contingo

Because if not, Brits for under £14 are a cinch.

CID confirmed 2009 is over, but because the 2008s did not reach mintage, they'll be able to stock more of these soonish. Or so they say. It's been asked before, but: if you buy from an EU retailer at 7% VAT and they ship to you here in the UK, are you liable to more vat on import?

Ach, spoke to them on Monday and they were still optimistically making enquiries... where was my callback CID?? Currently, my hoovering strategy has only a CID-shaped nozzle and is thus on standby 'til the 2010s.

Apparently there is a private messaging service on here somewhere. Indeed, I can see where to click if I want to message someone else, but where do I go to view/organize my own inbox (yes, even though it's empty)? thanks in advance

forgot to mention, CID expect replenished stocks in the next few weeks (see, I am free and easy with my info...)

Absolute0 - Witness the power of advertising. The only justification required is that the product will sell at the given price! TRM have successfully marketed cardboard ephemera to the kind of buyer who readily accepts this stuff adds value to a coin. (If ebay completed listings are supportive, such acceptance might not be folly.) Plus, I don't think many buyers are aware of the blister pack option. My impression is that collectors in the USA, Canada and Australia, all countries where the Britannia series is very popular, don't have a viable source for cheap Brits, and so pre-order presentation packs directly from TRM, and are grateful when TRM eventually deign to send them. (I may be in the same boat with 2009 silver kiwis.) Also, £22.50 leaves TRM at no risk of undercutting their distributors. And I imagine there's a type of customer who'd turn their nose up at a £15.50 gift pack, but at seven pounds more would begin to feel a certain munificence... I too require your dealer's number, absolute! Jackass, I suppose there's no point asking you for yours as you intend to "clear him out". But I would appreciate hearing about anything you learn from TRM.

I meant buying wholesale, as a company with a registered RM wholesale account. CID had them for under £15 so the wholesale price must be reasonable for large orders. Not sure what the RM's criteria are, but I expect you would have to be an active dealer with some trading history/references and purchases in excess of £10K, so perhaps not an option for a buy-and-hold investor... interesting to find out though.

Any idea when the 2010s are released? In these quantities, have you looked into buying directly from the Royal Mint as a company?

Old Nis, thanks for providing me with the terminology to describe what I'm doing (and the encouragement). Coininvestdirect are out of stock this morning; an order for two hundred Brits was placed over the weekend. How curious – we were just discussing the very same coins! Ah well, I suppose I'll have to be content with nearly 1% of the entire mintage...

Prepare to be amazed. Your observation is true for all silver coins apart from domestic products, i.e. 1oz Brits. Americans are crazy for them. Less than £15 each from coininvestdirect today. Yet ebay USA's completed listings for "2009 Britannias" shows heaps of them selling for $30, $31, $32... In the Royal Mint's lousy 'blister sheet' packaging too. You'll find a similar situation in Canada and Australia. Hence I would really like to find out about the export tax situation. Claiming back v.a.t., each Brit would be under £13 (today's prices)...

If your vat registered company sells its silver to American customers, do you have to charge them tax, and what other ramifications would there be? What if you set up a company specifically to deal British silver bullion coins to Americans and citizens of other countries where no tax is paid on silver? How would you structure this company to most effectively deal with the tax situation?

Spoke with goldassets. Based in Ireland and won't ship physical silver. Tried to sell me paper silver. The cheek of it! Residents of Ireland get 100 oz bars at 14% over spot. Sigh... I got a price of £384.62/kg bar from a big UK retailer, but you must buy at least 26 bars... for now I'm persevering with ebay for bars and coininvestdirect for coins. I know I should know this by now, but are silver coins imported from outside the EU taxed at a different rate than bars? What about silver coins whose value is mostly numismatic? Say I bought one of those horrendous colourised issues from the Perth Mint at fifty times its silver value – what tax would it incur upon arrival in the UK?

'Twasn't me! I've been busy sniping on ebay. Here are to be found such wonders as 1kg certified bars at 23% over fix (which I've been buying with abandon, seeing as none of you are up for disabusing me of my silver fixation). Another outfit I've been looking at is http://www.goldassets.co.uk who do 100oz and 1000oz Ag bars. No prices discussed on their site but I'll speak with them Monday and report what I find. Incidentally I spoke last week to coininvestdirect – or rather to a cheerful lady answering their phone – about discounts. Yes, I know they are already cheap. And at first her position was that they only offer wholesale discounts to businesses. But it emerged that if an individual was to build up a history of large private purchases, a few hundred here, a thousand there, and over a short time span – then they might be open to negotiation. Hope that helps some of you.

Hi again chaps Plowing on here with my bedtime researches of the PMs market... Not having a great technical background in this field I fear I'm being too easily swayed by all of the perhaps simplistic arguments advanced in favour of an imminent silver boom, e.g. the Ag:Au ratio pointing to flagrant undervaluation; artificial and inevitably unsustainable price suppression; rapidly increasing supply/demand shortfall; etc. etc. Newsweek has a column this week making the same points. Aware of how uncritical I'm being, I would love to hear the counterarguments put across succinctly. (Before I spend the rest of my cash would be handy.) Also: http://www.ventersmint.co.uk Anyone had dealings with this lot? Their 1kg bars are 35% premium, 50gs 33% premium. But I cannot find 'Venters' on the London good delivery list of refiners and, looking more closely, there is something of the kitchen stove about their production values. Those prices are neat though. "Any comments?"

