➡ The main buyers of silver in the U.S. are those purchasing large Comex LBMA rated bars. The retail sector for silver is currently struggling. Brian Kuzma, owner of Commercial Rare Coins and Precious Metals, has been buying silver from the public for a year and a half without knowing where or to whom he would sell it. The two major refiners in the U.S., Acai and Metalor, are backed up and not accepting domestic scrap, causing a freeze on the market.
➡ The speaker discusses the current state of the silver market, noting that retail sales of silver have significantly decreased, causing problems for refiners who can’t sell their products. The speaker also mentions that the demand for silver has shifted towards wholesale trading of thousand-ounce bars. Despite the decline in retail sales, the speaker believes that the market may recover by the end of the year. The speaker also touches on the topic of hedging, stating that they personally do not hedge, but acknowledges that the lack of hedging options has affected the wider market.
➡ The speaker discusses their experience with buying and selling silver, noting a large amount of 90% silver available. They mention that they stopped buying when dealers stopped buying from them. They also discuss the mystery of where all the silver is going, as it’s not accumulating at the refiners. They mention a decrease in traffic in their store, with a 60% drop in customers since 2020. They also note a decline in the retail bullion market in the United States.
➡ The price of silver has increased significantly and hasn’t dropped back to its original price, possibly due to industrial uses and a shortage of silver. Precious metal dealers are struggling to hedge and lock in prices, and costs have increased. Refiners have raised their minimums, potentially to eliminate smaller scrap dealers, and they now only accept silver of a certain quality. This situation reflects instability in the dollar, suggesting that the dollar system may be weakening.
➡ The speaker discusses the fluctuating value of precious metals like gold and silver, comparing it to a burning dollar that flares up and dies down. Despite the volatility, he believes in the long-term value of these metals and encourages others to have confidence in them too. He also mentions his expertise in dealing with physical products and his comfort in this area. Lastly, he empathizes with new buyers who may not understand the market’s ups and downs and assures them that precious metals will always be a good investment in the long run.

The only real buyers in silver in the United States are who is ever buying those thousand ounce Comex LBMA rated bars. The retail sector in the United States sucks. It’s terrible. For a year and a half you bought silver from the public without knowing where, how or to who you would load it off to. Yeah, I got gonads. So I like you. You have balls. Hey guys, Raf here from the endgame investor and I got my friend Brian Kuzma on the line. He is the proprietor of Commercial Rare Coins and Precious Metals on Commercial Boulevard in Lauderdale by the Sea.

Hence commercial because it’s on Commercial Boulevard. I’ve been to the store, it’s really nice place. He’s right by the beach and there aren’t enough lizards there. But we’re going to talk about that later because of pesticides. But anyway, that was what we’re talking about beforehand. Ryan, are you frozen? Wait, Okay, I see it’s. It froze up there for a brief second here. Yeah, so I think I’m good right now. Okay, good. Well don’t freeze again. Just stay warm. Well, yeah, I mean you’re in Fort Lauderdale so you should be fine. All right. Yes. So basically I, I wanted to talk to Brian because I want to know what’s going on on the ground in the retail shops in one of the more affluent areas of the country.

Largo by the Sea has a, you know, a lot of people with a lot of money and are they buying precious metals? Are, is Brian able to hedge? Because I remember during the time of the, of the move to 120, you sent out a few tweets that you were stopped. You no longer accepted junk silver because you weren’t able to offload it to whoever was going to buy it, presumably a refiner metal or a PSI or one of those other guys or whoever it is that you do business with. So how has the market changed since then? Has it.

Are people buying silver? Are you able to offload it to whoever buys it from you? And what’s hedging like these days? The silver is still your two major refiners out there, Acai or the two only LBMA and CME rated refiners in the United States. Acai and metal ore, they’re still backed up. I believe it’s possible that we may see some of those companies, those two companies free up a little bit and start accepting domestic scrap. And again, I did a video recently, I’m not sure if you got a chance to look at it, about the issues that we’re having in the United States with refiners and again only two LBMA and CME rated refiners in the United States.

Well, they’re the ones that are selling all the silver everybody else sells to them for the most part. If they’re not producing their own bars, they sell to them. And they’re still backed up. They’re still. My belief is that, and what I put a case forward to was that it was mining out of Central and Mexico and South America is why the freeze on domestic scrap happened. You know, it’s a whole long story on that. But they’re still not buying. 90% is still pretty much discounted. Sterling is pretty much discounted still. So it really hasn’t changed much.

I mean you can buy 90% well under spot. You can buy a lot of other products well under spot scrap sterling. Again, you know, really nobody’s accepting it right now. There’s a few companies out there that are starting to, I believe I heard elemental, I’m not quite sure will take metal in and produce and turn your bars into bars and give them back to you for a fee. But as far as getting, you know, when we sell silver to the big majors and our scrappers, we’d get 99% of the spot price, you know, so 1% less, more or less.

