I've been looking at copper bullion just out of curiosity. Currently copper is trading at 3.76 a pound, yet I see it selling for 3.95 an ounce, does anyone know why this is? I was extremely confused when I began searching around. I read an article about copper bullion, and to be completely honest I was completely naive to the fact that you could buy it in bar form.

A wire is a (very) thin bar. You can buy kilometers of copper wire

When a metal is sold in this manner it has to be assayed and halmarked in addition to the increase in price over melt to cover handling and profit. One of the advantages of buillion coins is that they are assayed and halmarked by the issuing government.

So you started a blog about bullion and metals?

You're missing the best parts of this hobby. tisk tisk

Hunting and bargaining for specific grades and key-dates is great. Looking through countless coins for varieties and errors is delightful. But silver is still worth more (in most cases)

Hoard the coins as bullion ... put the MS'ers in an album.

Copper prices are way overrated at the moment. The only reason why it is extremely high is that many geologists and miners were fired in the mid 1990s when copper prices are at the worst of all times and new source of supply was just stagnated - apparently 30% or so of the industry just went bam in less than 5 years and these people don't want to get reminded over how harsh the industry was back then. Granted, copper prices will not go back down to where it used to be, that was around 3000usd/ton and now it's at some absurd 7000usd/tonne.

Realistically speaking, it should fall back to around 5000usd/tonne when some of the major copper mines open up or some of them are due to finish expansion and that is scheduled in 2010-2012. Read some of the major mining reports that are popping out from BHP Billiton or Rio Tinto. Some major stuffs going on at the moment. Mining would be a lot more profitable if prices are kept that high but no, it never goes that easy. And yes, to throw something startling, if you think South Africa is the largest gold supplier as it has been for the past 50 years or so, that isn't the case any longer last year. Do some research - very interesting things happening at the moment.

No, It won't only be limited to that, it's just what I started it out based on. I'm most likely going to be making a lot of changes in the coming days.


This is a grand idea! I just wish I had more room, lol.


Thank you very much for your response, I was very confused when I saw it so much over spot. I see bars of silver and gold that you can pick up for about at spot so I was wondering why people were paying almost quadruple if not more above spot.


I agree, While I love this hobby, I won't deny that I enjoy having the metal content under me as well! I most certainly will be turning my blog more into a coin related site because as I was looking at it last night I was worried people would come to it and think this is strictly for investors when I would prefer it to primarily serve the coin collecting community, but maybe the investors within the community. I imagine your website is coinmelt.com correct? I use it quite a bit, I may need to add a link. Out of curiosity, how did do you get the market price of silver? Do you pay nymex to use their APIs or do you strip the data from the site? I've always just stripped data but this would create problems in the future if the site were to get too big.


I agree in many aspects, after all it is an industrial metal not really a precious metal. But I think that if the mining operations decided to drag their feet like they do in gold and silver you may start to see a more steady price in copper. I just think that it's a fun idea to entertain, but I'm most certainly not going to rush out and pay 8 times over spot to "invest" (if that is what you want to call it when you're paying that much) in copper. I'll hoarde the pennies but that's about the extent of it!

I strip the data... once a day unless I manually invoke the cronjob myself. Seeing as I only request under 3kb of data I'm actually using less bandwidth and server resources then normal visitors. Don't think there should be a problem. However if the service was to get larger then expected paying for information is always available.

I'm working - on and off - on adding more countries and compositions. Gold and base metals plus a few other options that will blow a few minds. The thing that sets it apart right now is that Canada is actually apart of the calculator and the AJAX results which don't require a page reload.

Link it if you want

Also, thanks for using the site!

With how busy the site is they'll just think it's another visitor, lol. But no problem, it's quite useful! I'm working on some site projects also but it will be a while before I release any of them. Mainly for killing boredom. I have one on one of my school computers that is similar in what yours does, but yours is nicer because everything is on the fly without page loads. I was lazy and did everything in only php. lol! But I have some hybrid stuff that use javascript for on the fly changes.