The price of precious metals are well positioned to remain at historic highs.  Citizens of Baton Rouge are increasingly taking advantage of these market conditions by cashing in their broken, used, unwanted, or scrap gold, silver, and platinum.  Many people in the Baton Rouge area are amazed by the amount of precious metals the own—many of which they did not even know they had or they had forgotten about. Among some of the gold, silver, and platinum items that our clients have sold recently include: jewelry, sterling silverware, watches, coins, and bars.  Many people are just now starting to realize that they have hundreds or thousands of dollars in items that they have not used in years.

Gold started an impressive run from around the 1200$ level all the way up to the 1900$ mark. Then the metal took a 350$ hit and has since rebounded to around the 1700$ level.  Moves in the price of silver have been even more extreme than those in gold. Trading around 20$ a year ago, silver took a massive leap up by more than doubling near the 50$ mark. Then the metal crashed over 33% to the 30$ level in just a couple of days.  After the crash silver started to slowly creep back up into to 40$ range only to crash once again to around the 30$ mark. Now the metal continues to trade in the lower 30’s and is waiting for some price direction from the industrial sector. Platinum has behaved much different than the monetary metals. While platinum maintained its historical average with gold (trading higher than the yellow metal) for much of the past 11 year bull market, a few months back gold decoupled from platinum and began to trade higher.  Now platinum is trading around the 1600$ level—proving that it is not quite the metal that gold is during the current times. As the citizens of Baton Rouge consider selling their broken, used, or unwanted gold, silver, or platinum many look to the precious metal’s extreme volatility over the past year.  Our clients that visit our CitiPlace location off of Corporate Blvd tend to think that prices are going to maintain their current levels and not experience as much volatility as compared to the last few years.  After the most recent corrections, our company experiences some panic selling of both gold and silver, and as prices re-corrected up, another round of high volume selling occurred.  These are interesting time for investors in precious metals, and as always, we  feel that hard commodities are  and will remain a safe harbor during uncertain times.