So who’s buying it from you right now? Presumably when somebody sells you their roll of junk, dimes or quarters or whatever they have, you’re selling it to somebody. Yeah, currently right now I think the discounts are pretty heavily and we’re selling it back to other industry people that have either either again producing silver bars with it or they’re just stockpiling it one or the other. I mean metal ore and acai may be taking metal and start. And I got to tell you, I did send in a big lot just recently. I got hit pretty heavy with charges for it.

And they’re not hedging, they’re not going to hedge right now. They’re not even hedging with gold. At least metal ore isn’t. And I think they’re not even locking in spot prices now until your orders are complete. In the past you could send in gold, lock in a spot price and they’d figure it for you there at least metal or right now is not even doing that with gold, much less silver. Wait, wait, hold on. Does that mean that when you, when you sell somebody the all, all the junk silver that the public is giving you or selling to you, how do you know when do you know what you’re going to get for it.

On silver right now, the last, the lot that I just sent in, I feel fortunate even though I’m not happy with the numbers I got or the check in numbers and other things which is kind of. I can’t really discuss that. But I’m probably one of the few dealers in the country that has sent a lot into, you know, metal ore in recent times. I don’t know if I should discuss that. It cost me a pretty penny to do it and was quite a large amount of silver that I’ve been accumulating for a year and a half now, which takes a lot of working capital to tie up.

But currently, you know, it’s 45 days out. You can’t lock it in, you can’t hedge it. So that’s what I’m dealing with now. I’m hoping that these two companies by summer start to slow down a little bit and start taking domestic scrap in. But what has happened with the two largest refiners in the country for silver is that again Mexican Mining has or South American Mining made a contract with both these companies I believe. Okay, now you’re not going to get this out of either one of these companies. You know, their customers as it should be.

They’re very tight lipped about who they do business with, how they do business with. But you know, my investigation and my looking around, I am pretty certain that both of these companies, Metalor and Assai took in big contracts that were worthwhile to them to take for a couple reasons. The stuff was over 900 fine, it was much easier to process. And the other reason is they’re probably offered very lucrative money to push all this Mexican silver in the South American silver through their processes. But in doing that they basically blocked out all domestic scrap. Which means when I say domestic scrap I’m talking about dealers like myself, 90% scrap silver, hollow ware, flatware, jewelry.

So they basically blocked, you know, if you were a domestic scrapper and you’re dealing with these two companies, you know, they basically said no more, we’re cutting off right now and all we’re doing is mining stuff. I believe that. But you said you are selling to them. So I am right now, just recently, this is just recent. After a year and a half year, over a year of me accumulating silver to my best of my ability and sticking it in the back room because I had nowhere to go with it. Now I’m not the only one out there, you know.

So you’re saying for a year and a half you bought silver from the public without knowing where, how, or to who you would load it off to. Yeah, I got gonads. So I like you. You have balls. But my. My faith in the price of silver, where it was going is pretty much what kept me solid. But the problem I started to have is I had to start backing off on certain deals. You know, I was getting large. I stopped buying from other wholesalers and dealers because the margins were too thin. You know what I’m saying? I was still buying from the public at a heavy discount if I needed to.

And I always told people when they come and listen to this, I’m heavily discounting it. I’m taking a lot of risk here, you know, and tying up a lot of working capital. So I was still buying the stuff, you know, at a big discount. And again, not really wanting to make the big discount, but just saying that’s the only way I can probably do this and not get hurt badly. And. But the problem was, as I started over a year and a half, I started using up a lot of my working capital, excess working capital. But recently I was able to send a lot in.

And again, the terms are pretty, you know, not really. It’s the most I’ve ever paid to do a lot. Okay. But I was fortunate that they really did. I’m a good domestics customer of theirs. They took the time. They said, hey, listen, we know you’ve been loading up because I’ve been talking my rep. We know you’ve been loading up for a while. We can provide you this slot. I had one day to prepare a huge amount of ounces, barrels and barrels and barrels of scrap to get to them. And I had one day to do it, because that’s how adamant they were.

Will put you in this little spot right here. And again, I’ve had a good working relationship with them. And then maybe there’s some other dealers out there that are getting the same thing. But my understanding is that they’re not telling me when this will end and when they’ll start going back to taking in, you know, silver from all the domestic scrappers. When you. When you sold to. When you sold your big batch of a year and a half of backlog, Was that before or after or during the. The silver crash in January? After. After. I was accumulating all the way up to, you know, $119 an ounce.

Okay. But, you know, remember, also, they stopped taking silver a little over a year ago. So, you know, I’ve been buying from probably 40, 35, 40 bucks an ounce, maybe a little bit higher. 50 or 40 or 50. Probably 35. 40. I’m sorry. Up to the 119. However, when silver was flying from that up to that $119 mark, we weren’t buying a lot of silver as much as we were selling silver. People were kind of panicking, wanting to come in and you know, is it going to go to 150? People were hanging on to silver as well.

