Are 1/10oz Gold coins a good long term investment?

[AaaGee]

I guess with the cost of living hitting most if not all of us 1/2 sovs and 1/10 gold are the way to go.  1oz has always been a step to far for me but managed to luckily get 2 this year. I doubt i will see any more to be honest. I do like my 1/4s though. Ive also got a couple of 1/10s but never really seen the appeal. Although my attitude has changed recently so 1/10s and 1/2 sovereigns maybe the way to go for me when money becomes a little tight. Assuming im not selling up alltogether to keep a roof over my head.

[JohnA1]

15 hours ago, Roy said:

Looking back through my spreadsheet, in 2016 a sovereign was around £190, a half £90/100 and a tenth £85.

I'd call that an investment 😉 

A pound of today will buy me less than half of a pound of 2016 (I have the Amazon orders to remind me😰)

So the metal has managed to barely keep up with inflation.

And I mean real inflation, not the ridiculous CPI figures that substitute what went up with what hasn't (and excludes taxation, housing, energy etc) What a sham...

The ONS has recently gone back and recalculated the figures retrospectively to make them look just below their 'target' of 2%.  Because losing half of your savings every 40 years is a target🤬

[Coverte]

41 minutes ago, JohnA1 said:

A pound of today will buy me less than half of a pound of 2016 (I have the Amazon orders to remind me😰)

So the metal has managed to barely keep up with inflation.

And I mean real inflation, not the ridiculous CPI figures that substitute what went up with what hasn't (and excludes taxation, housing, energy etc) What a sham...

The ONS has recently gone back and recalculated the figures retrospectively to make them look just below their 'target' of 2%.  Because losing half of your savings every 40 years is a target🤬

Very true, I looked up a printer I bought for a family member recently to check the model ID for new toner cartridges;

it's more than double its 2016 purchase price........ 

I may have bought it from their returns warehouse, I do that sometimes, because I'm tight ... 

[CazLikesCoins]

3 hours ago, Coverte said:

I may have bought it from their returns warehouse, I do that sometimes, because I'm tight ... 

I've got a camper's solar panel hanging out the window on sunny days topping up a battery bank 😄 

[Bratnia]

On 07/08/2023 at 18:35, Coverte said:

The first system I recall was windows 95, not sure what came before, but that moved to Windows 98 and then the big deal (as M/soft swept millennium I think it was under the rug) and behold Windows XP.

Sinclair Spectrum in the early 1980's, Amstrad 512 PPC in the later 1980's. MSDOS and Lotus 123. Then later Windows 3.1, still used Lotus Notes. Then on to Windows NT/95/XP, then switched over to solely Linux when XP reached its initial end of support (2009). Had been using both Windows and Linux (initially Coherent/Red Hat/Mandrake) concurrently for a number of years prior to 2009. Through work, a wide range from mid/small Honeywell, and Unix systems right up to large IBM/Amdahl clusters.

[Silverlocks]

6 hours ago, Bratnia said:

Sinclair Spectrum in the early 1980's, Amstrad 512 PPC in the later 1980's. MSDOS and Lotus 123. Then later Windows 3.1, still used Lotus Notes. Then on to Windows NT/95/XP, then switched over to solely Linux when XP reached its initial end of support (2009). Had been using both Windows and Linux (initially Coherent/Red Hat/Mandrake) concurrently for a number of years prior to 2009. Through work, a wide range from mid/small Honeywell, and Unix systems right up to large IBM/Amdahl clusters.

You're the only person I've ever seen that's used Coherent.  Did they ever make a version with an X server?

[Silverlocks]

On 06/08/2023 at 20:24, Divmad said:

They seem to trade at pretty huge premiums to spot Gold, unlike the full Sovereign, which is the first drawback.

But they are so TINY. Weighing in around 3gms or so, they are more like fancy buttons than actual coins.

And then there are a growing number of different ones to choose from.

Or is it just down to the affordability question?

I think they're most interesting as collectibles, but half sovs or sovs will be much more efficient for saving.  

I'm getting a few as a sideline now, basically to get nice photos of.  I'm making the big assumption that the photogenic ones will be saleable as collectibles so I can probably get what I put into them back out.  I might make or lose a few bob on them, but these are a sideline and sovs are still doing the heavy lifting.

They are tiny but modern cameras have enough resolution to get nice pics of them - 1,000 pixels across or so.  This is one I posted on TIR the other day.  Some phones (ones with periscope cameras) can also get pretty decent pics of small coins - take a look at some of @Solachesis's efforts, which were done with a middle-of-the-road Android phone that has a periscope camera.

If it wasn't for the photography I don't think I would have bothered with tenths, though.

 

Edited August 9, 2023 by Silverlocks

[Bratnia]

On 09/08/2023 at 06:10, Silverlocks said:

You're the only person I've ever seen that's used Coherent.  Did they ever make a version with an X server?

I stopped using it at 286's, but I believe the 386 upward later versions did support X, the 286 version was cli only (days of Compuserve and BBS's).

[JohnA1]

286, ha ha.

A friend of mine had one, we looked up to it as a home-mainframe of sorts, it even had a hard disk. My Amstrad had a (small pizza-style) floppy for the OS, then swap it for the program.

Copy protection was pinching the disk surface with a pin.

Ah, misspent youth..

Edited August 10, 2023 by JohnA1