Getting Started in Bullion Investments?
Success in investing in precious metals (or anything else) will be more likely to result if your investment strategy is sound. If you are considering getting started, we offer a few suggestions.

Is Bullion Appropriate?
First ask if bullion investing is appropriate for you. In considering precious metals investment, read references and trade publications. Consult a registered financial advisor who you can trust to help you. The thoroughness of your due diligence will pay dividends.

For What Portion?
If precious metals are a good investment choice for you, then determine the portion of your investment capital you will commit to bullion products. 5%? 20%? Should you commit to one metal, or diversify? Do you have some risky or underperforming assets that should be sold for precious metal? Will you purchase gradually in small amounts with cash flow?

Timing?
Next, determine your purchase timing. Frequent and smaller purchases suggest a different product than infrequent and larger purchases. Maybe you plan to time purchases with market dips. Doing so will require what analysis tools? If this is your strategy, make sure your analysis is realistic and flexible. You could find yourself waiting for a product to dip to a point to which it might not reach.

Reputable Dealer.
Buy from a reputable dealer. This is especially important if you’re purchasing over the internet. Look for a well-established dealer with history and stability in the business. Does the business have a real brick and mortar location or just a website with a telephone number? The merchant should be able to tell you the price of your items, whether they are in stock, and the estimated ship date. Will the merchant keep you informed via email or otherwise of every stage of the purchase?

Too Good to Be True?
Be wary of extreme bargains. Deals that are too good to be true usually are. Highly worn coins, or unusual weights and purities can be difficult to resell. Standard products have a slight premium for a reason. Strive to buy at a fair price, not the absolute lowest price. While you may find a great deal at a neighbor’s garage sale, accumulating a precious metals portfolio in this way is rarely sound strategy. Also, delaying your purchase to save some small change may leave you empty handed when big moves occur in the metals.

How much to commit?
Don’t commit all your funds at once. The market could well move against you, and if all of your capital is committed, you have lost money. Leave some cash to pick up a bargain if an unexpected fall in price occurs.

A Plan for Selling
Finally, a sales plan should be a part of your stragegy to meet your overall investment needs. Will you accumulate until the bullion you hold hits a certain price, and then liquidate all? Will you follow a time honored method of selling some on strength and buying on weakness to take incremental profits? Will you sell a major portion for a new large cash need such as a new business or to buy a home? Investor interest often seems to rise dramatically when prices have already risen dramatically, which may not be a good time to buy, but it may be a good time to sell. If you develop a solid plan, you will be more likely to make rational investment decisions, and not let your emotions rule.

This does not belong to me or LYN.

Dear Silver Investor,  The following is the import and sales tax for silver under two different import tariff codes in Malaysia. 
1) Tariff Code: 711810000; Descriptions: Coin (other than gold coin), not being legal tender > Import Tax =5% and Sales Tax = 10% Example : Silver Coin, ie. Silver Bullion with any national legal tender such as American Eagle USD1 silver coin, Canadian Maple Leaf C$5 silver coin, China Panda RMB10 silver coin, Perth Mint Kookabarra A$1 silver coin and all other silver coins produce by Government Mints.
 
2) Tariff Code: 711411000; Descriptions: Articles of goldsmith’ or silversmith’ wares and parts thereof, of precious metal or of metal clad with other precious metal.- Of silver, whether or not plated or clad with other precious metal.NILNIL > Both Import Tax and Sales Tax is ZERO Example: Bullion Silver Bars and Rounds with print containing the amount of actual silver content, and without any legal tender, and mostly minted by Private Mint. 

The silver investors are advised to purchase only silver bars and silver rounds if the objective of investors is the silver price appreciation. If you buy bullion silver coins from local Malaysian dealers that do not pay Government import and sales tax, that means you are in possession of smuggled goods in Malaysia. 

I hope the above helps Malaysia silver investors in their "investment of a lifetime over the next 3 to 5 years". 

Best Regards
mysilverbull@gmail.com


credit to - taurusbull

The following are types of Physical Silver you can invest in.