But not to mention a lot of customers that we had were coming in and we were saying hey listen, it’s heavily discounted. This is what I told people on 90%, 40%, you know, constitutional coin, sterling silver and other stuff that’s less than 900 fined. I was saying best thing to do is just hang on to it, wait for this refining crisis or this refining fiasco to kind of flatten out and domestic scrappers can get back into the groove of buying silver, selling it. But the only, and I think we may see that by the end of the year.

I know it sounds like a long time but I don’t think they’re ready right now. You know, if we were lucky those two companies may start buying domestic scrap, you know what I mean, from their customers. And a lot of guys are asking me why, you know, there’s all these other refiners out there, Elemental there’s and a bunch of others I can’t name that are good refiners as well. Well, but again the problem is, is the only real buyers in silver in the United States are who is ever buying those thousand ounce comex LBMA rated bars.

The retail sector in the United States sucks. It’s terrible. It’s terrible. It’s probably at the worst I’ve seen it since prior to 2020. You know, as far as retail sales and silver and retail sales in gold. There was a rush to buy silver. When we were flying again. The FOMO crowd so started just flying in, you know, that 50 to 119 mark after that pretty much gone. You know, and I don’t think, you know, I can’t say everybody in the whole country but I would bet you any honest bullion dealer out there will tell you it’s just flat.

There’s nothing happening right now. You got a little bit of stuff coming in, you got a few more buyers coming in, but it’s a fraction of where it was there for a while. So if you don’t have retail silver buyers, you can’t sell retail silver product. And that’s why all these refiners are having issues. They can’t sell retail silver product, you can’t sell 100 ounce bars, you can’t sell one. Not you can’t sell them, but there’s not a big enough market for them. So you’re saying they can only sell the thousand ounce bars to people who are trading the real wholesale stuff on comex for contracts? That’s what I’m saying.

I’m saying that the retail part of the business has died and that’s where a lot of these small refiners offloaded their silver to. And the other ones that weren’t offloading it to retail coin and bar business were selling it to metal ore or acai to be made into lvna comex bars. So once the retail business dried up, there’s no place to go with that stuff. A lot of these guys just stop buying it or whatever because if you noticed again, a lot of the smaller companies just stopped buying silver. The small refiners, they just stopped buying especially under 900.

Fine. So the retail business is dead but obviously aside metal or are cranking out thousand ounce bars, you know and I don’t know if they’re running it 247 at these companies but there’s plenty of products. Someone’s buying it from them and it, but it’s not the retail public. Okay, well I mean that’s, that’s something I hear a lot when I, you know, I, I do a little bit of a, I don’t, I don’t listen religiously to anyone in my immediate space because it just confuses me because I need to keep, I need to keep my eye on my thoughts.

So I just like I, I take, I take a survey of what people are saying generally and I hear a lot that oh, the, the comix is being drained. I hear that all over, over and over again. But then I look at the comax and I see that yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s gone down since, you know, three or four months ago. But still, aside from that we’re near record highs and the amount of silver bars that are just stuck in the vaults in New York so somebody owns these things. And, and the, the other thing I wanted to ask you, maybe you know this, that I’ve been tracking the open interest in silver futures for a while and I’ve noticed that it’s been, it’s, it’s extremely low right now.

I mean there was a little bit of a, of a bump up yesterday. About 5,000, 4,500 contracts were added but we’re, we’ve been below 100,000 for about two, three weeks now. And we haven’t been there since like 2008, 2009, so. And you mentioned that the, the big refiners are not hedging. First of all, why are they not hedging? And do you think that this has, this is related to the fact that open interest on comex is so low? I don’t know. That’s kind of out of my wheelhouse. Wheelhouse. That’s something that you could probably explain better.

As far as the hedging goes though, I know that for example, these companies that were buying, you know, like metal ore, for example, you’re buying an ounce of gold. They were buying an ounce of gold for $1200, $2000, 3000. Now, you know, that same ounce of gold is double and triple what they once paid. So it requires a lot more money and a lot more loans from banks in order for these companies to operate. Hedging. I don’t know what happened with hedging. I’ve never really hedged, to be honest with you. I’ve always kind of just rolled the dice and let things float upward again.

My feeling is that I just accumulate more silver and more silver and more silver, sell off excess when I can, and same thing with gold, but I don’t really hedge personally, you know, so. But I believe that hedging had cost them money somehow. And again, I can’t explain that. I’ll look more into it. But metal ore is again one of the larger gold companies or gold gold refiners out there. Also. LBMA comexrated too. They stopped buying scrap for a little bit because they were overwhelmed with it. That’s gold, not even silver recently. And when they came back and said we’re buying gold again, they came out and said that we’re no longer hedging right now and you can only sell your lot when it’s completed.

