for the love of God pls be careful buying physical GC/SI from places like this. if you "only" pay a 5-10% markup when buying/discount when selling consider yourself lucky. my $0.02 USD is to use GOOG to find a list of at least 5 places w/in 25 miles of your zip code and call them up and ask "i want to buy gold today - how much will i pay per oz?" then put it all in a xls and compare to current spot price.
Thanks. No worries, I don't intend on buying from sketchy places (at this place, they do post their current price for gold in a window, so the price will not be a surprise, but I'm more worried that they'll be selling adulterated or at least untested stuff.)
Tulving has great prices, but most individuals don't buy/sell enough size to meet his minimum requirements. The other drawback is sweating it out, hoping nothing gets lost/misplaced/stolen in the mail.
laugh if you want. Back when I lived out in the sticks, a man that had one of the better hourly jobs in the county owned a big dullie with an extra large trailer. He made his rounds from time to time and picked up all the hardcore beer drinkers cans. Then he took them home and crushed them and when he finally got a full crushed load, drove 16 miles to the recycling center and sold the aluminum and on his way home stopped off at the local "Buy, Sell, Trade" gold shop and bought physical gold. Who knows what kind of spread he was paying But it was true alchemy, turn aluminum into gold one time he stopped off for his pick up. At that time gold was 1340, and I warned him, "You better sell now!"
You can't. In fact, today there are only a handful of futures brokers that will supposedly allow you to take physical delivery. In light of recent events, I myself looked into this, because there is a massive disconnect in price between the paper markets and the physical one. Silver bullion is selling on second hand markets such as ebay for upwards of 50% over the paper market price. This is unprecedented. So I checked into taking delivery at the paper price, so I could resell into the physical market at the true(?) price. Unfortunately, in order to take delivery you have to rent a Brinks truck or other armored carrier (it is required by COMEX), and pick it up at one of only a few locations. So once you factor in transport costs it starts to take the shine off the arbitrage trade. And that is of course assuming that they would honor the request for physical delivery. Turns out traders who tried to do that with ABN Amro got the shaft, and were forced to settle in cash like all the other paper traders: http://www.examiner.com/article/largest-dutch-bank-defaults-on-physical-gold-deliveries-to-customers
There's no question. When physical supplies are practically non-existent and selling for 30-50% over paper prices on second hand markets, the paper/futures market is clearly fraudulent. After all, if you never have to deliver in the futures market, there is no danger in naked shorting.
i agree the abn amro stunt is ridiculous. however AFAIK this has never happened using CME GC futures. also you can look into sprott physical gold backed etfs.