Numismatic Silver Coin
Advantages
• Collector item for enjoyment
• After many years, and if and only if you can find desperate and knowledgeable collector, you can get a good premium selling price.
Disadvantages
• High purchase premium between 30% to 100% over spot price
• When you are desperate to sell, you may only get the same price as the silver round and bar, original purchased at a much cheaper price.

Silver Coin
Advantages
• Easy recognition and acceptability for famous coin such as American Eagle, Canadian Panda and Chinese Panda
• Older years coin can gain premium price over current year minted coins
Disadvantages
• Higher purchase premium of US$2 to US$4/oz over silver round and bar
• Desperate selling price will be the same as round and bar
• Must pay 5% Import Tax and 10% Sales Tax

Silver Round
Advantages
• Look and feel like silver coin, but cost much lower
• Good for bartering using 1 oz silver round
• Easy storage using plastic tube for 20/25 rounds
Disadvantages
• Storage density is not as good as bars
• Not as recognisable as silver coin.

Silver Bar
Advantages
• Lowest purchase premium for physical silver
• Easy storage by stacking up the bars
Disadvantages
• Not easy for barter trades particularly the 100 and 1000 ounce bar.
• Boring and dull design meaning less enjoyment comparing with coins and rounds.

Silver Bar – 1 ounce
Advantages
• Same low price as 1 ounce round
• Easy for barter trade
Disadvantages
• Higher price than 10 and 100 ounce bars

Silver Bar – 10 ounce
Advantages
• Lower price than 1 ounce bar
• Easier to sell than 100 ounce bar
Disadvantages
• No serial number
• marginally higher price than 100 ounce bar

Silver Bar – 100 ounce
Advantages
• Comes with serial number
• Easiest storage for retail investor
Disadvantages
• Difficult to sell in emergency situation
• Possible fake bar with lead filled inside the bar

Silver Bar – 1000 ounce
Advantages
• Can be deposit at Comex
• Comes with serial number
Disadvantages
• Not consistent weight per bar, ranging from 900 to 1100 ounce
• Difficulty for transportation as it weigh 68 pounds

If silver investor is not a coin collector, and only hoping for future price appreciation, I would recommend the following silver form factors;
Small retail investors: 1 ounce silver round and 10 ounce silver bar
Large retail investors: 1 ounce silver round, 10 ounce silver bar and 100 ounce silver bar

Credit to - taurusbull

1. Numismatics

A numismatic coin is a collector coin that has value in excess of its metal content because it is historical or rare. As a gold and silver bullion dealer, people often expect us to carry numismatics coins—but we don't. Why? Because collector coins are a different investment than gold and silver bullion.

When you invest in a numismatic coin, you are taking a major risk because you are already deep in the hole as soon as you purchase the coin. If you don’t believe us, try buying and immediately selling a numismatic coin—you’re likely to lose anywhere between 20 and 50% of your purchase price right off the bat.

Consider this: when you buy a numismatic coin you pay three different layers of costs—1) the cost of the metal, 2) the dealer’s spread, and 3) the numismatic premium. The numismatic premium can range anywhere from a few bucks to a few hundred thousand bucks.

That means before you are “in the money,” the market price of your coin must have gone up more than enough to cover the numismatic premium. Until then, your collector coin will be a loser.

Over the years, gold and silver dealers have build a mythos around numismatic coins—as if they offer some mystical advantage to plain gold and silver bullion. Those myths have been created, not because numismatic coins are good for the buyer, but because they are good for the seller.

The biggest myth about numismatic coins is that the government can never confiscate them. The second biggest collector coin myth is that they do not have to be reported to the government. Less-than-scrupulous precious metals dealers have made a living selling “non-confiscatable” and “non-reportable coins” that come with a hefty numismatic premium and hefty price tag.

The “non-confiscatable” myth refers back to 1933, when U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in a misguided attempt to combat deflation and stabilize the U.S. dollar in the throes of the Great Depression, signed into law an Executive Order 6102 that banned U.S. citizens from owning any gold—if you didn’t exchange your gold for Federal Reserve notes, you could be sentenced for up to 10 years in prison.

