Some gold bars specifically, for long term investment

Can you give me a short crash course on physical gold? Coins vs bars

Best companies to buy from, etc.

Bad idea? Good idea?

TIA

Read that thread. It's been around for 3 years, and has a wealth of information. Post your questions there.

Call Texas Precious Metals in Shiner

https://www.texmetals.com/

redsquirrelAG said:

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Baby Billy said:

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I can't imagine a worse long term investment

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Bookmarking this. Bc it may end of up being one of the best short term investments he ever made.

People still don't see the crash right in front of them while the DS is backed into a corner trying to hold on to their power lol. Talk about NPCs. Wake up.

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Maybe you're right. But you probably aren't.

And you certainly don't know for sure.

Put me on the bad investment side. The gold/silver industry has done an amazing marketing job regarding investing. You're better off buying bonds…..and I am not encouraging that eithe

Mas89 said:

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Coins over bars. Coins will always be easier to sell/ barter than bars. Pay the premium and get the trusted American Eagles. Gold or silver. More trusted and easier to verify.

I like to look at the historical round number years like 20 years ago or 2003. Since then roughly:
SP 500 has gone up roughly 5x with dividends. 1,100 to 4,800.
Gold has gone up roughly 5x from 400 to 2,000 per ounce.
Farm/ Ranch land in my area near Houston and in every other area I'm familiar with has gone up a whole lot more than either.

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How much has gold gone up the last 10 years vs the Dow?

Todd 02 said:

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WGAS what the OP wants to spend his/her money on?!?!

Maybe OP's "long term investment" strategy is to build a Scrooge McDuck room full of gold bars because they've already got all the paper investments they desire...

Live your own life.

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OP posted asking for advice, so people are doing just that.

Lake08 said:

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Mas89 said:

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Coins over bars. Coins will always be easier to sell/ barter than bars. Pay the premium and get the trusted American Eagles. Gold or silver. More trusted and easier to verify.

I like to look at the historical round number years like 20 years ago or 2003. Since then roughly:
SP 500 has gone up roughly 5x with dividends. 1,100 to 4,800.
Gold has gone up roughly 5x from 400 to 2,000 per ounce.
Farm/ Ranch land in my area near Houston and in every other area I'm familiar with has gone up a whole lot more than either.

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How much has gold gone up the last 10 years vs the Dow?

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I'm no expert in either but will answer your question using Dec 31, 2013 and 2023 closes for both per google.
Dow Jones average 16576 2013 and 37689 2023 for a 127 percent gain or 2.27x
Gold $1205 2013 and $2066 2023 for a 71 percent gain or 1.71x

As stated earlier, farm and ranch land increased greatly more than either in the same time period.
And a starter home I'm familiar with is at least 2x in value from 2013 to now. Sold for 160k in 2013 and on the county tax roll for 349k today.

Darby said:

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Some gold bars specifically, for long term investment

Can you give me a short crash course on physical gold? Coins vs bars

Best companies to buy from, etc.

Bad idea? Good idea?

TIA

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YES is the short concise answer. If you have extra funds that you'd like to park, then gold is excellent. The more money our government prints then the less you can buy with your dollars, but gold will appreciate and it's tangible. Your purchasing power doesn't go down with gold. Just remember, it's not that liquid so it's not like selling a stock and wiring out cash to your bank account if you have it in your possession, which I recommend you do. Take physical possession of it.

ProgN said:

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Darby said:

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Some gold bars specifically, for long term investment

Can you give me a short crash course on physical gold? Coins vs bars

Best companies to buy from, etc.

Bad idea? Good idea?

TIA

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YES is the short concise answer. If you have extra funds that you'd like to park, then gold is excellent. The more money our government prints then the less you can buy with your dollars, but gold will appreciate and it's tangible. Your purchasing power doesn't go down with gold. Just remember, it's not that liquid so it's not like selling a stock and wiring out cash to your bank account if you have it in your possession, which I recommend you do. Take physical possession of it.

