Bullion bars
Bullion Bars: Investing in Gold, Platinum, Palladium and Silver bullion bars
Investing in physical precious metals like gold, silver, platinum and palladium is known for being an excellent financial hedge or safe haven against adverse economic, political and social changes. The prices of gold and silver have outperformed inflation significantly. An investment in gold, silver, palladium and platinum bullion bars, ingots, rounds and coins has proven to be an excellent means of accumulating wealth too.
Precious metals in bullion forms like bars, ingots, coins or rounds are money and are the ultimate safe haven asset and the best way of wealth preservation.
Gold, silver, platinum and palladium bullion bars are very convenient to invest: they are easy to buy, handle, store and sell and they are very liquid. And bullion bars carry lower premium over spot price than bullion coins, rounds or jewelry.
Some of the advantages of owning bullion bars, especially silver bars and gold bars are:
- Most investments in silver, gold, palladium and platinum bars can be done anonymously.
- Bullion bars are uniform size, making them very convenient to store and easy to handle.
- Bullion bars are compact in size, making them ideal for investors who want to secure a large amount of wealth in a relatively small storage area.
- .999 pure bars have recognizable hallmarks, making them readily accepted for resale and easily convertible to cash.
- Larger bars (especially 100-oz bars and more) have low premium over spot price.
- Gold bullion bars as well as silver bars offer investors effective portfolio diversification, since it is negatively correlated with other asset classes.
- An investment in bars made from precious metals provides liquidity and portability.
- An investment in bullion pure bars is a relatively low risk investment.
The most popular bullion bars: Gold Bars
The most traditional way of investing precious metals is by buying gold bars (or gold ingots). You can buy gold bar starting from 1 gram to 400 troy ounces!
Gold bullion bars are increasing in popularity as investment vehicles, as they carry much lower premiums than gold bullion coins. It is estimated that the premiums on kilo gold bars can be at least $50 per ounce less than the premiums on gold bullion products such as the Gold American Eagle coins or other gold coins like South African Krugerrand gold coins or Canadian Gold Maple Leaf coins.
Try to buy the largest gold bars you can afford. The larger the gold bar the lower the premium over spot gold price for the bars.
I recommend you tu buy bullion gold bars made by well known producers. Johnson Matthey Gold Bars are good example – they are very popular among private precious metals investors.
Silver Bars: the most inexpensive and convenient bullion bars
Silver bullion bars are most inexpensive and cost effective ways of purchasing physical precious metals. You can buy silver bars in varying sizes from 1 oz to 1000 oz (including 10-oz silver bars, 100-oz silver bars and 1 kilo silver bars). All these silver bars are .999 or .9999 fine.
Silver bars have lower premium than 1-oz silver coins or 1-oz silver rounds. 100-oz silver bars is the most popular among investors. The 100-oz silver bars are often called investment bars, because people who buy them usually do so for investment purposes, not as a hedge against inflation.
Gold Bars
You should buy silver bullion bars from recognized bar manufacturers only: Engelhard silver bars, Johnson Matthey silver bars, Credit Suisse silver bars, PAMP Suisse silver bars or Perth Mint silver bars.
Platinum bars
Platinum bars are a good way to invest in the precious metal platinum with a lower premium over spot than for platinum coins like Canadian Platinum Maple Leaf coins. The most known are PAMP platinum bars. PAMP platinum bars contain a purity of .9995 and have been traded on world investment markets for more than twenty years.
When buying platinum bars you should always check that the bars have official Assay Certificates and they are sealed in a protective holder.
I think you should buy platinum bars for your investment portfolio of bullion products. You can easily buy 1-oz platinum bars or 10-oz platinum bars. 100-oz platinum bars are much harder to find in spite of very low premium over spot for 100-oz platinum bar. I recommend you to stick to 10-oz platinum bullion bars.
Palladium bars
Palladium Bars
Many people today are purchasing palladium bars (and palladium coins) as an investment. Palladium bars are minted of .999 fine (99.9% pure) palladium. You can buy palladium bars in different weights: there are 1-oz, 10-oz and 100-oz palladium bars on the market.
It is always a good idea to include palladium bars in your bullion bars collection or your precious metals portfolio.
Not many refiners mint palladium bars. I can recommend you buying PAMP Suisse palladium bars, Credit Suisse palladium bars or Johnson Matthey palladium bars (Stillwater Lewis and Clark Design).
You can buy also 1-oz Palladium Rounds (Lewis & Clark) minted by Johnson Matthey.
The premium for palladium bars is lower than the premium for 1-oz palladium coins like Canadian Palladium Maple Leaf. But the premium for 1-oz palladium bars is twice as much than the premium for 10-oz palladium bars. The lowest premium over spot have 100-oz palladium bars but they can be hard to find and expensive for individual investors.
Buying silver, gold, platinum and palladium bars
Where can you buy gold, platinum, silver and palladium bars? First, I recommend you check Ebay. I think Ebay is the best source for finding good deals these days. There are plenty of sellers who sell gold, silver, palladium or platinum products including bullion bars. Always check the seller’s feedback before buying.
Another good sources for buying precious metals bars are the sites of big online precious metals dealers including such sites as AMPEX, MONEX or COMEX.
Incoming search terms:
Which bullion bars should I buy: gold bars or silver bars?
Hi Rickie, Thanks for leaving your comments on my blog.
So much information about bullion. Have you invested in any and how is it going?
Making a killing yet:-) the price of bullion has gone up in recent years.
Cheers
Bryan
Do you ever think gold will beat platinum in price, i would love it if you send me pics of gold and platinum bars
Do you ever think gold will beat platinum in price?
I think no. But I prefer buy bullion bars made from different precious metals. First made from silver if you did not have too much money. And I think gold bars are more liquid than platinum ones.
Gold is always a good investment
Can you take me through the steps of buying/selling anonymously? How is that possible?
Thank you for exploring this beautiful and valuable metal. It is wonderful that the Palladium will be mined here in the USA. Stillwater Mining Company produced another beautiful Palladium coin in past years and their value has skyrocketed. A year ago I purchased 10 Palladium coins for $270.00 each and now they are worth over $900.00 each. PAlladium is making its mark in the jewelry industry as well.
I cant wait to see this coin and definately cant wait to own as many as I can afford.
Silver investments are going to break through all benchmarks for the year and her is why we think silver will take off. Silver is now trading at about $34 which is significantly lower than its inflation adjusted all time highs. We all know that both the domestic and international markets have been having a lot of trouble lately.To top it off the use of Silver in manufacturing has increased, What this means is that the amount of silver that is unrecoverable has increased and supplies are depleted (because of the prohibitively high price of extracting silver after its been used in manufacturing applications). This means only one thing silver will climb in price while the other markets are unsure which direction to go. We had trepidations about going back into silver full force these last few months but all of the indicators are pointing in the right direction
I have never seen such a perfect time to buy platinum.I have recently sold off all my silver and gold to raise cash to buy platinum and I bought 20 ounces of it today.At under 1500.00 platinum in 10 years will be over 3,000.00-Not bad knowing one has a guaranteed 7% return that can top bonds,cds,money markets or most stocks-with platinum thirty times rarer than gold I think platinum is right where silver was in 1993 and is set to explode in the next decade.
Not so sure silver is such a great hedge against a weak stock market. Gold might fulfill that role but silver hasen’t and some say silver is just the little brother of platinum. In my opinion,silver has had it’s run and what a good decade it was but the next silver run is likely to be little overlooked platinum.