Bimetallic

Hi all – There's been quite a bit of media coverage of Costco selling PAMP bars online. One article claimed that the price sometimes falls under spot. They're a major discount warehouse-style retailer in the US. Limit of two bars. They keep selling out apparently. They're 1 oz Lady Fortuna bars. Online only. When I first heard this I thought their margins must be razor thin – retailers are used to much greater markups than bullion dealers most of the time (how dealers make it work is still a mystery to me, @LawrenceChard). So it makes sense if they are indeed falling under spot occasionally – I doubt their website supports the constant real-time price updates tracking a spot price and other variables, but who knows. The coverage is weird. It's like buying a gold bar is unheard of, like who would buy one online, and with incompetent price comparisons. And what does this mean? "APMEX and JM Bullion sell gold by weight, quantity and price." By price? How do you sell something by price? Anyway, the reporters are all struggling to describe a market we take for granted. It reminds me of the recurring lesson that when the media reports on something you know a lot about, you notice severe errors. Depending on the rate, it implies they're just as bad at other topics...

Sorry, I'm surprised I missed that. I must've mentally inserted Canadian between Royal and Mint. Maybe a North American bias, since I'm in Arizona. I've never seen RM carded products, just the Canadian cougars and moose and other wildlife. Gold Brits are inexplicably cheap in the US, with a ≈4.4% premium, so I like them a lot.

1. Are you sure the loose coin and carded coin are the exact same product? The only carded RCM coins I've seen are their special 99999 fine gold, not their normal 9999 fine grade. That's five nines vs four nines. Regular Maples are four nines. RCM is the only mint in the world that even offers five nines gold. Those always sell for an extra premium. 2. There's an interesting potential unintended consequence of moving toward carded gold, which is most common with bars. It makes fraud easier, since people are no longer interacting with their bullion directly if it's sealed in a plastic bubble in a card. This reduces the available counterfeit testing methods. I think Sigma is supposed to work, but not any other method like XRF, ultrasound, specific gravity, and simple measurements and mass become more difficult. If counterfeits in cards blows up in the future as a big issue, they'll probably lose their premium and any sense of value added. Just a possibility to keep in mind. It would spark a return to direct reality kind of movement, and dealers and buyers will cut the plastic first thing.

If you have to post the value on the package, I would misdirect on the contents to deter thieves. The contents should be implied as something hard to sell, fence, etc., unlike bullion or jewelry. In the US all of the online dealers label their shipments as coming from fictitious merchants like Joe's Machine Parts, M&J Bearings, etc., or just a generic "Fulfillment" followed by an address. But given the value declaration, the fiction should be something like Nova Biotech, Star Electronics, Chavez Labs, etc. High tech that explains the value, but isn't going to be liquid financially, no one to sell it to.

Does the Royal Mail have a monopoly in the UK? I know they were privatized some years ago, but there are many forms of privatization, including ones where there is still a coercive (government-enforced) monopoly. How do they get away with such brazen employee theft? Do their employees still have the artificial level of job security they had before the privatization? I thought you lot had CCTV everywhere these days. I realize the RM can't have a monopoly on international package shipments, but national monopoly mail carriers often use their monopolies on letter mail to offer lower prices for package shipments than private carriers can offer (the mail monopolies have nearly fixed route costs already, and can throw packages onto the routes for very little marginal cost). Is the RM the cheapest for international too?

The video I see from the thread on questionable Sovereigns is by some bloke named Christopher Collects. Are he and Backyard Bullion one and the same?

@LawrenceChard It wasn't you – it was Robert Matthew, the author of the article that you republished on your site. He said "...it contained £2-18 shillings of gold but sold on the continental markets from between £4 and £10." I didn't understand his shillings bit, but I assumed that his number came to less than £3.00, so 2x to 4x premiums (or rather up to 3.33x, conservatively, with £10.00/£3.00). By the way, this bit from further up the thread is off: There's an extra zero in your copper figure, and a slightly incorrect number – it should be 0834, not 0084.

Fascinating, @LawrenceChard, I had no idea Sovereigns used to sell at greater than 100% premiums over melt value. I'm not sure what a shilling is, but it looks like prices even reached 3x or 4x their melt. (When he says "£2-18 shillings", does that mean two pounds plus some fraction of a pound?) I don't think we've ever had 2x to 4x premiums on old American gold coins in the US, like the pre-1933 gold, but I don't think there was much of a gold bullion market here from the 1930s to 1970s, before lots of government mints worldwide started producing bullion again, followed by the economies of scale provided by web-based dealers. It's interesting that the British government couldn't get enforcement action by other countries initially because Sovereigns were no longer legal tender. By the way, do you have a definitive test for genuine/fake Sovereigns? Since they're made of the same stuff, are you just looking at the quality of the strike? It doesn't seem like a very difficult thing to reproduce, just standard coining with good dies. How do you know for sure that someone didn't hit Royal Mint levels of quality and detail? It sounds like the Italians and Swiss might have been capable of it. Since coins don't have individual serial numbers, it would be easier to fake them than banknotes (also because they're much less complex than notes). I assume that even an excellent fake note would risk discovery by either having the same serial number as another (genuine) note, or by having an invalid serial number. But coins face no such obstacles. It's an interesting question whether a superb fake Sovereign that is indistinguishable from genuine Sovereigns is in fact much of a fraud. If it's impossible to know that it's fake, then it's like Schrödinger's cat in a box that can never be opened...

