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LawrenceChard
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Posts posted by LawrenceChard
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Yes, everything was harder then.
Even after we went live with our first site, the only real option was dial up internet access, obviously at slow speeds.
I don't remember when Freeserve arrived, but it was still dial up.
We were lucky that Telewest installed past our Lytham Road premises quite early.
When we moved to Harrowside, around the corner, in 2013, Virgin Media (they took over Telewest) had not cabled past us, so we cancelled our Virgin account, a long, painful, atrociously serviced process, and used BT highspeed copped instead. Only then did Virgin cable Harrowside, so we now use them again.
We have lots of tech problems, mainly because of their terrible quality modems, whcih probably save them about $5 each, combined with their even crappier tech service.
We do have at least one smart router, but is have to pass through their modem, we cannot use our own.
We should have BT copper backup to a smart router, although we do have an emergency 3G or 4G backup.
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32 minutes ago, Midasfrog said:
Just had a look at your taxfreegold site was checking the gold price in uk £ and it said gold price live £1195.97 ? what is happening there
The feed is broken.
This did used to happen, and I think the feed on chards.co.uk works much more reliably.
I will forward this to my techie colleagues, and expect we will either splash a big warning on the page, or do an auto refresh to our newer site.
Thanks for pointing this out.
We do appreciate all the feedback we get, (some more than others).
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On 12/03/2020 at 13:11, Kman said:
I would know too 😎 but from seeing your "How To Identify A Fake Sovereign" video on youtube
Nice to have you here Lawrence
I told Lizzie a while ago on here, that being in the domain industry myself I was impressed at your early adoption and foresight registering some very nice names back in the 90s
Thanks, but actually I was driving myself crazy for two or three years before, because we did not have a web presence. I still think we got into it late.
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15 hours ago, sovereignsteve said:
is there a reason your font size kept reducing? It is as challenging to my eyes as trying to grade a half sovereign 😉
I must have copied and pasted something, in fact I probably ran it through to for a spell check, although my spelling is excellent, my typing is flaky.
I should learn to check for paste options, because I often find the formatting of a deocument changes on me mid-way, and it drives me bonkers trying to fight my way out of it.
I sometimes copy things into a plain text editor, before pastng back, but even that fails sometimes.
I blame smart computers or programmes being dumb, but maybe it's a dumb operator trying to be smart.
You should try using a 4K or 5K monitor with some programmes like Adobe Photoshop, fonts on controls are minuscule, and some of them don't zoom.
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12 hours ago, ChrisSilver said:
@LawrenceChard I think you might be writing some of your posts inside the quoted text of another member, when you quote text from another member please can you write on the outside of the quote in order to avoid confusing what you are writing with what you are quoting. You can edit your posts as needed
I'm sure you are right. It's happened twice, when there is more than one comment, and "quote" returns both.
I guess the answer is to answer one, then do another response for the other.
I think I have done more forum posts in the last week than in a normal year.
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57 minutes ago, richatthecroft said:
who does their research on a pokey little phone
Anybody under 30!
A great testament to the sites usefulness and the masses of information it contains.
Long live the content of taxfreegold in whatever guise 😁 And thanks for leaving it up there for us all to use 👍
Thanks again...
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1 hour ago, sovereignsteve said:
I've been to your shop many times😉
or should I say shops.
But, I'm never there!
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25 minutes ago, richatthecroft said:
Yes, thanks @LawrenceChard extremely informative-
Just wondering if there are any plans to update/continue with your tax free gold website? Its a fantastic resource.
Thanks,
I just posted your last comment to our Marketing Team.
There was a need to unify our 3/4 main websites for a number of reasons, such as security, shopping basket, e-commerce, customer experience, mobile friendliness, loading speeds, and a whole raft of other stuff.My strong opinion was to leave all the old sites intact until the new one made them redundant, but not everyone shares my view.
Indeed quite often, I want to check some facts, and look for our existing resource on TFG, GS, or 24carat, and when I find it, I get forwarded to a page on chards.co.uk, which does not include the original information. We may start removing these redirects, and going back to letting viewers transfer themselves to our new site if they wish.
