Buying Gold and Silver

Thomas Ott -

I'm back from vacation feeling refreshed, relaxed, and ready to post. I was slowly burning out from work and blogging so I needed this vacation badly. We had a lot of fun and I spent most of the time with my family, driving to all sorts of kid-fun places and doing some small "fix it" projects at home. I did step out a few times to have beers with the MarketDoctor and visit with, for the first time, his gold coin dealer.

Yes, yours truly bought shiny gold and silver coins for the first time in his life (I promptly buried them next to my shotgun and 2 year supply of plastic-sealed toilet paper).

All joking aside, I decided to start saving in Gold and Silver. Yes, you read that correctly, I said saving. I'm not playing the Gold and Silver market by buying and selling these coins, I'm just transferring my paper money (USD) into Gold and Silver. Essentially I'm switching one asset for another shiny and hard one.

Yes, I know I won't be earning any interest on them but I will be maintaining my purchasing power. Right now if I park my savings in a bank account, I'll make maybe 2% interest. That would put me in a depreciation hole faster than shit sliding down a stick if you believe that our true inflation rate is between 10 and 12%.

If you ask me, maintaining purchasing power wins over a 2% interest bank account in a border hyper-inflationary economy any day.

Update in 2023

Nowadays I just monitor gold and silver prices using my various time series forecasting Python scripts. I go into lengthy detail on how to forecast silver prices in the following article.

How to Forecast Silver Prices With NeuralProphet And Python
I wanted to forecast where silver prices and volatility were headed and know if I had to pay more for premium or spread…
Neural Market TrendsThomas Ott

Of course, my models are a bit more sophisticated than what I share but it should get you going on building your forecasting models for both silver and gold.

Buying Gold and Silver

If you want to buy physical gold and silver go to your local coin show (LCS) and hunt around. The saddest and scariest thing is to buy "coins" off eBay or some other place where the dealer's reputation is questionable. There are a lot of fakes out there made in China and elsewhere.