Black only calls him "Fred" and states that this is a made-up name to protect his identity. Fred is depicted as a great, encouraging boss, but also someone who would kill people who threatened him. (He once killed a member of a criminal syndicate who came to his office with demands that Fred pay for "protection".) Black notes that Fred was a London nightclub owner (not sure what kind of club, like a strip club or a disco), and they were active around 1970 - 1975 or so. Fred paid for Black's shopping list of extremely expensive offset presses, platemaking machines, process cameras, inks, fine cotton papers, etc. I've never heard of fakes made of solid gold before. That seems like it would ruin the margins of such an enterprise. The only fake gold bullion I've heard of is tungsten plated in gold, since tungsten has essentially the same density as gold (less than a 0.2% difference), particularly with PAMP Suisse and other bars. Those silver readings are fairly trace level, if the numbers are millesimal fineness. 3 means 003? So 0.3% silver by weight? And then the fake is 0.9% by weight. I wonder why they bothered adding such a tiny amount of silver, and why the real Sovereigns had even 0.3% silver. That seems a bit high for unintentional trace level, and too low to be intentional or esthetically relevant. When silver is included in Crown gold, it's normally several percentage points, like the 3% silver in US Gold Eagles, which makes them so much brighter and prettier than Krugs and Sovereigns. I think other countries also included significant silver in their gold bullion, maybe Mexico a long time ago. I could've sworn I read about a Mexican coin that was all silver, no copper, as the alloying metal, so 90/10 or 91.67/8.33 with no copper at all. That post by Jon Clarke relies on weight measurements that come down to less than a thousandth of a troy ounce difference. Both samples weigh 0.235... troy ounces, with the difference coming in the subsequent decimals. He doesn't mention the tolerances and accuracy of the scale used though, so it's not necessarily valid to assert that the fake sovereign truly weighs more than the real one. Most scales aren't accurate to that degree. The difference here is about 12 mg, for objects weighing about 8,000 mg. Are your scales that accurate? As far as sources on Crown gold, I found Dodd's 1911 book History of Money in the British Empire and the United States (free online at Google books), and this article by Heather Darsie. It seems like Crown gold is defined by its gold fineness of 9167, not by the alloying metals. The balance is typically copper, but there's nothing that says there can't be some silver. I've attached a screenshot of some of the snippets from Dodd's book.

Hi all – I've been reading a memoir by one of your countrymen, Charles Black. It's called Counterfeiter: The Story of a British Master Forger (1989). He was a banknote forger, probably the best around in the 1970s, mostly of USD, but ultimately also some British pounds when he says he reminded himself that he was an Englishman after all. How he faked the watermarks was pure brilliance. But he dropped something in passing that shocked me. He said his boss had a side hustle of selling fake Sovereigns to the finest bullion dealers in London. But, they weren't fake in terms of metal content. They were true Crown gold alloy coins, 91.67% fine, balance copper, just like real Sovereigns. The boss had them made in Switzerland with the help of some Lebanese forgers (Black says the Lebanese were the best overall forgers in the world). Black said this was profitable because of the markup, i.e. the premium. That's hard to imagine today, since the premiums before the pandemic were only 5-6%. And that's over spot, which doesn't account for any fabrication costs. Were the premiums on Sovereigns much higher in the 1970s? Were they mostly proofs or something back then? He doesn't mention anything about proofs vs. normal bullion, special editions, etc. @LawrenceChardHave you ever discovered fake Sovereigns that were made of Crown gold? Any other fakes made of the real stuff? This type of forgery is fascinating, almost like an unauthorized minting more than true fakery.

I don't understand. You're saying there wasn't a burglary attempt? But this story was published? How would they get that wrong? Didn't they interview you? I mean they said Chard's staff were amused to find the tunnel or something, which would require them to have talked to you or your staff. Is this some fake paper? (I don't see anything about aliens or whatever on the cover.) I tried finding the story online but couldn't. I did find this though: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3483679/Hatton-Garden-gang-sentenced-14million-gem-raid-today.html Those geezers were also involved in something called the "Brink's Mat" gold heist. We have a Brink's armored car firm in the US, but I don't know what the "Mat" refers to. Somehow they got caught every time, which makes me a little bit sad. Why do these sorts of big-time heist crews always get caught? What's the point of doing something if you're just going to get caught? What happened to pride in one's work, in one's craft? I mean, I'm not condoning robbery, but jeez, if you're going to do something, do it right. In California, they had a similar big robbery of an armored car company cash depot – it was a seven figure haul. They got caught because one of them tried to pay a realtor for a house with cash still wrapped in the armored car company's branded cash straps...

