Member Info for Happyhaddock

It is certainly true that premiums apply both ends on physical silver and that if you intend to sell back to the same dealer you bought from that you need a big move in price to profit from the advertised buy back rates, however I'd counter that with the following points:

1) when silver moves it does make big moves so covering those dealer premiums isn't usually an issue if you view it as a longer term investment, that said it can still make more than 10% moves in a day.

2) the time to sell physical is when public demand is high, which usually coincides with when prices have risen rapidly and when dealers are short of stock, that means it is easy to sell straight to the public on sites like e-bay and achieve a very high premium above spot, or get dealers to pay way above spot price to buy back your silver. Consequently I don't pay too much notice to the day to day "advertised" buy back rates from dealers, they are what they'll pay when they don't want your silver.

Silver really is one of those bizzarre things that folk only seem to want to buy when the price has gone up massively, where the more expensive it becomes the more people want to buy. Any ordinary items sold in shops be that groceries to electronic gadgets the accept norm is that lower prices increase demand as they are seen as a bargain. It's all nonsense but I only buy silver when it is (was?) going cheap and on sale!

you can certainly look upon Sprott as the "least bad" silver derivative, but why bother with any paper derivative that involves third party liability ... if you want to invest in silver then simply buy silver... after all you can sell real bullion you can hold in your hands for a decent premium over spot price where the average 1ounce silver round currently changes hands for close to £30

mapp it is true that the SP here rose from a low level, spiked at 3p and came down again, but to a large degree that is only relevant if you have an interest in selling your shares.

If you decided that something was a good investment that should be an indication that you want to hold those shares not sell them, I try not to let short term prices moves influence decisions to sell if the company's fundamentals and prospects haven't got any worse.

Whilst I am currently fortunate enough to have very few "losers" in my portfolio there's one purchase I watched make a pretty quick "paper loss" of more than 50%, I simply chose to ignore that fact on the basis I didn't buy it for where I thought it's price would be a month after purchasing them but on great expectations of where the price would be 3 years after investing. Sure enough things turned around and got into "paper profit" but again I don't see that as particularly relevant as I am still a couple of years away from my three year time frame for that investment and it may well go down again in the interim.

I suppose it comes down to having the courage of your convictions in terms of having done your research before investing, if you are swayed by small moves in the price it implies you haven't that confidence or are a short term trader more interested in price momentum than the company behind the share price.

You are probably correct on that one slimboy, though part of that wanting everything on a plate now comes from the increasingly nanny state we live in that shelters people from the hard knocks of getting things wrong.

The plethora of safety nets a modern socialist society offers is the ideal opportunity to take risks and lean from your own mistakes, but all too many are discouraged from even trying when those that do nothing and those that fail still get lifted up to the level of those that work hard....

However that view is potentially crossing into dangerous political ground best avoided where I have nothing against a successful society helping the less fortunate.

Slimboy - when I am exhibiting my paintings at various shows I often get punters asking how long it took to paint this or that? I'm never sure why it matters to my customers but my standard reply is "roughly 30 years of practice"

Turbo I've used the very phrase myself many times about the one thing that all lucky people tend to have in common is that they are intelligent and hard working... except I've never really thought of myself as hard working... I suppose that comes from earning a living doing something you don't consider work.

By training I am a theoretical physicist and science teacher (among other things as some people, joke I have more letters after my name than in it having not left Uni until I was nearly 30... not that I mistake simply having qualifications for being well educated)

However for the last 20 odd years I've been a self employed artist which is simply a more polite way of saying somewhat of an idealist day dreamer and drifter taking on weird and wonderful projects just for the challenge rather than from any real need.

I envy the arrogant self assurance of youth as I could (did?) do so much more with such an attitude, but I wouldn't trade it for the cynical wisdom of experience as it is that which keeps too much self confidence in check.

Turbo - I wouldn't place your faith in me ... I'm just an old cynic

if life has taught me anything, (and that itself is debatable) it is that the majority of people are wrong about the majority of things the majority of the time.

The only thing that going with the herd achieves is the anonymity that nobody will notice or care when you are just as wrong as everybody else.

It talks a contrarian personality and self belief to go against the flow, but it does enable you to achieve all manner of things others deem impossible. Plus in a shallow world where we expect failure, success is isn't so much a case of actually "succeeding", more often than not it is simply a case of being noticed... how else would you explain the iconic status of so many vacuous stars of reality TV that are famous simply for being famous.

@mapp kind of you to say so... as to successful well that's always a subjective point of view...

anybody can get lucky and make a decent profit, I prefer to define success as understanding how/why you made a lot of profit so as to repeat it year after year.

over the last year I've been invested on a "rising tide which lifts all boats" so the only skill I needed to be successful was in noticing that the tide was about to come in.