Our old websites were never intended to be mobile friendly, whereas our new one is. Upgrading them to modern user and Google dictated standards is a very expensive and lengthy process, so it is unlikely to happen, but we did recently analyse them for security threats, and they needed little or no action.
The rather clunky search facilities on them have now broken, because of technical stuff like version compatibility, and Google have been downgrading old sites, in favour of mobile friendliness, loading speeds, newer HTML standards, and more.
We have a steady process of replicating much of the older sites' content onto chards as time permits, so all is not lost.
I was thinking only earlier today, that many people have told me they use our sites as a reference source when they want to check something. These include American and European dealers, Royal Mint employees, recently a couple of people from Kitco, etc.
A few days ago, I noticed a missing image, and a typo on one of our legacy sites, and we still correct these when we find them, but we rarely add brand new material, which tends to go straight onto chards.co.uk.
The aim is to get chards.co.uk up to the point where it is better in all respects than the old sites, but there is still a lot of work needed to get there.
At least our new site is easier for adding new products, and has a much better search facility than our legacy sites, although we are aware we need to make it easier to find information rather than just sales pages.
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19 hours ago, sovereignsteve said:
but why? it looks like you😊
How do you know?
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3 hours ago, sovereignsteve said:Not sure what the situation is at present but I get the impression that In the past getting sufficient supply has been their main problem.
If you were meaning us, I can give a few insights, but this will need to be the short version, although there is already a longer version on one of our websites, probably TaxFreeGold:
Managing and balancing supply and demand is always our main problem, and that includes not only stock but also cash.
Once upon a time:-
Back in about 1964/5, there was only one gold bullion investment product available or frequently traded on the UK market, which has always been small compared with bullion markets in many other parts of the world.
That one single product was the British Gold Sovereign.
For some time, we used to run a weekly advert in Exchange and Mart, which read:
Gold sovereigns £4 each, £365 per 100, £3500 per 1000...
Krugerrands had not been invented, or even thought of.
No serious investor bothered with half sovereigns, they were relatively more expensive, and the market was not sufficiently liquid (and still isn't).
There were some other gold bullion coins, some of which I guess were important in their own domestic markets, but none were important in the UK.
Keeping track and control of stock was easy, we could do it with pen and paper, or even just in our heads.
There were actually a few options, such as:
"New" sovereigns (QEII), Old sovereigns (anything earlier), Kings (Edward VII and George V), Victorias (sometimes split into different heads and reverses),
but, most investors simply bought "sovereigns", which in effect was "our choice" of sovereigns, a category we still use and run today. This was always the cheapest and best option for investors.
Sometime after 1971, most high street banks (remember them?) joined in, and started offering to sell gold sovereigns via their foreign exchange departments.
Whey were always more expensive than us, but of course, they had a vast branch network, were trusted household names, and for a few years they dominated the market.
One odd side-effect was that because they lacked the local experience to check incoming "old" sovereigns, they almost exclusively sold only "new" sovereigns, and "new" sovereigns went to a premium price above "olds". We always advised people to buy the cheapest within reason (and still do), which usually meant "old" Sovereigns. Some investors wanted to pay more for "new" sovereigns, and we always tried to advise them, but we remained happy to supply them if they were adamant. Similar stuff still happens.
When there was a wave of selling, most investors owned new sovereigns, so the market flooded with them, and they went to a discount compared with "old"; then when the market changed, "new" would go back to a premium. At those times, we made an active market in "swaps", where we would take in the higher priced coins from our customers, and swap them for the lower priced ones, sharing the cash difference with them. Sometimes we did the same in reverse a few weeks later, so any investor who did two opposite swaps ended up with the same type of coin they started out with, plus a cash profit on them, almost for nothing. Incredibly, some of these investors were only prepared to swap half their holdings at any one time, so they, and we, lost out.
Then Krugerrands happened.
At first, this did not affect the UK market, for a few reasons. First, in 1966, the UK government had banned the British public form buying gold, and this continued until 1971; then there were international embargoes on South Africa and its products, because of apartheid.
