicator to me.  Worldwide, who actually has the means to go even further into debt?  Another round of deflation through a flight to safety in cash is on the cards in my opinion.  If it happens it likely won't be great for gold and silver but wdik.  Maybe it will.  If there's another flight to cash and this time the UK pound gets really hammered it might not end up losing much in £'s.  It certainly won't stop me buying a little physical from time to time though.  Might just have to wait a lot longer to see a profit.

@jayboat  It certainly doesn't look good for the pm's right now.  Here's a little 10 min vid from a guy that seems to be pretty good at analysing gold and silver using Elliott waves.  He does an interesting weekend clip every week.  I reckon for his bearish option to be set back we need to see a decent bounce by the end of the week back to the 1720 region which is looking less and less likely.  The weekly chart looks very bearish now and is currently forming the third of three black crows which is not good.  If it turns here (1680) though before Friday night and forms a decent hammer that might be positive but it's not looking likely imo.  I can see this falling all the way to trendline support at 1650 in pretty short order.  A crash through that and we're going all the way to 15.60.  That's the last line in the sand for the bullish case and as he says it would be a multi year consolidation if that happens.

@Niels87  Just looking at the chart link at the top of the forum page and selecting EUR you can see that you should have been able to get them for around 30 cents cheaper.  I guess its the old story though.  When the comex banksters write the paper price down the dip tends not to be passed on fully to the physical market.

@jayboat  The rise we saw in April was not replicated so heavily in China but that's because they were already more expensive.  This sharp move down means that the comex has moved back to it's usual discount to the shanghai metal price.  The western paper discount to the Chinese physical markets was nearly zero two weeks ago with silver trading in china for roughly US$18:80 but that has only dropped during this paper drop to around US18.25.  All of the big drop in the last two weeks has been in the west in the paper market.  We are now back to the normal level of difference at around 15 - 20$ per ounce of gold and $1.50 per ounce of silver.  I'm guessing that a good number of the record long positions from the COT report two weeks ago have now been unwound.  Who knows its clearly so heavily manipulated.  Anyway, I take some comfort in the fact that the Chinese price has not moved anywhere near as much in all of this rollercoaster.

I swear if I just used the page below as a buy and sell timer it would have made me loads of money by now.  The lowest I ever saw paper silver get to was a $2.05 discount to the Chinese price (while shanghai was closed) back in December and that was just before it bounced hard.  2 weeks ago it went to parity just about and I knew I should have sold (paper) on that signal alone.  I've seen this reverse several times now and it has so far corresponded to bottoms and tops pretty accurately and works as a good overbought/sold indicator.

Worth an idle look from time to time.  http://didthesystemcollapse.com/

Yes it is.  You need a reasonable amount of speed (imparted by gravity) to hit the sweet spot where the induced field in the coin is high and the surface friction effect is low.  If you have the slide too shallow, the amount of force induced is not high enough relative to the force of friction which becomes the predominant force resisting the coins movement.  That would be ok in a perfect world if friction was constant, but friction tends to be rather variable for a group of supposedly identical shapes and masses.  Tiny differences in the shape of a surface add up to large differences and the observation becomes more a measurement of differences in surface friction rather than of diamagnetic property.  Conversely, if the slide is too steep, ie near vertical, there is nothing to stop a coin from ever so slightly lifting away from the magnets which in turn reduces the strength of the induced field in the coin and allows the coin to travel faster like a non diamagnetic coin.  It's all about the sweet spot where the diamagnetism produces the predominant force resisting motion and it just seems to be around 70deg.  It would probably be different if you covered the slide with felt to prevent micro abrasions which I have considered doing.  If you make up one of these slides and play with it, the sweet spot becomes apparent and it's quite fun little experiment.  It feels a bit like the old cornflower and water trick.  Stirring slowly the spoon stirs easily but if you try to stir fast, the cornflower produces much more resistance and slows you down.