The only exception under Roosevelt’s order was collectible gold coins (rare or unusual, having “a recognized special value” to the owner). That exception to the law spawned myths that persist to this day: it is simply untrue that gold coins minted prior to 1933 are "non-reportable" and “non-confiscatable.”

By describing these old coins as non-reportable and non-confiscatable, the dealer implies to the customer that coins minted after 1933 are “reportable” to the government and “confiscatable” by the government. Understandably, many customers are spooked by those prospects and are persuaded to purchase heavy premium pre-1933 collectible coins—usually earning the dealer a nice, hefty profit.

Our suggestion is that unless you are an expert in numismatic coins, avoid them—their fundamental drivers are different from those that drive bullion, and during a financial crisis, when we want our wealth to be most protected, numismatic coins may leave you high and dry.

Added on October 24, 2011, 10:10 am2. Pools & Certificates

When you buy into a bullion pool or certificate, you become a creditor of the bullion bank storing your precious metals. Just as when you deposit your currency at a bank, the bank doesn't keep your dollars separate from everyone else’s dollars; the bank simply tells you in your bank statements or online how much it owes you—essentially, your wealth is transmuted into digits in a computer.

Legally, however, when you buy into a gold pool or certificate program, the bank becomes the owner of your precious metals.

If the bullion bank gets into financial trouble, (gasp! Imagine that!) it can sell your gold to maintain its assets at a level where it won’t get shut down and where it will avoid a run on the bank.

In that instance, you won’t be paid back in gold, but rather in currency—less currency than the value of the gold the bank owed you—because logically a bank in trouble almost certainly would be forced to sell your assets at fire-sale prices. If you live in a country with some kind of bank deposit protection (such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in the United States or Financial Services Compensation Scheme in the U.K.), your gold will not be covered. That’s because deposit insurance only applies to currency—meaning that, in the likely event of a bank crash, currency deposits are safer than unallocated gold.

So why would anyone invest in one of these types of sketchy accounts? Simple. It’s cheap and easy... and everyone loves cheap and easy, right?

Purchasing gold or silver through pools or certificate programs is cheaper than purchasing a like amount of physical gold or silver, primarily because most pools or certificates hold the metals in unallocated storage—which means your metals are comingled with everyone else’s metal. What’s yours is not yours—and in the event that your bullion bank goes under—it’s theirs.

If you are going to store precious metals, take a look at our bonded and insured silver and gold vaulting options in Salt Lake City, Miami, Hong Kong, etc. These vault storage options are both segregated and allocated, which means that your metals are stored separately in your name and are owned by you alone. If we go under, your metals stay in your name, and you will never be beholden to a bank.

Added on October 24, 2011, 10:11 am3. Leverage Accounts

Leveraged investing is when you borrow currency in order to invest. In a traditional investment strategy, you might set aside a certain amount every month to be invested, so that the principal you had invested would grow over time, compounded by any earnings on the investment. With a leveraged investment, you would invest a large sum up-front, then make regular payments to pay back the amount you borrowed, plus the interest. The potential advantage of the leveraged investment is that there is a supposedly larger amount earning returns over a longer period of time. If the return on your investment is greater than the principal borrowed plus the interest, your leveraged investment has outperformed a traditional investment.

Leverage can dramatically increase your investment winnings, and leverage can be great for those who are educated in the proper techniques and are skilled in its use.

But if you don't know what you're doing (and sometimes even if you do), leverage can also magnify your losses to 100% and beyond. It's this simple: when you introduce leverage… you introduce risk.

Margin investment is borrowing money from your broker to buy a stock and using your investment as collateral. Margin generally enables the investor to own more stock without paying full price for it. The downside to margin is, if your investment loses money, your losses are exponentially greater. In the case of margin, you are going up against a mathematical formula and compounding fees that are engineered to work against the novice.

Leveraged investing is the realm of professionals who know no greed or fear; they just know the odds and the numbers, and they know how to eat the little guy for breakfast. You never know who's taking the other side of the bet. Many times you are going up against very "Deep Pocket" traders such as mutual funds and hedge funds. Either way, if you're not better than they are… you're dead.