In 1971, everyone wanted Krugerrands, partly because they were cheaper (lower premium), although the previous high market premiums on sovereigns gradually reduced, and partly because the concept of a one troy ounce gold coin was a piece of marketing genius, which made it easy for anyone to understand and compare prices and premiums, whereas traditional gold bullion coins such as sovereigns require arithmetic, a calculator, or a transparent dealer enlightened enough to quote percentage premiums.
So, now we had two different gold bullion stocks to manage. In truth, this was not much more difficult than managing one, but then...
Then:
A lot more countries started issuing their own one ounce gold bullion coins, some people wanted Canadian Maples (they were 999 instead of 916 gold), others wanted...
Rand Refineries introduced fractional sizes in 1980, being half, quarter, and tenth ounce version.
Canada introduced 9999 then 99999 versions of its Maples.
Some mints introduced fine gold (9999) variants of their own.
From 1st January 2000, "Investment Gold" became VAT exempt in the EU including the UK, and this included gold bars in addition ot most existing "investment gold" bullion coins.
Some time after that, we remembered that disposals of sterling used to be exempt from CGT (Capital Gains Tax). We researched and checked this, which was not easy at the time, then published our findings. The British Royal Mint undoubtedly noticed this on our TaxFreeGold website, and eventually started promoting the fact. Now (almost) everybody knows.
Fast Forward to Now:
I have tried, and generally lost count and given up, trying to work out how many different investment gold bullion stock lines and categories we now need to manage.
A brief summary of the categories includes:
CGT Exempt:
"Our choice" gold sovereigns. (Still often one of the best options)
"Minty" gold sovereigns.
The current year's gold sovereigns (yes, some investors want to pay more to get this year's)
"Our choice" gold Britannias (one ounce).
"Minty" gold Britannias (one ounce).
The current year's gold Britannias (one ounce).
Other British one ounce bullion coins (I have lost count!)
Fractional gold Britannias (why).
"Our choice" one ounce gold coins, non CGT exempt, (usually the lowest premiums of all).
Krugerrands (one ounce), usually only slightly higher premium than "our choice".
Fractional troy ounce coins, half, quarter, tenth, twentieth, twenty-fifth, ounce, one gram (why?).
Multiple ounce gold coins, 2 ounce, 10 ounce, kilo.
Chinese metric gold pandas, recent years, 30 gram, 15 gram, etc.
Gold bullion bars, mainly one kilo, half kilo, quarter kilo, 100 gram, 50 gram, 20 gram, 10 gram, 5 gram, 2.5 grams, 2 gram, 1 gram, one ounce, half ounce, plus taels, tolas, and a few other types.
Gold proof sets and individual proof gold coins.
Traditional, previous circulation gold coins, the foreign national equivalents of gold sovereigns.
Some older, historic "non-investment gold" coins, guineas etc.
Not Only, But Also:
Silver coins and bars.
With almost as many variations as for gold. (Even got its own Forum!)
Platinum.
Palladium.
Short Version?
You can imagine what the long version would look like!
Market Makers
We do not act as distributors or resellers for most of this stuff, but as active "market makers", which means we try to be ready to buy whatever anyone wants to sell, and to provide whatever anyone wants to buy.
It's not often, but people do sometimes want to sell 1,000 Krugers. That's about £1.3 million.
Similarly with gold sovereigns. Hey that's only £0.3 million!
Also, any and all of the above list.
Plus collectable numismatic coins. We recently bought in two collections, each for about £75,000; on two consecutive days.
The Result?
We have to spread our stock investment over a far greater number of products than we ever needed to in the past. I am not complaining about this, it's just another fact of life, and another challenge.