Cheers

The slide shown here is what you can make up at home.  This guy sells them in the USA.  Easy to make yourself and you can order flat rare earth magnets on amazon easy enough.  It's quite fun to play with and if you take different metals that are diamagnetic like copper silver or gold you see that they respond in the same way to the slide but slightly different relative to each other because of their different strengths of diamagnetism.   A standard plated brass fake roars down the slide at near free fall.  Silver, copper and gold slide gently due to the induced opposing magnetic field in them as they move through the strong field lines from the neodymium magnets.  It's immediately clear if a coin is a plated non diamagnetic material.  More care has to be exercised for a potentially plated diamagnetic metal like copper but it is still possible to compare to a known genuine gold or silver coin and see the speed difference between say a plated copper or other material coin.  The three metals all slide at very slightly different speeds so if you make up a nice long slide then you could time all your brits and compare.  An obvious difference in speed would be grounds for investigation.   Also, if it were as simple as a plated copper coin the coin would have to be huge to bring up the weight.

Just on the note about the SG test.  It's acceptable on silver coins because they are small enough to be hard to make a multilayer platter that balances out to be the right density for its volume and weight.  In gold it's less use because of the fact that tungsten is almost exactly the same density as gold and is therefore the element of choice for the robdogs to fill the centre of a bar with.  Much harder to do in a small coin so still worth conducting the SG test on a small coin as part of a series of other tests.  If they were able to make a Tungsten plated coin that passes the SG test, Tunsten is not Diamagnetic.  Its paramagnetic so would fail the slide test.  Combined these tests root out the fakes pretty well for coins.  As I said, bars are much harder to test at home and really require ultrasound testing to confirm no tungsten inside.   I used distilled water (de ionised water) when I did my SG tests just to keep things clean from any lime scale in the tap water. 

If you look up Tungsten "W" on the next link you can see that it's density is almost identical to gold "Au" at 19.25 and 19.3 respectively.  That is close enough that it's nearly impossible to test for that slight difference at home doing the SG test with basic scales.  That theoretically means that a tungsten coin plated in gold would weigh the right amount and measure the right amount.  However, Tungsten is not Diamagnetic but rather Paramagnetic so responds differently to a test of its magnetism.  http://www.periodictable.com/Elements/074/data.html

With Silver the SG test is much better for coins.  That is because there is no single element that is the same density as silver that could potentially be made into a coin and plated.  The SG of silver is in a zone all of it's own and so a clever series of plated materials would be required to match the overall density and for a single ounce of silver the effort and expense is way too much to justify.  That is obviously not true with gold because of the huge price difference so a decent loupe to examine is important.  I have come across a couple of silver fakes on ebay and with the loupe they are pretty obvious when compared to a genuine.  As a previous poster said, I'd pop into Atkinsons if you are near to them and ask for their help in testing electronically.  Even if they charge you for a bit of labour it will put your mind at rest which probably wont be otherwise.  I would avoid an acid test.  It only tells you what you know which is that the surface is gold which is not much use

Hope any of this helps and good luck. 

Hi Perky,

If your brits are 2015 then they should be .9999 fineness.  That means they should weigh almost exactly one troy ounce.  One troy ounce is 31.1035g and not the 32.21g you mentioned from the mint.  It's also less than the 31.15g that you say yours are weighing.  Perhaps your scales need calibrating.  I've seen somewhere a description that says a Britannia can weigh up to 31.2g (I think this is just rounding up on less accurate scales tbh) which would be only a tiny 0.0965g more than the 31.1035g that is a troy ounce.  The figure you said that the royal mint gave you cannot possibly be the case for a new 999 Britannia.  They just simply wouldn't be giving out an extra 1g (£30) of free gold with every coin.  Perhaps the figure quoted by them was for an older coin that is not of 999 fineness?

Anyway, you should measure them with digital callipers (pretty cheap to buy) and check against the official measurements on the mints page for the 2015 Britannia.  My Britannia is pretty much spot on and came from a very reputable bullion dealer so you should expect yours be very close to the correct weight.  If the weight is correct then most fakes are much larger than the official dimensions to enable the weight to be correct.  If the size is correct then the weight will likely be underweight if it is a fake.  This is not definitely true though as it's potentially possible to make a plated platter that ends up being the correct weight and dimension albeit very very difficult.  You could always make up a magnetic slide from N42 neodymium magnets that you can buy in flat form and glue to a piece of wood in a series 6 inches long.  Then place at about 60-70deg angle and compare the speed of the different brit coins you have running down it.  They should all run at the same speed for the same metal so it would show you if there is any difference.  A multi metal platter will not run down a neodymium slide at the same speed as a pure gold one does as it's overall conductivity is different.