From goldinvestment's contacts page: "Web and gold enquiries, sales and marketing: Oliver Temple" It's reassuring to know that from what he's heard (albeit "so far"), his company is "very respected" – after all, he's even managed to successfully deliver his product to himself! Now I wonder if he'd swap some gold for web marketing/SEO guidance... Must admit, I'm launching a retail site myself, and I'm afraid we do stoop to such tawdry tactics as these; we just do it a bit more clever like.

Well, what a richly educational thread this is proving to be. I should add that, for me, this is more of a game than a serious investment activity, the greater part of my assets being tied up elsewhere (and in no less exciting a sector). So, proceeding on the basis that both fun and potential profit are equally key, I observe the following. 1. Coininvestdirect is a joy. The very competitive prices are indexed to the current spot price — live — so that they change just about every time you hit the refresh key. I have spent this evening with a very full shopping basket in thrall to that refresh key, riding the price dip all the way to its glorious bottom. One time, the page reloaded showing a £50 reduction in my checkout total. Hair-raising stuff. 2. Bullionsupermarket is a useful tool demonstrating that, most of the time, silver sells for more on ebay than it does elsewhere, but just occasionally it doesn't. Winning bids on ASEs were very low the other day. What Bullionsupermarket doesn't show you are the prices paid on sterling silver coins (such as modern commemorative proof crowns), which as Old Nis pointed out offers perhaps the lowest premium on silver available to UK consumers. 3. The silver market is absolutely insane

Thanks for the comprehensive advice Old Nis. Re: Cookson – after I pointed out their 1kg bar, one of my offspring who shares an interest in investment PMs phoned in an order last Wednesday (I was hoping for one more dip but will likely cavitate on Monday). Very straightforward transaction apparently. Next day the postman remarked on the surprisingly heavy package – we told him it was uranium. For 1oz Ag coins I've not found any UK dealers cheaper than coininvestdirect. I did notice weighton coins are selling assorted .925 Ag commemorative proof coins weighing around 28g (recent British issues have been 28.28g) in 'parcels' of 10 coins for £99.95. I make that about £78 of silver at current fix. Meaning a premium on the parcel of only 28%, a bit more if you factor in postage. That sounds like a really good deal – the only question is, are these coins a bad form in which to hold your silver, in terms of liquidity?? They're not exactly bullion...

Aha — that makes sense now. The Cookson bars are accredited and are produced by SEMPSA Joyeria Plateria S.A. of Madrid. That site is very interesting, especially re: forecasts. Anyone feeling like forming a group to purchase the 50,000oz. minimum of Ag necessary to participate in the wholesale market?

Thanks, I am now started. Also – and please forgive me for not knowing this – but what does it mean of silver bars when it is said of them, as trev has said above, that they are "LBNA good delivery bars"?

Yes, good practice for if he shows up here again...

With insured shipping considered for both, coininvest's 1kg was less than a pound cheaper than Cookson's. Also considering shipping, I've failed to find a significantly cheaper bar on any european site (although I didn't look that hard, my German's terrible and I have an aversion to Google translation services).

Thanks for the tips chaps Now all that remains is to arrange for a mania to develop...

While perusing cooksongold.com for reasons apparent in my other thread I noticed their 1kg silver bar seemed quite cheap: £422.80 including vat & insured postage which translates to 42.3% over spot. I wondered if there was something undesirable about this particular species of bar, but perhaps not: The Bullion Shop has the identical bar for £502 and www.qualitysilver.co.uk has it for 699.99 (what a scam). +42.3% is less than most prices paid on ebay, especially if you include postage. So how about that then?

Thanks all for your input. I had my son ring round today and none of the suggested dealers were prepared to spare us the full spread. So I am just going to sit tight and settle for boring old cash once the price is right. And no, I shall not ebay it.

A perhaps unusual query... I've casually collected gold coins for many decades, and in recent months have paid increasing attention to the pm market. Deep in contemplation of the au:pt ratio the other night I inadvertently unlocked a repressed memory. In 1978 my horrible and tasteless ex-husband had gifted to me upon the birth of our son a lump of .999 fine gold molded into an 'S' - the first letter of my name - with some mawkish message or other inscribed around its edge. After extensive ransacking of unlikely hiding places I have unearthed said object and weighed it. It is smaller than I recall at 86.35g. I do not want this thing, nor do I want to sell any gold. Instead, I wonder if there is a way to exchange or part-exchange it for coins (either sovereigns or brittanias as they would fit with my collection and be CGT-exempt) WITHOUT having to sell at the bottom of the spread and buy again at the top. Of course I would happily pay a commission for the service and for the required assay (it originated with a Singaporean gold dealer, if memory serves, and is unhallmarked). I just want to avoid getting hit with the full kablingey. Does anyone know of a dealer who might assist (I am in London)? Or have any other suggestions (I'd rather not ebay)? Or is this whole thing too weird... thanks in advance S