zKott wrote:scyther,
What is your approach towards copper investing? ...or better yet, what is your intent?
I've followed a lot of your posts and I get mixed vibes from you.
You obviously know a great deal about what you are talking about, but I've seen you say that you're done sorting and you seem to feel an aggregation of volatility towards copper in general.
I'm sure you don't wish for copper to plummet, so are you just pessimistic on this subject or are you just apprehensive of your investments, as most people are? (...or do you even consider this an investment? ..or a hobby?)
More interestingly though, I am fascinated by your stance on copper pennies. Do you still sort? If not, are you stacking Nickels? What is your stance on Nickels? What is your goal to accomplish? (meaning how much copper etc?) If your not into either, what are you into these days? (Au/Ag?)
I hope it is acceptable to post this in this thread and I hope not to offend you so please don't interpret my inquisition as abrupt, insulting or intrusive.
I'm not insulted, and I can understand how you would get mixed vibes. Yeah, I've grown a rather pessimistic and a bit jaded about copper, and silver even more so. When I first got into this (maybe 14 months ago), it seemed like an easy, fun, common sense way to make money. I didn't realize at the time how low copper had been less than 10 years earlier. I thought it was just inflation making pennies worth 2x face value, but now I realize that while inflation is a factor, it's mostly just that copper has gotten more expensive in the last decade. I thought the melt ban would be repealed soon (like the ban on melting silver was after just a few years), or that they might stop making pennies (which, again, I assumed would lead to legal coin melting), but now I don't think that anymore. I heard about all the money printing, and assumed inflation would follow quickly, but I didn't understand much about the fed back then (I still don't understand very much, but a little more). I didn't realize they would actually reduce the money supply; I thought money printing only went one way. I didn't realize that inflation had actually been rather low in the past decade, and had little if anything to due with rising metal prices.
I've watched the value of my silver fall a lot, and I've learned that the fundamentals for silver aren't really any better now than they were when silver was $5 an ounce. I've thought more about the very long term fundamentals of metals, and realized that as technology improves, less metal will be needed for industry as more substitutes are found, and more supply will be available as asteroid mining and other new sources are utilized. I've learned (recently) that there nearly 25 billion ounces of silver in the world, which is a lot higher than some people believe. I've also thought about the future of numismatics and realized that the trend is (probably) going to be down, at least for US coins.
I haven't spent
that much money on this (in fact, almost nothing compared to a lot of people here, although a decent amount relative to how much money I have) but I have spent
a lot of time hand sorting coins, and while it's been fun, the main reason it was fun was because I thought I was making easy money. So, I'm a little annoyed when I hear about how the commodities bull is ending, how we should short copper because China changed some policy (luckily that doesn't seem to have resulted in anything), or anything like that. I still sort pennies occasionally, because I'm bored and it's fun to find wheat pennies, but not as much as I used to. If you look at my signature every once in a while, you'll notice that the nickel total goes up every week, but the penny total only occasionally.
My position on nickels: if you believe there's a significant possibly that severe inflation is coming, you may as well stack bricks of them. They obviously have the best metal-to-face value ratio of any coin still being minted, and it doesn't cost you anything- not even time to search. That said, I don't see much profit there. I don't personally stack bricks since I have no income and a limited amount of cash to work with, and I already have enough tied up in copper pennies (I'd guess around $700, which is significant for me). I sort nickels mostly just because I like collecting them (only 6 left until I have all the Jeffersons!).
I don't particularly have a goal for stacking, and I'm not buying silver at the moment. I'm waiting for a bottom, and then I might buy, although I probably shouldn't since I think the long term trend is down.