There's no benefit to avoiding printing. Paper is invariably made from privately owned renewable forests, that harvest the trees on a rotation, replanting each area in turn, and round and round they go. The trees used for paper pulp are young when harvested, no more than 20 years old. Fine paper is made of cotton, so no trees involved there anyway. Cotton paper is acid-free by default, so it's great for archival and storage purposes. (Most cheap office paper made from tree pulp is also acid-free these days, but not by default.) Moreover, I don't think environmentalist abstractions are rational or should be encouraged. There is nothing we do regarding paper that has anything to do with something any wise person would call "saving the Earth". Probably nothing we do should be characterized that way, or its opposite. Having an abstraction of "the Earth" as some sort of thing to be saved, and getting a boost from purification rituals tied to said salvation, is all optional. Humans don't need to be running around with such emotional and wobbly abstractions and mystical beliefs. When I exposed the fraud of the 97% climate consensus paper (the authors lied about their methods, broke experimenter blindness) to the journal publisher (IOP), the corrupt official at IOP sent emails with an appeal at the bottom to "Please think of the Earth before printing this email." Jesus. She was fundamentally ideologically compromised with respect to her ability or willingness to retract a fraudulent paper that served the agenda of this cult or ideology she was affiliated with. Of course she didn't retract the paper – they stuck their heads in the sand and covered it up. (And who prints emails? It wouldn't occur to me to print her ridiculous emails.) p.s. Is Chard's website supposed to be down right now? Because it is. Is it down "for the environment"?

Are any of the coins in this thread made of silver? They're not marked as silver, and the links say that they're made of copper nickel. Well, the link for the first one says it's copper nickel, and the skeleton coin was listed for £4, so it must not be silver either. I don't understand what the point of these objects is – they're just copper-nickel right?

No coin condoms for me. Takes away all the feeling... 😊 In general, I just wash my... hands, erm. I guess I've actually gotten quite into hand washing since the pandemic started up. I've been vigorously washing my hands every time I return home from a trip to the market, or walking the dogs/checking the mail, etc. I've grown fond of vigorous hand washing. It feels good, and I probably should've washed my hands a lot more before the pandemic. So now, whenever opening new (to me, not necessarily to the world) silver, I always wash up like a surgeon. It's natural now, low friction. I think I was also mindful initially of COVID risk from packages and the surfaces of the actual silver, banknotes, or world circulation coins. I collect all three, and was still ordering stuff from Europe well into the pandemic. I don't really worry about COVID much anymore, since I'm vaccinated, boosted, and never got infected anyway, but I stick with the hand washing. The ultimate is probably thorough hand washing + cotton gloves, but the hand washing alone pretty much eliminates issues from handling. Sebum is the big contaminant coming from human hands and skin. It's the unique skin oil, really excellent lubricant actually. It's what banknotes are mostly contaminated with (along with cocaine...). Brief handling of coins with washed hands shouldn't do anything harmful. The sulfur in the air is the main issue with silver, so sealing off the air is the big thing. For super precious coins, cotton gloves do help prevent subtle scratches from grains of sand on the skin and fingernails.

If you invest based on crude hunches, you'll probably lose lots of money. People have lost lots of money on silver. A crude hunch is something like: "Silver demand and price will go up because of solar panels, electric cars, etc." That's not a valid method of knowing anything about the world, and no serious investor would ever act on that amount of cognition. To know or predict that demand will go up because of those things, you have to do research. And math. You have to find out to what extent silver is used in various products, and calculate whatever increase you expect in those products, along with any changes in the amount of silver used in those products. That last part is critical because it's dynamic, not fixed. There's no law of nature that says you have to put X amount of silver in a solar panel. The trend in precious metals use has historically been downward in electronics and other products. Manufacturers are always trying to reduce costs when they can, and engineers figure out ways to minimize things like PM. So whatever amount is used today is not necessarily going to be the same in 2030. But the key point is that you have to do research to know anything of this nature about the world. You can't know anything about future silver demand by just asserting a vague hunch. That's not anything. And if you go that route, serious investors will seriously outperform you. They'll be on the other side of those trades. Hedge funds, for example, are extremely smart and rigorous about research and data. They will find out exactly how much silver is projected in various products, and model and update it accordingly. In general, silver is a small market. Gold is fairly small compared to lots of industries, and silver is quite a bit smaller than gold. You'd be surprised to know how little bankers care about it or think about it. It's not important to them. Relatedly, if you look at where and how wealth is created in this world, it's not in metals or commodities. It's in intellectual property, in starting new companies, based on innovative ideas. That's where the billionaires come from, at least the younger ones. The Airbnb guys are billionaires, created a whole new market. Same with Uber, Amazon, Tesla, etc. If you want wealth, you have to create value, or fund people who do. You can't count on just owning a metal as a path to wealth. Maybe crypto could work out for some people, the people who got Bitcoin at a dollar or whatever, but in general speculation is iffy. Silver isn't special. It's always second fiddle to gold, and at least with gold there's a possibility of it undergirding a future cryptocurrency. That won't happen with silver. It's more of cool diversity investment. I love owning it, but it doesn't need to be the key to my life or worldview.