You can have fun collecting coins, gold, and silver. It’s also financially rewarding. These tangible items, also known as “hard assets”, are heavier than many other commodities or collectibles. A wise man once said that if an asset falls on your feet and hurts, it is most likely a hard asset. This is what you do with 50 ounces. For silver, or for a brick in gold – ouch! Visit our website and learn more about gold IRA brokers.

It is the recent price increase that has brought renewed interest to precious metals. In fact, silver and gold have been in a bull market for five to six years. The lows in stock prices in 2002 coincided with gold’s rise from just $300 to just over $1,000 an ounce. This was more than any gains that were seen in traditional financial assets such as stocks, bonds, or money markets. The major industrial metal, silver, rose nearly four-fold per ounce. That’s a much larger percentage gain than the gold over the last five years.

You have two choices when it comes to collecting or investing in this field. You can either buy physical metal and hope it goes up in price, or you could collect numismatic (fancy name for coin collecting) pieces with collector value and/or some gold or silver content. I prefer coins because that is how I got started as a teenager. Back then, wages were not high for teens (as they today), so I had to limit myself to silver coins and one ounce silver Ingots. Gold was way out of my price range. My father joined a mining company as a silver dealer. The price of silver rose to $50 per ounce in 1980. When I started to appreciate the tiny collection of coins I’d accumulated with my hard-earned money, my parents gifted me a bag filled with silver dollars. The silver dollars were accepted by the Las Vegas slots machines when you gambled during the 1940s and 50s. My Grandpa was an eminent sage. He kept them in Ohio for years and then passed them on to me. It was great fun to sort them and catalogue their value. They ranged from the 1870s to 1920s. It was my hobby. I rarely traded or sold many coins. I understood the United States common series of cents/nickels/dimes and dollars so that’s what my collection consisted of.

Silver and gold are not known for their ability to make long-term profits. These price rises have occurred after years of suffering. Gold was $850 in 1980, when the Dow Jones Stock Index was under 1,000. You have lost a lot by holding physical gold or sterling over the past 25 years, as inflation has taken away any profits you may have. The metals tend to trade in fits, spurts, or rise when investors panic in other areas (recent banking and mortgage problems). Collectible coins have, my opinion, yielded better returns and were more predictable over long periods. This includes coins that don’t contain gold or Silver, like early coppers cents.