One Last Historical Note
During the 2008 global credit crisis, banking crisis, stock market crash, demand for gold bullion shot up. Stocks and supplies dried up. Big American demand hoovered up most of the physical gold stock in Europe, from which we used to source most of our shortfall. The British Mint could not keep up with our demand. Premiums jumped up to stupid levels. Some UK dealers were paying over 10% premium for sovereigns, and reselling them for 15% plus. I remember seeing a Krugerrand sell on ebay for an absurd 27% premium! We tweaked most of our selling premiums up slightly, but only by about a half percent. We took a decision that rather than charge what we knew to be rip-off levels of premium, we would maintain near normal premiums, and we offered investors the choice of buying provided they were happy to accept delivery as and when we could source actual physical stock. Many investors understandably wanted immediate delivery, bought elsewhere, and usually paid rip-off prices. Nevertheless, many investors placed their trust in us, and we sold considerable volumes of investment gold. The only world mint who could cope with demand was the Perth Mint. During the period, we had two x 3,000 ounce old shipments from them (think £4 million each at today's prices), including 66 x one kilo gold coins in one shipment (£2.7 million). We also had one shipment of 100,000 ounces of silver,mainly kilo coins. To ensure none of our customers were at any risk, at no time did we own less physical gold than we owed. At times, we owed about £4 million worth of gold, at 2008 prices. Naturally, we did deliver all the gold for which we had contracted. Our thanks to all those customers and investors who trusted us, at a time when most people did not trust their banks. In retrospect, I am still not sure that maintaining our low premiums was the best solution, but I still remain proud that we managed to cope with the demand in our own way, repay the trust of our customers, and deliver on all our commitments, even if not as quickly as we would have preferred.
- goldking, Tattoedamat, CadmiumGreen and 7 others
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On 26/08/2019 at 22:10, sovereignsteve said:
sponsored by the silver forum?😉
That sounds like a good suggestion, although it would now be more applicable to Darr3nG.
I suspect that members might be surprised, or even shocked, at how much it can cost to try and run a good site.
Some of this is actual financial outlay, but much is also the human resource behind it.
Dealer sponsorship is one obvious idea, but it does bring its own potential problems with it.
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8 hours ago, goldking said:
Although mainly a UK based membership, it's a worldwide forum. Only a very small percentage of the membership will be within a short travelling distance of Blackpool so it stands to reason that the majority will want to see postage costs included in the price comparison. I don't know if you're aware, but clicking the 'change' tab down at the bottom of the comparison page shows the item cost on its own.
Just a suggestion, but given that HGM can do P&P for £6.95 to the UK is there any reason why you can't match it? That would improve your ranking in the comparison by several notches from a quick glance down the listings.
As a side note, were you at Sheffield auctions last month? Your avatar pic looks nearly identical to a guy I was chatting with there
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I could not find the "Change" tab you mentioned, but then again, it's been a long day!
Check our revised shippiing charges you may ne pleasantly surprised!
...and, no, I was not at Sheffield auctions. I must change my avatar, watch this space!
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46 minutes ago, Midasfrog said:
You suspected wrong yours is the lowest and a very reasonable postage / packaging cost.
I am always happy to be corrected.
Our minimum insured UK shipping charge was £9 until very recently (earlier today). I did not even know we had implemented discussed changes until I saw Darr3nG's post about 20 minutes ago.
It is now £6.
We were aware that ours used to be toward the upper end, but we believed, and still do, that this fairly and accurately reflected our total shipping costs including picking, checking, packing, postage, and insurance.
The mystery remains, who was "charging way over the top"?
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On 19/08/2019 at 21:29, Midasfrog said:
This site is great for showing whos charging way over the top for postage 😉
I suspect Midasfrog is mainly meaning us, but I disagree that we are charging way over the top.
Our charge is for postage and packing, and includes a considerable chunk for picking, checking, packing, and admin time. Mrs Chard believe we lose money on the shipping charge.
Interestingly, until about 5 or 6 years ago, we offered 2 shipping rates £2 at buyer's risk or £5 fully insured up to any value. We often had to spend a lot of time convincing buyers that their £20,000 or £100,000 purchase was indeed fully insured, and we could understand why they were concerned, it probably sounded too good to be true. As far as we were concerned, it kept things simple, and our sales revenue slightly subsidised the shipping and insurance charge.
We changed to £5 (before several postage price hikes) shipping plus £1 per complete £1000 for insurance; our actual cost for the insurance was slightly more, but the small subsidy made the calculation really quick and easy. Instantly, most buyers were much happier!
We also believe that "free postage" is misleading. It makes a good sound byte, but actually it just means the postage is added to the price in advance. Most sellers offering "free postage" don't offer a price reduction on the second, third, fourth, etc, item bought, so they get to pocket the difference and the "punter" (I strongly dislike that word), never realises, remaining blissfully happy that they got "free" postage, and hardly ever realising it was costing them more.
