Calculating the ‘real gold’ price
Posted by: Stefan Pernar in Uncategorized, tags: Cyrrion, GoldUPDATE 2009/02/23: I am now running a weekly commentary on gold as well as silver prices on the blog of the internet catalog of world coins. Check it out!
I have been intrigued by GATA’s recent series covering the sudden and steep decline of the Gold price which was apparently brought about by 3 colluding banks in the US. Having some real gold in my bank deposit box myself I was quite delighted to hear that ‘real’ gold would be sold at a premium in this new reality.
Not wanting to take this assertion on faith alone I set out to track down and calculate the ‘real gold’ price. Since I own and run a coin related information services website for collectors I extracted all US gold bullion 1 oz gold coins (Eagles and Buffalos) sold on eBay from late March 2008 until today and set out to compare actual sale prices with spot gold closing prices.
The data was cleaned up by removing higher value and thus high priced coins of numismatic interest – so called ‘graded’ coins and auctions of multiple coins. The data was then aggregated to daily and then weekly averages for actual eBay sales prices as well as spot gold prices and then compared (raw data and detailed results).
After analyzing the data the results are rather interesting: In the weeks preceding the sudden decline the premium paid on eBay for 1oz American gold bullion coins was on average 6.76% over spot and rose in the two weeks since the manipulation to and average of 11.26% over spot constituting an increase of 66.76%.
Examining this data it can mean one of two things:
a) Ebay auction dynamics allow for higher returns during periods of falling prices
This actually makes sense considering that auctions on eBay typically last 7 days and assuming that some buyers place an early bid close to the actual gold price. Then, when the auction finally ends, the actual gold price is lower than such bids.
b) The ‘paper gold’ spot price is a fiction
The GATA and others are right and the gold spot price based on paper gold futures is not representing the price people are actually willing to pay for ‘real gold’ of the under-my-pillow variety.
At the moment I am not discounting any of the two possibilities. The fact remains however, that I am waiting for more than two weeks already to get an oder of mine filled with my preffered supplier of gold coins. In any case, if you are holding paper gold these days – why not try and convert it into the real deal? Just for kicks – I mean, what is the worst that could happen? Right?
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August 28th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
[...] Original post by Stefan Pernar [...]
August 29th, 2008 at 2:26 am
Hey, just followed your analysis with great interest. I agree with you on both options of your conclusion. Even though I tend more towards your first conclusion.
There are numerrous aspects in ebay trading that increase the chance of higher returns provided there is a large enough group of people interested.
a) eBay is international trading, so what about currencies, buyers might be willing to bid higher on the assumption of a certain exchange rate. Just calculating with a slightly different exchange rate I was able to decrease the difference between spot an ebay by 3%. Also the date of buying and the date of paying thus converting might put the eBay-Gold-Price in different perspective.
b) Emotional buying, people might buy standart coins just for the fun of possessing gold, disregarding gold or numismatic value thus increasing the average price.
c)stupid buyers, eBay has a higher chance of people buying gold without knowing the actual value and bidding higher than a professional buyer. Spot bases it’s price on the larges amount of gold bought that day this certainly implies a proffessional buyer.
August 29th, 2008 at 3:00 am
Hey Micha, good to hear from you.
a), b) and c) should be true all the time though and even out in the analysis unless one assumes that buyers suddenly increase a certain behavior under your points. What do you think?
Also I only took coins into consideration that where bought in USD so the assumption would be that buyers speculated on a falling USD for settling their payment in another currency – however, the USD rose during that time against other currencies which would be counter indicative.
My guess is that a small group of buyers who are ‘in the know’ about the fictional gold price are willing to pay the premiums and are thus causing this effect. I will continue to do a weekly analysis and should the pattern continue or break during a period of rising prices then it would become more obvious either way.
December 6th, 2008 at 12:04 am
[...] took this piece of news as a trigger to update my attempt at calculating the real gold price of late August 2008. Back then I demonstrated an increase of roughly 2/3 for the premium over [...]
December 7th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Great article Stephan!
We’ve been tracking spot vs paper PM prices here at Silverbids for about a month.
I think this persistent price gap is a new economic indicator. People are losing faith in the ability of the exchanges to physically deliver, so the paper discounts and physical premiums go up and up.
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