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Facts. Get a good safe and only buy physical metals. Eagles or Buffalo's are a good start. Get a mix of 1/4, 1/2 and 1 oz coins. You don't want to have to trade a whole oz one day because that's all you have. Silver is also great for smaller needs that you wouldn't want to use Gold on. I always recommend to start with Silver and move up to Gold once you are happy with your silver stack. Check out the Youtubers Yankee Stacking and Silver Dragons. They will teach you so much.

Tell me what kind of long term "risk" the S&P 500 has.

Is it the same one as the poster above saying that his grandchildren will be trading gold coins for bread? Someone please paint me that picture.

Baby Billy said:

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Tell me what kind of long term "risk" the S&P 500 has.

Is it the same one as the poster above saying that his grandchildren will be trading gold coins for bread? Someone please paint me that picture.

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If you had invested in December of 1999, tell me how many years, first in nominal and then in inflation adjusted terms, it would have taken you to merely have your original value back.

Baby Billy said:

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Tell me what kind of long term "risk" the S&P 500 has.

Is it the same one as the poster above saying that his grandchildren will be trading gold coins for bread? Someone please paint me that picture.

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Gold coins for bread? Go back to bed lmao

Baby Billy said:

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Tell me what kind of long term "risk" the S&P 500 has.

Is it the same one as the poster above saying that his grandchildren will be trading gold coins for bread? Someone please paint me that picture.

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The long term risk with the S&P is volatility. In the last 100 years, the S&P500 has had an annual return that was a loss of more than 15% 11 times and in the case of the Depression, the average had a drop of over 85% by 1932. If you are fully invested in the market and need the money after a major drop, life sucks.

Real estate doesn't tend to drop 20-50% in value. The exception being housing during the Great Financial Crisis and it looks like office real estate will see a sizable drop over the next few years. (There is always risk in a one off asset such as a house that ends up with an Interstate built in the backyard). One risk of real estate is it isn't highly liquid like stocks

As for long-term returns (30-40+ years), I think there is more risk in gold and silver than the stock market, bonds or real estate because they aren't income producing or growth assets. The site below shows the cumulative returns of various assets EXCLUDING dividends which further separate stocks and precious metals.

For the last 100 years, total returns excluding dividends were
S&P500 68,000%
DJIA 48,000%
Gold 9,700%
Silver 3,700%

https://www.longtermtrends.net/stocks-vs-gold-comparison/

The argument to hold precious metals for your grandchildren is if you think the entire economic system is going to collapse. If you think that, I think the question is do you want to hold gold or guns and bullets. If it is gold and silver, I would rather have small coins because bartering with bars doesn't really work given the amounts being transacted.

Mostly agree, but comparing metals to the stock market using a deflating fiat as your baseline is misleading. I had a post a couple years ago on the stock market thread where I compared the price of gold and the price of round steak at multiple points over the last 100+ years. The result showed that the price correlation between the two is mostly unchanged over that time period. What can that possibly mean? It means that metals and commodities have held their value over time. The only thing that has changed it the dollar has been decimated. In inflation adjusted terms, you would rather have your wealth in gold than the dollar. That doesn't mean you have made great dollar returns on your gold, it means your savings have been SAFE, whereas to get the same sense of safety literally anywhere else, you would have had to have your money invested in the stock market. And if you needed that money or wanted to retire and pull out that money at the wrong time, you would have been screwed.

It's easy to bury your head in the sand and say "market always goes up long term". But that's extremely risky, because you don't know when you will need that liquidity. Having a portion of your wealth in gold might not be lucrative during bull markets, but your wealth is guaranteed safe.