What size are the two suspect coins relative to the other coins?  Did they all come in the same tubes or were they bought at different times and from different dealers?

Finally, who did you buy them from if you don't mind me asking?

Cheers

Hi Bumble,  Interesting chart.  Easy to forget how different the price is in pounds from dollars.  I think that the drop in dollars after the trump win and then again after the hawkish fed rate news is done.  Been a nice rise off the very hated sentiment December lows but I now think a little pullback is on the cards next week or so.  But what do I know!! lol  I had a long spread bet from mid December and closed it last week and took a small short on both.  In hindsight I was a little early due to the surprise hookergate news forcing pm's up a bit further but that anxiety seems to have subsided now and I still think there will be a small drop before powering on upwards towards 1300$ again.  What that will be in pounds is anyone's guess though.  Seems like the uk pound is very oversold at the moment so a gain in strength will be a headwind for gold and silver in pound terms.

I've been keeping an eye on the difference in price between the shanghai exchange and the comex on http://didthesystemcollapse.com/   It's currently quite a small difference relative to what it was in December.  It's the standard comex price that has moved the most and not the shanghai price.  In December it moved to nearly $2.10 differential for silver and $60 for gold.  That was at the low and signalled that the paper contracts in the west were oversold.  Right now they are closer than normal at around $1.30 for silver and $14 for gold.  They seem to hover around the $20 - $25 mark for gold and the $1.55 - $1.65 mark for silver so I suspect they will move back towards that differential in the short term.  That could happen with a rising shanghai price but I doubt it because it's the comex price that seems to be the one that moves around a lot while the shanghai price is more stable.  Anyway, I'm betting on a small drop before a return to the bullish move that started in December.

Cheers

A while since anyone has commented here.  What a brutal bear silver has been in.  Seems like a descent to below last years low is on the cards.  Not sure myself.  Will Trump succeed in inflating the market through infrastructure spending?  Who knows.  But either way it still wont solve the financial debt issues and so silver is super cheap again IMO. Not a recommendation to buy... hehehe but I think we are nearly at the bottom.  Only because sentiment is so anti PM's.

Looks like a change of plan for PM complex after the fed.  3 rises not 2 seems to have spooked the market.  Tbonds taken a big hit too.  Might be some time before a recovery in confidence in PM.  The mood has certainly changed since the middle of the year and bulls v bears are at extreme lows.  It seems to be back to vicious bear again for gold which probably means its time for a bounce soon though lol.  I see the Chinese price differential hit $60 at some point yesterday and $2 for silver.  Lots of paper trading this down so interesting to see how low the physical market will go.

picked up the 1 kg rooster today. Looks awesome can't wait for it to arrive.

6 hours ago, vand said:

TBH its all about the USD at the moment. After the uncertainty of the presidential election, the markets now have a clearer idea of America's future path and have released a lot of pent up fear and anxiety. Give it another week or so and the narrative will move on.

I think you're right vand.  It's all about the USD and where that heads.  Where that leaves us with the price in pounds is anyone's guess.  Just a hunch but I feel that the price of PM's is heavily oversold in USD and even quite a bit in pounds.  Interestingly, everyone thought that a Trump win would propel PM's higher but after gold's rejection of its breakout to the high side the opposite narrative appears to be in play just now.  Maybe over the next few days a short term bounce is on the cards but I expect it to falter again and build a base.  I reckon PM's will end up roughly this price in 2-3 months after building a base at this or even slightly higher levels.  That's just from the failed breakout to the high side which is a powerful signal.  That time frame to build a base would tie in with DT taking office in mid January leaving a potential breakout either up or down from the consolidation that I reckon is now underway.  The Trump PM bullish psychology has certainly taken a beating but I did read somewhere that there was a truly enormous sell order inserted on gold after the unexpected result.  Apparently so large that it would likely be the actions of a central bank.  Who knows whether or not that is true.  The previous narrative of Trump being good for PM's is certainly being tested right now. Interesting times. 