4. Futures & Options

Futures and Options are contracts that can give precious metals investors leverage, which can magnify their gains, but also, magnify their losses.

If there were to be a default on the commodities exchanges during the coming gold and silver rush, we believe the exchanges could change the rules to allow liquidation orders only.

In that case, investors holding futures contracts for gold or silver would be forced to accept payment in cash (currency) instead of redeeming their shares for physical silver or gold, as their contracts entitle them to do. In an alternate scenario the exchanges might freeze prices on all open contracts, while prices on gold and silver for immediate delivery and off exchange silver (silver in private hands or silver in private vaults outside of the commodities exchanges) continue to shoot for the moon. It has happened before, and it will likely happen again.

5. Gold ETFs / Silver ETFs

When you invest in a gold or silver exchange-traded fund, you do not become the sole owner of actual gold or silver. For an ETF represented to be backed by gold or silver, the fund managers will contract with a custodian to hold the gold or silver in a vault. The custodian is usually a large, international bank, serving as a custodian for numerous customers. Most of the time, because the custodian is a huge multi-national corporation with thousands of accounts, when gold or silver is bought or sold, the metal never physically moves. Title to the bars of gold or silver is simply transferred from the seller to the buyer as a book entry in a massive computer network.

This is where problems can arise: If the custodian is allowed to appoint sub-custodians, and the sub-custodians are allowed to appoint sub-sub-custodians and so on, now the gold or silver is spread out over various geographic locations. The only way to prove these sub-custodians hold enough gold or silver at any given point in time to fully back the account is for the ETF to require the custodian and all sub-custodians to be audited, during non-trading hours, all on the same day. If the gold ETF or silver ETF does not regularly require this type of audit of its custodian and sub-custodians, chances are high that the same physical gold may be purchased or owned by the same entity or individual at the same time.

Many metals experts believe that silver ETFs and gold ETFs may hold less than the amount of precious metals they supposedly own or none at all.

For most of us precious metals investors, the essence of keeping your hard-earned wealth in precious metals is to own a physical asset that can weather any economic storm. When you put your wealth in ETFs, you simply become an unsecured creditor of a mega-bank that will happily gobble up your wealth if financial turmoil strikes.

As is true of any electronic or paper form of wealth, the investor can be denied access to the value of his or her gold ETF or silver ETF shares due to Acts of God, war, force majeure, confiscation, computer glitches, fraud, insolvency, lawsuits, liens, garnishment, etc. Given those caveats, coupled with the very real possibility that silver and gold ETFs are not backed by physical gold or silver, investing in real, physical gold or silver will always be the safer bet. The higher premiums investors pay for physical gold and silver stored either their home or in a segregated fully insured vault account seems a small price to pay in exchange for a safe and secure investment.

One final note on silver and gold ETFs, due to high annual ETF management fees, more often than not, it is much less expensive to store precious metals in a private, segregated, fully insured gold and silver vault as opposed to having your silver ETF or gold ETF shares diluted from exchange trade fund or ETF management fees.

For More On Why Physical Bullion Stored In A Private Segregated Vault Is A Much Wiser

In Closing…

At GoldSilver.com, we want our investors to be educated, so that they can make the best decisions for themselves and their families. We don’t sell or offer many types of products simply because we don’t believe in them—and we won’t invest in them ourselves. We offer secure vault storage and home delivery because that is how we store our own precious metals—in hand or in the hands of fully insured secure vault storage custodians we trust, outside of the banks and the failing financial system.

Even if you don’t purchase your precious metals from our company, we want you to be well informed to better deal with the gold and silver investment world out there—hopefully you are now more aware of the various gold scams, silver frauds, and potential pitfalls when making your silver and gold investment decisions.

