[expat_panama]

Talking to a dealer about metals trades sounds like asking a barber if I need a haircut.  For everything that's bought and sold the prices starts with and offer that's lower than the sale price, and the actual exchange price is somewhere in between.  On this site they say that some folks are offering $16.24 for "silver bullion round one ounce" and other people who have 'em are demanding $17.33. 

That's a 6.7% fee for buying and selling.  This site says the difference between the bid and offer on silver is only 0.6% --a lot less, though I'm not sure what other fees Kitco traders have to put up with.  Abb talked about buying shares in BEARX and with my Scottrade broker I can right now buy it at $2.29 and sell it at $2.16, or I can just post my own bid/offer price and wait and see.  For silver coins there are places like this one that you can buy and sell silver coins --more listed here.

You can tell I know less about metals than stocks, maybe we'll hear better info from the PM folks.

[expat_panama]

 

	Markets		Yesterday		Today
	metals		Falling back to November's bases @ $1,207.85 and $16.48		futures holding, silver upside and gold off
	stocks		Record highs, but less than a fifth of a % in falling volume		futures now trading up just barely

Big announcement parade this morning:

MBA Mortgage Index
Housing Starts
Building Permits
PPI
Core PPI
Industrial Production
Capacity Utilization
FOMC Minutes