2011-08-05

Buying Silver

I admit, I've bought some silver. You might think that I've gone mad, after all the posts that I made about irrational and megalomanic silver bulls and buying out of the money put options on SLV.

Well, think again.

I haven't bought silver the way you think about it: while in China I found a small antique shop and digging into their items, I found some silver coins which grabbed my attention immediately. After a lot of bargaining, I managed to buy some of them for about $20 per coin, which is like 50% off the current price you can get for silver coins on the markets. In addition, they are very old coins, so I believe they have some numismatic value on top of that — don't hesitate to share your opinion with me if you know anything :-)

Of course, one of word of caution is that everything you find in China is either a fake or a replica. I hope I was able to spot what I think is silver.

Here's a picture I just took with my iPhone to share with you:
Click for larger view

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

The bottom right one is a US Peace dollar. With the letters readable but fine detail in the eagle's feathers gone, it's in fair-good condition, and by condition there's probably not additional numismatic value. There's no mint mark, so it was struck in Philadelphia, so if it's from 1928, it might have additional numismatic value due to the low mintage that year.

However, silver coins? Bought in China? At a steep discount? Hmm, I smell counterfeit...

pej said...

Thank you Anonymous! You seem to be very knowledgeable. The eagle was coined in 1922 (the date is on the flip side).

The other US silver coin doesn't have any date though, so I don't know when it is from.

The Hong Kong dollar is from 1867 and bears Queen Victoria on the flip side.

The Japanese coin doesn't have a date neither.

I'll try to find some silverware cleaning product today and see what I get.

pej said...

Please see updates on the coins in the following post: Silver Coins Purchase

Tiho said...

Smart man. But 4 coins will not save you. You might need about 40,000 to 50,000 as a minimum!

pej said...

Don't worry, dude, I have much more. I can't go buy 40,000 coins from a random dude in an antique shop, specially when it's in China where everything is counterfeit and replicas :-)
Looks like one of these 4 is a counterfeit actually.

Frances said...

Avoiding counterfeit is actually a hard thing to do especially if it would be your first time buying silver. That is why checking out the BuySilverAssets website would prove to be very helpful at times like these.