I'll refrain from calling myself successful until I've been able to make similar profits from a falling market when that tide goes out.

However as for UFO it is the largest holding in my equities portfolio and is likely to stay that way for some time yet because I believe in its future prospects... time will tell if I am right or wrong. However having first bought in at a SP of one tenth of a penny it seems probable that I will be able to can cash out with a decent profit at any point I change my mind.

I'm not sure if others in the company are putting pressure on BBG to do interviews when he has nothing new to say, or if it is he himself that feels a need to come out and say that there is still nothing new to say.

However we all know that there are various delays affecting us and almost every other junior explorer at the moment and that every estimate of when we may finally get to hear about the various things we are anticipating proves inaccurate and leaves us waiting a bit longer.

The company still has the same excellent prospects it had when the SP was 3p, and in fact since then things have supposedly progressed a little even if the price has gone back a lot, we just have to keep waiting, where as it typically takes years for a junior explorer to progress a project to operational mine that makes profits, a few months delays due to legitimate reasons are neither here nor there.

If we didn't know about the reasons for the delays I'd be far more worried about an absence of information regarding the progress that has supposedly been made.

@smiller, the long term approach doesn't have to be a very sedate one that only delivers 3% per year... I'm not suggesting that this year is an any way typical but the overall return for my own portfolio of 16 stocks currently stand at an average 74% profit for the last 12 months, and that is only a third of where it was last October. I could have tried to time the market and jump out at the top to hopefully buy back later but that never works for me and so isn't compatible with my policy of buying shares to hold for the long run.

Nor have my gains been achieved by just one stock doing extremely well and carrying lots of so-so performers, about three quarters are in profit and most by a good margin. Consequently I'd maintain the best trading strategy is do enough research to be confident holding whatever the share price does in the short term without feeling a need to trade.

However I doubt my story is unique as there are probably lots of folk here who are invested in several different companies that have multi-bagged over the last 12-months as it's been a funny old year as they say.

@smiller I think one of the big reasons that the authors of best selling books are reluctant to share successful trading strategies are that they don't want to admit they don't have any and that doing well in the short term is often a mixture of gut instinct and a bit of luck.

We've all heard the statement that given enough monkeys with typewriters one will surely produce a Shakesperian sonnet just by chance.

Similarly with enough professionals trading the market some will get very rich based upon a lucky hunch... these folk get promoted not for having a sensible, reliable, repeatable investment strategy but for having made lots more money than their colleagues. This encourages taking big risks where they either get lucky again or get fired for losing billions from a pension fund... either way these are the folk making headlines that sell books. Private investors may or may not make profits but publishers don't offer them contracts to write books. People don't buy books from folk who have a reliable investment strategy that makes them a safe 3% per year because people don't want to only achieve 3%; they want to know how that slick city trader achieved an 8000% return in less than twelve months and bought themselves two Ferrais , a luxury yacht and retired at the age of 26.

I only have three strategies,

1) avoid anything that is being endlessly publicised in main stream sources as a good investment... by then what they are really saying is that it was a good investment and now is the time to get out. Good investments are found by researching the things nobody else is currently interested in.

2) Don't buy anything I wouldn't want to own long term in case I screw up my timing and get stuck with it for years waiting for the price to show a profit.

3) Recognise that statistics show far more people lose money quickly trading in and out of stocks than profit from doing so (hence rule 2).

In regard to covid back in sept 2019 a friend of ours who is a nurse, who had been working with respiratory specialists in the far east. She was warning everybody she knew back in the UK to get flu vaccines because of a nasty illness she was just hearing about in China where there was talk of a possible new pandemic which had the potential to be as bad as the spanish flu .

I find it a little alarming that it was more than six months later before the European media and press started talking about covid and well... we all know what happened after March 2020. It does make you think if i knew of "it" 18months ago even if at the time I didn't know what "it" was, then how much did different nations authorities know about covid and what preparations were being made that have not been publicly talked about.

@pops. - the thesis/paper I wrote on the paranormal course I mentioned earlier was about homeopathic medicines; overly diluted solutions which statistically have no active ingredients left in them, yet which by the weird placebo effect have been shown to have curative powers in those that believe in them, and no effect in those that don't.

In many cases markets are like these pseudo sciences where "reasoning" is a retrospective attempt to justify what happened with explanations that rarely hold true in terms of predicting the future. I know many hold with technical analysis of price charts, but so far as I can see the biggest reason people are able to make any accurate predictions is that they become a self fulfilling prophecy of convincing enough people to buy/sell based upon the belief they are accurate predictions.

