If I had 100 ounces of gold where could I sell it and get the spot price. Jimmy Rogers didn't know the answer when I emailed him about it. lol
I find this very dubious - you can walk up to a counter at the local HSBC in london or Banco di Siena in Milan and buy/sell gold?
If you are buying gold in retail quantities you would generally be buying bullion coins from a coin dealer. The same dealer will buy it back. There's about a 3% bid/ask spread on 1 oz coins. See, for example http://www.golddealer.com/bullionpage.html Typically the bid is at or slightly above "spot", the ask is about 3% higher than that. After all the gold "spot" price is the price of good delivery bars in a vault, which is not the same product the average small investor is buying.
You do have to have an acount there ofcourse. You order or sell the desired amount and after a few workdays the transaction is completed. There are also gold shops where you can indeed buy and sell gold at the counter. Transactions above 2500 Euro require the showing of an ID.
I take it most selling on behalf of the individual investor originates out of fear of holding the bag as tech stock holders and house owners endured previously last decade.
Here in the U.S. one generally has to buy retail quantities of coins from jewelers or rare coin dealers. Of course standard bullion coins are not "rare", and everybody knows it, they are sold at a small premium over spot. It's just that the market is handled by the same guys who sell numismatic coins. As for why we can't buy gold from banks here in the U.S., I suspect it is for historical reasons. Roosevelt confiscated all privately held gold bullion during the depression, and from then until the mid 1970s it was actually illegal for American citizens, living in the land of the free and the home of the brave, to own gold. That is especially bizarre when you consider that our Constitution actually mandates a gold or silver standard (easily the most ignored part of the Constitution).
Ebay Oh wait...im sorry...you wanted to know where you could get SPOT price....unfortunately, you will have to accept MORE than spot price on ebay. http://cgi.ebay.com/10-South-Africa...198?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item20b513f3ee 10 one ounce gold coins sold for $14,996 on Nov 11, 2010 when spot price for those coins was $14,000. Sorry, I guess you will just have to live with taking an extra $996.