On January 18th 2021 I got the blessing from Shandy to pick up a 1 kilo silver bar. The spot price had recently come down from about $27 / oz to $25 / oz and I was able to find a Perth bar from a good dealer for $875. Relatively shortly there after the "Reddit Raiders" temporarily spiked the price to $30 / oz and you couldn't get anything physical hardly unless you were paying $35 / oz or more. Those kilo bars started going for over $1050... I guess I should have sold then...

I was pretty confident at the time that the whole "silversqueeze" push wouldn't work and there'd be a pullback even though everyone was swearing that spot would just come up to close the premium gap and $35 silver was here today. Here we are about 7 months later. Silver recently hit about $23/oz even. Premiums have become... less insane.

We got more of our deposit back from the old landlady than we'd expected and the wife agreed to let me put some of that into a new kilo bar - $822 this time. Cheaper than the last one by over $1.50/oz. Only about 11% over spot. It may yet drop more from here but I think sub-850 is an attractive enough price for a kilo in today's world. I do believe that in the fullness of time it will go up again but I think these guys were wrong in thinking they could force a major macroeconomic shift.

I'm glad I didn't sell what I have or dump my old 2010 tube of SAEs and other rounds that Ben used to play with as a baby - those rounds are more valuable for their flaws now for me anyway. I'm also glad I just stepped back and refused to buy more. There have to be some people out there eating some ugly losses.

But I made one other purchase to mark this and help me remember it:

They're advertised as having about the same size (diameter) as SAEs so I bought some 40 mm air-tites for them to keep them pretty and they'll stay with the NCLT and other rounds.

Not really "coins" but the closest thing to a commemorative that this mania and madness is likely to ever get - "Gamestonk and all." And these things are appropriate for the job because they are bonkers. Whoever designed this does not believe in the idea of a "field" and just crammed details and references and... stuff... into every spare bit of space on each face. I love it for what it is and find it amusing but it is ridiculous, manic, and insane - just like the craze it is about.

When people shout "to the moon," how many people think about the guy from Happy Days and how many think of the old Frank Sanatra song? My wife loves the song, but I have to laugh when thinking about the fact that that song could be applied to some people in r/Silverbugs in a very different and comical way. "You are all I long for. All I worship and adore."

For a while there, whenever I'd show Shandy that silver or gold were having a big up-day she'd jokingly shout "To the moon." I think the part she didn't say was, "So we can sell it all!"