Looking For Cheap Silver At Coin Shows

Before getting to the main topic of this post, a free promo for my newly revised A Guide to Buying and Selling Peace and Morgan Silver Dollars has been scheduled for November 7 and 8, 2013. If you have a Android phone or tablet, iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows PC or Windows 8 tablet, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone and the free Kindle reading app for your device, you can download this eBook for $0.00 on these two days only. It is written for the casual investor of Peace and Morgan dollars as well as those persons who already may own some of these coins and don't have a clue as to their worth. I hope you are able to take advantage of this free 2-day promotion.

One of the things I like to do when attending coin shows is to look for the one-off silver coins and bargain with the dealer for a good price. As you might guess, these are coins that are not well known which means the demand is low to non-existant and the dealer is willing to bargain so s/he can concentrate on the popular, higher-demand coins. One such coin I found recently is a 1993 20 Crowns silver coin from the Turks and Caicos Islands commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The obverse features the image of Queen Elizabeth II and the reverse has the image of an astronaut (Neil Armstrong) stepping on the moon from the Lunar Module. This is one of the more attractive silver coins I have seen and I could get it at the current spot silver price with no premium.

So far, so good. I found an attractive silver coin for a good price. But there is a potential problem with this coin without doing some homework. And that problem is that nowhere on this coin are markings to indicate the silver purity or troy weight. Without seeing a .999 (or .9999) purity marking plus some kind of weight designation, I could only assume it is a full one-ounce pure silver commemorative coin. So I asked the dealer to "prove" it was what I assumed it to be. And he was able to by showing me the coin details in a huge reference book he had on hand. So I bought the coin.

At the next coin show you attend, keep your eyes open for deals like this. The dealer I bought this from is a one-man show whom I know and trust. But I still wanted the assurance of knowing the coin was as I expected. If a small dealer like this can have the resources to identifying a wide range of coins, whoever you deal with should be able to also. If not, go elsewhere. Once I got home, I took out my handy Neva Pocket Scale and weighed it just to be sure. It weighed 480 grains (gr.) and 31.1 grams (g.) which is what I expected to see. On a more precise scale I would have seen 31.1034 grams. As you probably know, One troy ounce=480 grains=31.1034 grams=1.097 avoirdupois ounce.

The October sales of Silver American Eagles stands at 3,087,000. For the year so far the total is 39,175,000. Don't look for the premiums of these popular bullion coins to go down anytime soon. The US Mint has notified its Primary Dealers that all sales of Silver Eagles will be suspended for 4 weeks beginning the second week in December. Guess what that will do to the premiums. I hope you have yours.

Happy investing.