I wouldn't buy any derivative, I bought/buy physical, initially and long ago as a raw material for hobby silver smithing, but the huge variances in price is what lead me to buying and storing a little extra when it was cheap, rather than buying it when I needed more for craft projects... that was what in turn lead me to buying much more than I needed as an actual investment which in urn lead me to miners for extra leverage to the metal price.

I can certainly tell you that if buying casting grain or other "raw" silver to put into a melting pot to make into jewellery then the COMEX spot price or ETF values are irrelevant, real prices carry a huge premium over spot, as do minted coins.

"If silver goes to ATH"... we were only just talking about conspiracy theories and ignoring some of the rubbish people spout about silver... nevertheless I've just read a post elsewhere that silver already is at ATH as big industrial buyers are now secretly bypassing COMEX and paying record prices straight to miners to start stockpiling silver in anticipation of future shortages.

No idea about if this is any way true and I don't report the story as fact, merely the fact that the story is circulating, but the silver market is one that feeds on a frenzy of rumour and speculation where many believe that the COMEX price is wholly artificial.

smiller, I've always been fascinated by the various conspiracies that circulate, not so much because I believe them, but from the point of view of a psychological study of society.

Though an entirely irrelevant and tangential matter, years ago at Uni I studied an additional (non-credit) course in "Normal and Paranormal Science" ... Not the ghost busting nonsense the course title might imply or that some students who didn't read the prospectus were expecting, but a psychological study of ordinary people's misconceptions and misunderstandings of basic statistics/probability. Why such misunderstandings lead them to ascribe undue significance to entirely predictable and very minor events that can be rationally dismissed , and how in turn once they start linking these "non-events" together it can lead folk to the most outlandish beliefs. Sadly humans have an innate need to explain things they cannot understand, yet the one thing they least understand is the concept of their own ignorance. I had one person on the course expounding on some mysterious theory about why things go missing and are always in the last place you look for them... I explained that one away on the grounds that sensible people stop looking having found the thing they lost!

Anyway it is a course of study I often reflect upon when judging the markets reaction to "news", or even what the market professionals deem worthy of reporting as news. It's often hilarious the reasoning used to explain minor moves in prices that are best ignored as nothing more than the noise of of regular trading.

@ smiller - long term I am here for the silver but readily acknowledge that it is a totally artificial market that cannot be timed, measured or predicted, it's just that history shows when it does blow up it does it big time. I think the very fact there is so much talk about silver going crazy is reason enough to assume it won't happen soon simply because those with a vested interest in controlling it will be fully focused on silver. I am most likely to be wrong but suspect the big move in silver will come when everybody takes their eyes off it because some other "bigger" issue come along. Perhaps a short sharp deflationary shock followed by over-reaction leading to inflation... who knows? Of course politicians won't call it a recession, they'll simply redefine success to mean something entirely different, where I suspect we'll hear lot more in the future about the environmental benefits of diminished manufacturing, and the "intangible" benefits of a new society less focused upon economic growth.

In the short term I'm with you on the fact that DSO iron ore is likely to be UFO's real income

@smiller you mention government spending and inflation... well folk have been predicting huge problems due to this for years/decades. It is true that the situation is as bleak as its been in an awfully long time, but folk have also been saying that for years... particularly those that expect the price of silver to shoot to the moon.

Having lived through the interesting financial period of the 1970's I know what high interest rates can do, but the system came through that and was somehow simultaneously made worse and prevented from failing.

Never underestimate politicians' ability to kick the can further down the road, so long as they are out of office by the time the problems they create need dealing with ,they don't care how big a mess they leave for those that replace them, and for this reason it is amazing how long generations of politicians can collectively defer real trouble from actually starting. Though to an outside observer you can readily question why the house of cards doesn't fall down in the hurricane.

@ smiller whilst I'd agree about not giving much credence to other folks price predictions and time lines, and that BBG is the only one we should listen to, everyone knows that this industry worldwide is experiencing a lot of delays and set backs due to a combination of covid and increased demand for drilling/assay services.

With that in mind I'd still be a little skeptical of any short term time line even BBG might offer, not because I don't trust him but because a lot of stuff is temporarily out of his control. That said the very lack of news from BBG is perhaps the most clear indication that he himself knows this and that making a statement that we are delayed and that he can't guarantee when he will have the news we are all expecting isn't really news.

If you believe in the long term prospects of UFO you'll simply hold and wait.

short term, over the next few years I do believe that the iron ore and to a lesser extent the copper are the real value drivers,

long term though I am here for the silver, as I've said I ignore a lot of the drivel and short term price forecasting that goes on in the silver space and simply trust that that crazy swings in silver price will one day see our silver priced at a whole lot more both than it is currently priced at, and possibly than it is truly worth, offering an excellent time to sell on and move out.

HH