By the way, Jane and I once personally delivered a large Krugerrand order to the Cayman Islands, as it was almost as cheap as the insured shipping. We got a one week package deal which cost less than the return air fare. That was a really tough week!
"Free" postage also penalises those buyers who shop in person, collect, or increasingly, have their purchases stored securely.
We believe in trying to be fair, and also trying to be as transparent as possible.
Some good news is that we have been planning on reviewing and re-calculating our shipping charges for some time, and we are just about to revise them on site, mainly downward. There are some complicated calculations which include allowances for weight, value, size and shape, so our stock database has to include the relevant data for many thousands of products. Even then, a few things still need to be worked out on an individual basis.
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On 08/08/2019 at 19:55, nee4891 said:
Affiliate marketing is a good way to go, and a solid passive income.
Also agree on the above, straight the point and I like it, well done and thank you :).
Affiliate marketing is unlikely to work on this, because the vendors at the top of the table, with the lowest prices, do not need to pay commission for the affiliate programme, while those with higher prices are not likely to want to pay when the comparison site shows them to be more expensive.
IMO, most affiliate programmes cost consumers and other buyers extra money, and benefit those vendors who can afford to pay the highest commission to affiliates, and this is on a best scenario basis, assuming the affiliate programme is disclosed and transparent, often it is not, which is often misleading, possibly fraudulent.
Straightforward advertising would probably be a cleaner method, but similar financial arguments spply. The cheapest, best value vendors don't need to pay for the adverts, and might have to increase prices to allow for the extra advertising budget, which defeats the object, and ends up costing the buyers more, which defeats the whole object of a price comparision site (from a buyer's point of view), although probably meets the purpose of the site, making money for the site owner, from his point of view.
As can be seen from the negative feedback when user charges were menioned, most consumers don't want to pay to use comparison sites either, meaning that the only way they are likely to work if they are run by a talented and altruistic owner.
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14 hours ago, Darr3nG said:
@LawrenceChard - you can continue the reading here [ https://thesilverforum.com/topic/26565-compare-gold-prices-uk-free-website/ ] and see how my "challenger" site evolved.
I too followed this thread and it actually pushed me to re-learn some skills, I hadn't used in a while.
@Kman - thanks for the offer, but this project isn't costing too much. I found a cheap VPS service and just have been too lazy to move the front-end hosting - not bothered about the domain name as I don't plan on commercialising (more on that decision in the link ^)
Thanks,
I have read all the pages of the thread, so I was aware. I was hoping to be able to access and test the original mystery "Guest" site, and have spent some time looking at yours, which does seem to work impressively well.
We are aware of many of the technical problems, as we have been doing regular price comparisons for some years. These have only been on a limited number of what we regard as key investment products, and we have only done them about once weekly, because we did them manually, however for a few months now, we have been doing the site scraping electronically, so we get co-ordinated time comparisons. Our comparisons are done both with and without "free" postage.
Until yesterday, we only used these internally, but yesterday we quietly rolled out some of the output to a limited number of our web pages, but they are still "Work in Progress", as we still have a few more sites to include, together with quantity breaks. We also need to clean up the displayed tables.
Our comparisons have consistently shown that we are the most competitive (lowest total cost) better than 90% or the time on a selection of key products, the main exceptions being on single piece purchases including postage costs. We are still the cheapest total on some of these, and where we are not, it is usually only by a few pounds total at most.
I can see that most Silver Forum members prefer to see prices including postage, each for their own reason.
Because we have been "bricks and mortar" dealers for many years (before 1964), we approach pricing primarily on that basis, but because we have always conducted mail order business, even before Tim Berners Lee invented the internet, we also take postage included prices into account.
One factor where postage included price comparison fails is where customers buy 2 , 3, or more coins, in which case, our per item postage costs reduce by about 50% for the first additional item, 66% for the second additional item, etc. While the postage included comparisons remain valid for single piece purchases by post, they are skewed and incorrect for physical collection customers, and for any purchases of more than one single piece, and therefore wrong more often than they are right.