On ‎07‎/‎10‎/‎2016 at 12:39, BackyardBullion said:

Same basket comparison is now 375 Euros and it would cost me £340

So much for taking advantage of the drop in silver price!

Good news is that I bought £1000 worth of euros for a holiday about a month ago at 1.19! I have 90 more euros in my pocket than if I had done it today!

Think we might be looking at a leg up in gold and silver over the next few days and week or so.  But, if so, I suspect it will be combined with a rise in the £vs$ which will tend to keep the price in £'s pretty static with only a small rise.  Essentially the big drop seen in gold and silver priced in US$ has been as much to do with a strengthening US$ as it has a fall in price.  I think that wind is about to be reversed but the net result for us in £'s will be not much... lol

BB, How did you buy your Euros?  Is it possible to do a transferwise or similar to yourself.  They seem to have a decent rate for retail forex.  I have always found the xchange shops in the airports and high street in the UK to have quite literally the very worst rate in the entire world.  I've done a quite enormous amount of travelling over the last 20 years with work to a very large number of countries all over the planet and I'm always struck by how totally unacceptable the exchange rates in the UK are.  It's ironic given that we are supposedly the financial capital of Europe!!  In the rest of the world these shysters would be had up for Usury for fleecing the people so badly on retail holiday money.

Wow has taken quite a beating in the last couple of days.  Might even get a couple of ounces at this price.  Shame the £ has fallen so much at the same time.

1 hour ago, jayboat said:

 

What language do i use in google translate to decipher these posts. 

Here's a couple of pics to illustrate.  The week long candle shows a reversal of the short term downtrend and because it closed higher than the previous weeks open.  The weekly candle completely encompasses the previous one and it has also closed the gap in the prices which occurred two weeks ago at the market open. That gap could have been a bearish signal if it was not closed quickly.  As such, the reversal is a signal to some traders to buy silver this week looking to target something like a 7% gain.  We are seeing todays action strongly in buy mode.  The charts are daily and weekly to illustrate. 

Thanks for the reply.  Good to know 89/144 applies to the commodities.  Looking at the candles, I see that last week both the daily and weekly prices closed the gap!  I wasn't sure if it was gonna end up as a runaway gap and be very bearish but it seems to have been firmly closed instead.  Also the weekly price has formed a bullish weekly reversal pattern.  It was a strong rise last week so interesting to see what happens from here.  According to http://thepatternsite.com/WeeklyRevsUpside.html a bullish weekly reversal in a bull market has a 70% chance of succeeding in further rises and on the stocks he tested it with they went on for a 19% ave further gain.  Personally, I'm hoping the price stalls a bit here till I've had a chance to buy myself a 10oz Lunar rooster lol.  I'm hoping they are coming out next week and it would be nice if the £ could pick itself up off the floor as well to reduce the price a bit as it's getting expensive these days.

On ‎10‎/‎08‎/‎2016 at 13:59, vand said:

Solid move today, although ideally I would have liked for silver to at least tag the 89DMA as it did in early June, but it looks like we could be ready to go higher from here. The last churn in the last 5 weeks has definitely unwound a lot of speculative long positions and flushed out short term players and weak hands. 

Hi Vand,  I see we've just tagged your 89DMA and got a nice little bounce today(so far anyway).  Can I ask where the specific number for the DMA comes from?  Is it particularly pm related or just a fib number. Thanks

What a nightmare.  The lengths these people go to with the fake slabbing etc is grim.  Hope you get your refund promptly.  Reading this makes me wonder if anyone has ever been scammed in reverse?  Anyone know what happens if you were unfortunate enough to sell one of these real coins to a scammer and they then claim it's not genuine?  I imagine they could claim the refund, keep your coin and when you protest they send you back their fake?  I guess they could only get away with it once and run the risk of an angry visit from you.  Must be a big problem for Ebay to police this type of thing and I just can't see how they manage it tbh.  Just seems too dodgy to use safely for genuine buyers and sellers.

Anyway, best of luck getting your refund.  A good reminder to me to stay away from ebay.  I guess that you should report him to the police or do ebay do that?