Collecting coins, gold and silver can be both enjoyable and profitable. These tangible items are sometimes called “hard assets” due to their weight, which is higher than most commodities and collectibles. Once, someone said that “if an asset is dropped on your toes, it hurts”, then it was likely a hard asset. You can do the same with 50 ounces. You could use a brick of silver or gold, but it’s not worth the effort. Visit gold and silver for IRA before reading this.

Their recent price rise has led to renewed interest in precious metals. Since 2005, there has been a bull-market in silver and gold. In tandem with 2002’s bear market in stocks, gold prices rose from below $300 to just above $1,000 an ounce. This outperforms the gains experienced by stocks, bonds and money markets. Silver, the main industrial metal rose nearly fourfold per ounce over the past five year, which equates to a larger percentage gain than gold.

There are two options when it comes to investing or collecting metals. You can either purchase the metal and store it in hopes that it will rise in value or you can collect numismatic coins. These pieces have both collector value and some silver content. Since I was just a teenager, I prefer coins. Unfortunately, the wages back then were very low for teenagers (as they are now), so I could only afford a few silver coins or one-ounce silver ingots. Gold was not within my price range. My father became a silver dealer in a mining firm that was riding the wave investor speculation. Silver prices were over $50 per ounce by 1980. That piqued my interest. Later, when I was able to appreciate the small collection of coins that I had accumulated with my money and my parents gave me a bag full of silver dollars. When you gambled in Las Vegas, the slot machines took silver dollars during the 1940’s & 1950’s. My Grandpa had them all throughout his Ohio home for many years and gave them to my father. It was fun sorting them and cataloguing their value. They were from the 1870s to the 1920s. I was only interested in it as a hobby, and seldom traded or sold any coins. I knew the United States’ common series, which included cents, nickels, dimes, and dollars. That’s why I kept them.

But, gold and silver do not have a strong track record for profit over long periods of time. After a long period, the price of gold rose in recent years. It was $850 when the Dow Jones stock market index was below 1,000. Overall, holding physical silver or gold has cost you a lot because of inflation over the past 25 year. The metals seem to trade in spurts, and sometimes rise in times of investor panic in other financial areas (recent mortgage mess and banking mess). I believe that owning collectible coins has provided better and more predictable returns over long time periods, even coins without gold or silver like the early coppers cents.