Bags of fun

I see the price of ounce of gold has passed the $1,240 mark this morning, leaving it about a $20 bill away from another new record price.

Silver at $19.13 an ounce is just above what some dealers for the last two years have been calling the wall, which is roughly $18 an ounce.

That’s the point where impatient holders of silver sell out after having bought at the highs of over $20 an ounce that prevailed in early 2008.

It shows that even in an uptrend, timing purchases is still important.

Will the wall finally crumble, or will the price retreat back to that level? I have written this question several times and the $18 mark seems to be becoming as much a baseline as a wall. We will find out which it is in the coming weeks.

At any rate buyers of 90 percent silver U.S. coins will note that the silver content is roughly 13.67 times face value, meaning that the $1,000 face value bag has a melt value of $13,670.

This figures the average bag at 715 troy ounces, which takes into account roughly eight ounces of wear from the roughly 723 ounces they start out with.

Remember the early days over 40 years ago when dealers started paying seven percent over face value for 90 percent silver?

We have certainly come a long way, haven’t we?