Quoted from goldsilver.com

chunyen2020
T&C
1. One people entitled for one guess/predict price, price that is speculated after 30th Sept 8PM (M'sia time) is not counted.
2. One Teh Tarik, meet up only

SGKSY
T&C
1. Predict the exact price (refer to saturday morning closing price of this website http://silverprice.org )
2. One ASE 2011 with airtite for the prize.

basSist: 30.39
Chef: 29.86
magpie9: 31.30
SGKSY: 32.5
keii-kun: 30.46
spikyz: 30.50
8181: 30.57
property101: 30.23
bigwolf: 26.82
chunyen2020: 27.03
mingophoria: 30.23
cruzzie73: 30.18
IRIS PROJECT: 30.31

i change to 30.39~ despite of ASE!

hehe so need to guess before 8pm and guess what is d closing price right? so i guess thats d only valid list we have.

and it seems silver price going down sharply. Suddenly 29 area.

got a question for u guys long term silver investor...

during this drop (~usd 40 to ~usd 30), how much silver have u bought? do u continue practice dollar cost average? or buy additional?
if u are even taking out some of ur reserved cash / emergency fund (or whatever you call that extra cash), how much of that portion in terms of %?

i personally still continue buying, usually i buy 1 kilo per month but during this month i bought 1.5kilo (just additional 0.5 kilo). have yet to touch my reserved cash, but if it drop to 26 again, i would take out small portion of the reserved cash to buy 1 more kilo.

i mean no matter how low the silver is, there is still chance for it to go lower, therefore i dont plan to shoot all the bullet at one go. but of course if the price drop to like usd5, then i would sai lang (show hand) 

wonder what u guys do during this "silver sales" and whats ur strategy getting the most out of the fall?

got a question for u guys long term silver investor...

during this drop (~usd 40 to ~usd 30), how much silver have u bought? do u continue practice dollar cost average? or buy additional?
if u are even taking out some of ur reserved cash / emergency fund (or whatever you call that extra cash), how much of that portion in terms of %?

i personally still continue buying, usually i buy 1 kilo per month but during this month i bought 1.5kilo (just additional 0.5 kilo). have yet to touch my reserved cash, but if it drop to 26 again, i would take out small portion of the reserved cash to buy 1 more kilo.

i mean no matter how low the silver is, there is still chance for it to go lower, therefore i dont plan to shoot all the bullet at one go. but of course if the price drop to like usd5, then i would sai lang (show hand) 

wonder what u guys do during this "silver sales" and whats ur strategy getting the most out of the fall?

btw, welcome to the silver thread mucklampir 

since you're working with silver, need to ask you is it true that we're using more silver than output? and is the above ground silver stock really decreasing now?

1. Silveray Enterprise - http://silveray.lot.my/

2. Silver Bullion Coin for Malaysians – http://www.silverformalaysia.com/p/bi-weekly-promotion.html

3. Merlip-Merlip Silver Shop – http://merlip.lot.my/

4. Silver Stacker – http://stackers.lot.my/

5. ClickGold2u Silver Coins & Bar – http://www.clickgold2u.com/

6. Silver Bull-lion – http://www.mudah.my/silver-bull-lion

7. One Cheap Silver – http://www.1cheapsilver.com/

8. Silver Bar Coins & Dirhams – http://www.silverkini.com/

9. SILVER INVESTMENT-MALAYSIA - http://silver-investment-malaysia.blogspot.com/

10. True & Trusted Silver (T&T SILVER) - http://www.tntsilver.com.my

11. Pamp Suisse Silver Bullion - http://pamp.lot.my/

12. Peti Besi -http://www.petibesi.net/category/store/

13. Silver AG+ - http://www.silverstore.lot.my/

14.Jutawan Perak https://www.facebook.com/jutawanperak

15. Wan Dots - http://silver.wandots.com

16.Golddinarsilverdirham-http://www.golddinarsilverdirham.com/116.html
_______________________________________________

Malaysian eBay Seller (Klik pada 'Items for sale' atau 'visit store' pada profile seller) :-
1. SilverMalaysia - http://stores.ebay.com.my/silvermalaysia

2. inthedark957 - http://myworld.ebay.com.my/inthedark957/

3. ngeking252- http://myworld.ebay.com.my/ngeking252/

4. 88shops - http://myworld.ebay.com.my/88shops/

damn china man... curi our dragon away for himself....