Are you interested in owning gold and silver but are unsure of your options? Check out this blog for some answers.
Ways to Invest in Gold and Silver:
If you are considering making investments in gold and silver, there are several ways to do it. First and foremost is buying physical metal. You can buy junk silver coins, which are old US coinage that are 90% silver and 10% copper. These include pre 1965 dimes quarters, half dollars, and silver dollars. You could also buy generic silver and gold rounds. Many refineries will make things like bars and generic rounds/coins with different images on them.
The gold and silver Eagles, issued by the U.S. mint are the most popular investible coins in the world. These coins carry the highest premium, which is the amount of money you have to pay over the spot price. Other countries also produce government issued coins that include Maple Leafs, Krugerrands, Brittanias, Philharmonics, and Pandas.
In addition to coins, you can buy bars of gold and silver. These bars can be as small as one gram or as large as 1,000 ounces. This is a great way to buy small denomination or fractional gold and silver.
With physical gold and silver, you need to consider storage options. You can store your metal at home in a safe or other hiding places. If you want to store precious metals outside of your home, you have a few options. These options include segregated, allocated, or unallocated. Companies like Brinks and Loomis have storage vaults across the U.S. and there are other global storage options.
Another gold and silver investment option is buying numismatic coins. Numismatics is the name for the coin collecting hobby so numismatic coins are considered collectible coins. These coins are valued more for their scarcity or quality than just their gold and silver content. In 1933, when FDR passed an executive order to “confiscate” our gold, it was possible to keep gold coins if you said they had collectible value. So, some people today like to buy numismatic coins in case the government wants to confiscate our gold and silver again.
Another gold and silver investment option is to buy stock in mining companies and other companies involved in the precious metals market. These could include large minors Newmont Mining or Barrick Gold. You can also buy stock in small minors that are much riskier but could have a large reward if these minors find and unearth large amounts of metal.
Instead of individual stocks, you could choose mutual funds that invest in various gold and silver minors. Sometimes mining company shares are bundled with other commodity companies.
If you want to invest in the metals but you don’t want the physical metal, you can buy ETFs. The primary ETFs are GLD and SLV. However, there is a concern amongst physical metal buyers that these ETF managers don’t have the massive amount of metals needed in storage to properly represent the number of shares available. You could also consider the ETFs in Canada called PHYS and PSLV which are known for having the actual metal in storage to match every share of the ETFs that have been sold.
Another investment option is buying certificates that represent stored metals at the Perth Mint in Australia. The Perth Mint offers certificates to represent either allocated or unallocated metals
And finally, you can go out and find your own gold by panning in rivers, metal detecting, or buying scrap gold from those who don’t want it.