We did notice that you were only a few miles down the road from us in Lancashire, and would be delighted to discuss this and other techie stuff with you. Our chief tech person is Ian Davis.
More to follow..
Watch this space (as they say)...
- AuricGoldfinger, Tattoedamat, Kman and 2 others
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On 08/08/2019 at 19:42, Guest said:
Hi all,
I recently launched a little side project of mine for monitoring the prices of gold sovereigns by UK dealers:
At the moment functionality and looks are very basic; it refresh automatically every 2 minutes and watches a few of the most reputable dealers that I know of.
I wanted to share it in case someone else finds it useful. It's completely free and donations are accepted to keep it running.
Any constructive feedback is welcome. Thanks!
I only became aware of this whole thread a few days ago, with a very recent post, but I ended up reading the whole lot from start to end.
I never got to try the original price comparison site, but I was impressed by the heap of favourable responses thre were for it, then I read further, when "Guest" mentioned moving it to a more expensive UK based server, followed by starting to charge for it.
I had already thought that "Guest" sounded rather young, slightly naive, but well-intentioned, but I found myself feeling slightly shocked at how quickly the positive comments turned negative, and even vitriolic (trollish?). I ended up feeling quite sorry for him (that's sexist), or her.
I do have some more observations, but it's getting late...
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7 minutes ago, Midasfrog said:
That was me that said that , I was only two years old and pocket money was 1d a week took me years to save up for my first sovereign 💰
My pocket money was 2/6 per week (a halfcrown), which was one of the lowest figures in our school class (lowest decile). I also got paid 2/6 per hour working for our family business (amusement arcade in Blackpool). There was no mimimum wage in those days, but it would have been about £10 for a 40 hour week, so about 5/- (25 pence) per hour.
But now I have blown it, and nobody will believe I am still only 29.
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On 10/08/2019 at 12:06, AuricGoldfinger said:
The website is great.
BUT
There’s one MASSIVE problem that no one has mentioned yet.
£300 is too bloody expensive for a sovereign! 😁
That's what someone said about £4 each back in 1964!
.
Gold Monitoring Thread £ GBP only
in Gold
Posted
Before attempting an answer, I looked back at the thread to find what lay behind the question.
I used to read some of the newsletters cited, and still do very occasionally, but my conclusion was that most of the articles were written by people with a vested interest, trying to lobby the market their way, or hype people into buying.
The GoldSeek analysis of the Comex market is possibly sound, but I did not read it right through. Remember though that for every Comex long trade, there is a matching short trade.
Also, the Comex market is not a physical market, except that in theory, delivery can be made or taken. I have never looked at the stats, but I guess that 99.99% of Comex trades are paper trades (or electronic), not physical.
I cannot speak for other dealers in the physical market, but...
Our aim is to balance our book stocks as soon as possible, ideally to keep them all in balance. In practice, this rarely happens on an intra-day basis. Typically someone will sell us 100 Krugers, somebody else will buy 500 sovereigns. These two transactions nearly balance each other (100:400 would be closer), but usually leaves us trying to sell Krugers and buy sovereigns. The next day, the opposite may be true.
Being semantic, it also depends what you mean or understand by "are short". This could mean having a stock level of zero, or below a preferred threshold. It could mean having a negative stock (owing stock). While this can be a common occurrence, it usually only persists for relatively short period, possibly as short as a few minutes, possibly running into a few hours or days. (Three occurences of "short" in this paragraph, with two different meanings).
Anyone running a "short gold" position deliberately is really a speculator rather then a dealer. It is also quite difficult to be short in physical gold. Some gold mining companies are, or used to be, financed by a short gold position bcause their working capital was often borrowed against their future production, secured by the gold still in the ground waiting to be extracted.
If you read the post I made recently about "Liquidity", you will see that the only time our company was ever "short" was around the 2008 international crises, when we were short mainly of Krugerrands and sovereigns, but with a similar "long" position in kilo gold coins (66 of them), some bars, and also 100,000 ounces of silver, mainly in the form of kilo coins. This was our physical hedge, although even without them, our overall gold stock was always "long" or positive throughout the whole period.
I hope this helped.