Gyroscopic Investing

You typically have to pay a spread of about 5% to buy gold coins in the year 2012. When I first bought gold coins around 10 years ago, there was a 3% spread (when gold was around $400/ounce or so).

I assume that it only makes logical sense to list gold coins in your portfolio at the current sell price, even if that may be below spot because if you liquidate the position, that's all you get.

Does anyone do anything differently?

TripleB wrote: You typically have to pay a spread of about 5% to buy gold coins in the year 2012. When I first bought gold coins around 10 years ago, there was a 3% spread (when gold was around $400/ounce or so).

I assume that it only makes logical sense to list gold coins in your portfolio at the current sell price, even if that may be below spot because if you liquidate the position, that's all you get.

Does anyone do anything differently?

I would just use spot price.

Since you are rarely going to be selling more than a fraction of your gold, I think that spot price is a good way of valuing that part of your whole portfolio.

Also, if you are selling gold, it probably means that the price of gold is rising, which means that you are probably going to be getting spot or higher for most coins anyway.

I use spot since it is close to the dealers buy price, except for my one 5x9 Maple, which is priced over spot because of its awesomeness.

TripleB wrote: Does anyone do anything differently?

I use the buyback prices posted at APMEX.  It's no different than buying a stock and having an instant loss because you can only sell at the bid.

Google Docs and the following formula:

=(GoogleFinance("GLD","Price"))*10

Bean wrote: Google Docs and the following formula:

=(GoogleFinance("GLD","Price"))*10

GLD has a slow decay due to its expense ratio, so this computation will increasingly understate the value of your coins.  For example, GLD's price per share currently reflects 0.096925 oz rather than 0.1 oz.  10 years from now this will be down about another 4%, so each share will reflect something around 0.0903 oz.

Rather than multiply by 10 you can divide by GLD's current NAV in oz of gold (and update this whenever you feel like it).  You could also automatically update GLD's NAV in gold by subtracting the ER every month - i.e. multiply by (1 - 0.4/12) each month.

rickb wrote: GLD has a slow decay due to its expense ratio

Yup.  I prefer to use the price from kitco or bullionvault.  I've some python scripts that will retrieve them.  bullionvault has an xml api, but for kitco I parse their mobile page and it breaks every now and then.  I can launch the scripts from a webserver CGI and hit that with the spreadsheet to import the values.

AgAuMoney wrote:I've some python scripts that will retrieve them.

Me too.  I use their regular market page and still haven't come up with a completely satisfactory way to handle spot versus NY price.  Does the mobile page distinguish between the two, or does it just post whichever price is current?

Here is an online precious metal tracking service that might be of interest:

http://metalquick.com/HOME.aspx

This seems unnecessarily complicated compared to multiplying #coins by the sell price on your favorite website (I use coloradogold.com), and I personally would rather not make it so easy for someone to figure out how many coins I own, but if you have a lot of different coins it might be worth checking out.

If you are using google docs:

=Index(ImportHTML("http://apmex.com/","table",7),2,2)

sophie wrote: Here is an online precious metal tracking service that might be of interest:

http://metalquick.com/HOME.aspx

This seems unnecessarily complicated compared to multiplying #coins by the sell price on your favorite website (I use coloradogold.com), and I personally would rather not make it so easy for someone to figure out how many coins I own, but if you have a lot of different coins it might be worth checking out.

Sophie, thanks for the mention. You're right, if you just want to know the current value than you can use a simple method like you stated. But as you also point out, if you have a lot of different purchases, you have a lot of different cost basis's to keep track up with. And then the calculations start to get harder to figure out if you're winning or losing and by how much. What is your average cost per oz? What is the ROI? If you are going to report the gain or loss on your taxes, how do you know if you had a gain or loss? That's where a more robust solution comes in handy. 

WildAboutHarry wrote:

AgAuMoney wrote:I've some python scripts that will retrieve them.

Me too.  I use their regular market page and still haven't come up with a completely satisfactory way to handle spot versus NY price.  Does the mobile page distinguish between the two, or does it just post whichever price is current?

I'm pretty sure the mobile site just does NY.

To check you can hit http://m.kitco.com/ with a phone.  (Usually they will do browser detection and redirect you to where they think you should be and tablets usually end up getting the full site.)  Or fake a phone user-agent will usually work.  Or currently they seem to be redirecting phones to http://www.kitco.com/mobile/index.html? ... lsite  which is presently working from my desktop but will probably stop now that I've posted it. 

AgAuMoney wrote:I'm pretty sure the mobile site just does NY.

Thanks for the tip.  The mobile site is much easier to parse.

melveyr wrote: If you are using google docs:

=Index(ImportHTML("http://apmex.com/","table",7),2,2)

Thanks for posting!

Here's another practical example - a buyback price from AJPM:

=RIGHT(Index(ImportHTML("http://www.ajpm.com/gold-bullion.html/","table",5),1,1),7)

AgAuMoney wrote:I'm pretty sure the mobile site just does NY.

I was up early (or stayed up late) and Kitco Mobile appeared to pull up the spot price when NY was closed.

Yes, Kitco mobile uses the spot price when NY is closed.