Heineken-Ashi said:

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Mostly agree, but comparing metals to the stock market using a deflating fiat as your baseline is misleading. I had a post a couple years ago on the stock market thread where I compared the price of gold and the price of round steak at multiple points over the last 100+ years. The result showed that the price correlation between the two is mostly unchanged over that time period. What can that possibly mean? It means that metals and commodities have held their value over time. The only thing that has changed it the dollar has been decimated. In inflation adjusted terms, you would rather have your wealth in gold than the dollar. That doesn't mean you have made great dollar returns on your gold, it means your savings have been SAFE, whereas to get the same sense of safety literally anywhere else, you would have had to have your money invested in the stock market. And if you needed that money or wanted to retire and pull out that money at the wrong time, you would have been screwed.

It's easy to bury your head in the sand and say "market always goes up long term". But that's extremely risky, because you don't know when you will need that liquidity. Having a portion of your wealth in gold might not be lucrative during bull markets, but your wealth is guaranteed safe.

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I fully agree and have made the point above a few times that while the market may go up over a long period of time, the volatility is a problem because when you need the money, it may be in a downturn. As you know, this is why it is recommended to reduce stock exposure as you get closer to retirement/needing to have access to the money.

I haven't seen your post but commodities like grains haven't kept up their purchasing power over time (I can't share it because it is from my day job analysis). I think comparing the cost of buying one commodity to another will show they are correlated but does not prove they have kept up buying for finished goods and services. The reason many commodities have lost purchasing power is we have gotten a lot more efficient at producing those commodities so it takes a lot fewer resources to produce a unit of the commodity.

Gold has also had significant drawdowns (30-50+%) at times although less than stocks. If it is a part of a portfolio, it does provide some diversification and in times of trouble, it tends to be negatively correlated to stocks.

If you adjust the nominal returns shown to real terms, gold and silver will drop by the same percentage so you still have less money over the last 100 years to buy things with. There is a reason the greatest investor of our lifetime, Buffett, has no material exposure to gold and has always recommended stocks.

No argument on most of that. I've made countless posts on Gold as an investment short term explaining how it is NOT a hedge during a recession as it will likely top off and fall as everything else does.

But clarification on my last post, I did not compare gold to steak. I valued steak in gold. Using gold as the currency. Yes, there were swings up at times, and down at times. I noted in that post that supply/demand of each, efficincies and innovations in mining, agriculture, etc played a role. But we aren't paying much more or less today for steak than our ancestors were in the late 1800's. When you take the dollar out of the equation and compare a commodity to a time-tested stable store of wealth, you see that everything we are experiencing in ONLY because of the decimated value of the dollar. That was my point, one which you seem to fully understand.

I think we largely agree. Gold can be a part of a diversified portfolio but I wouldn't want it as a sizable part of it. I think we also agree you need to define your investment timeline and make your portfolio match the timeline because if you need cash in 1 year, I assume we would both recommend a CD, money market, and/or cash. If it is 50 years, cash and near cash is trash.

While you measured steak in gold terms, if you measure as a percentage of our income, in the US we have never paid less for our food than we do today. There is a reason why we are the first society where if you are poor, you are more likely to die of complications from obesity than you are from starvation.

Kansas Kid said:

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I think we largely agree. Gold can be a part of a diversified portfolio but I wouldn't want it as a sizable part of it. I think we also agree you need to define your investment timeline and make your portfolio match the timeline because if you need cash in 1 year, I assume we would both recommend a CD, money market, and/or cash. If it is 50 years, cash and near cash is trash.

While you measured steak in gold terms, if you measure as a percentage of our income, in the US we have never paid less for our food than we do today. There is a reason why we are the first society where if you are poor, you are more likely to die of complications from obesity than you are from starvation.

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Everything in our monetary system is tied to debt. Take that away, and this would normalize. We are where we are because we over-leveraged everything, including payrolls, both as a country and as individual consumers, to get here. It feels great now, but a significant deflation event will make it not so. We just hope that event keeps being on the horizon and not soon.

It's for suckers and paranoid people at this point.

Bitcoin ate its lunch and continues to hammer it into sand.

Build your relationship with God not gold. The rapture is coming

Easily stolen, expensive to store, not as liquid as you might think, difficult to take with you during a SHTF situation. Buy Bitcoin, it's 10K better and portable.