So besides silver, you know, no one really expected that with gold. And that really does put a big crimp on a lot of dealers out there on gold, you know what I mean? Because now you can’t pay. If anybody’s wondering why the percentages and the dealers have wider margins right now, well, there’s your answer right there, you know, especially in gold. Well, why, why are the margins wider now? Well, because now your gold dealer doesn’t have the ability to hedge with the major refiners. But again, there are some companies out there, I think, smaller companies that, that, that are locking in possibly, I don’t know.

But my experience is just, just dealing with again, Metalore, who’s a great company and, you know, knowing about ASAI in their business, I’m still waiting to be approved by Assai, by the way, as a one of their representatives, dealers. Okay, so. So when you say that you never hedge, then what? When you sent out that tweet that you were stopping your purchases of silver from the public, since you don’t hedge, then why did you stop then? And what changed that you started up again? I had to assess the situation, what was going on. You know, I had to sit back and I mean, there comes again.

I just started accumulating so much inventory and then some of it I was still able to lay off like 90%. There were still guys making offers out there, but it was discounted very heavily and I was selling. There’s so much 90% out there. There was so much constitutional silver out there. The sterling silver scrap, where the margins are bigger for me and much better. I didn’t mind accumulating sterling silver again, flatware scrap, that kind of thing. But on 90%, the, you know, I was selling it to other dealers that were heavily discounting it because, you know, I could have easily spent everything I had possibly owned in one day on 90.

You know what I mean? There’s so much of it out there that people trying to sell you. You mean there’s so much 90. Yeah, there’s so much 90% out there that, you know. You know, if you came to me today and you said, listen, I want to spend $10 million and I want delivery in a couple days, it would probably be easy to do with 90% silver versus triple nine silver or that kind of thing. It’s just out there. You know what I mean? And the reason it’s out there, because nobody’s refining it, you know, nobody’s really getting a chance to refine it and turn it into money.

We’re not just doing this for money. We’re doing it for a shitload of money. So dealers are heavily discounting it, and that’s kind of where we’re at today. So I just, as soon as the dealers that I was selling 92 said, not buying, then I said, I’m not buying. You know what I mean? So, okay. And now it’s all confusing. It’s complex. And, you know, the way I do things may not always be, you know, correct, but I just had to. I just had to reassess things. When I said I’m not buying right now because I didn’t want to get loaded down with certain product, I Had to sit and see where my, my situation, you know, you know, how much money do I have tied up, you know, so.

Okay, but now things have calmed down and you’re able to get the wheels going again. Then I got my first lot out which I’m very thankful towards and thankful towards the people at Metalore that helped me do that and otherwise I’d be still be sitting on it right now, you know, so. Yeah, yeah. But again I asked him, well, when can I send another lot? And there was really no answer. Will it be this summer? No answer. You know what I mean? So. So if you want to make some money then become a giant refiner somehow.

Yeah, well, it, it. I, you know, I’m not quite sure why we didn’t see more people step in there, but again, it still confounds me why there’s only two cme, you know, there’s one comics rated and LBMA rated refiners in the whole country. So you know, there’s only two. I don’t know. I don’t understand that. I don’t understand why there’s not more out there. But you know, well, you know, if you’re a drug dealer then the best thing to do is take out your competition and make and, and you know, like it didn’t Breaking Bad, right? Yeah.

Well. And again, this mining, this mining stuff I believe, and I’m pretty certain I’m right on this, I have some evidence, but I don’t want to discuss it that I am right with the mining stuff coming through at some point. I’m sure when that stuff starts to slow down again, again you’re going to see more the domestic scrapper, the guys in the US are going to be able to start buying again and the spreads will get a lot tighter. So as I was saying that the open interest on the comex, meaning the amount of contracts that are notionally traded around, it’s at lows not seen since 2009.

At the same time there’s all this demand for Comex bars. So that, that seems inconsistent to me. Unless there’s these demand, there’s this demand for Comex bars, but they’re not going to be sold because if, if open interest is low, that means the amount of bars that are for sale are very low and the rest are just being hoarded in the New York vaults. That doesn’t make sense. But why would you need specifically a Comex bar? Because eventually you want to. You want to. I’m just going through the thoughts in my head and you know, whatever you think of them, but because maybe you’re thinking eventually you want to sell a thousand o bar on a registered futures market or something, but you’re not going to do that now, so you’re just going to keep it in storage.

I mean it seems like there’s a lot of wholesale speculation that is not being put for sale. Just like you were sitting on in a year and a half of inventory. It sounds like whoever’s up there is sitting on, I don’t know, three, four years of Comix Bar inventory that are just being stacked up there. You know, as far as the refiners go, I don’t think anything stacks up. The refiners, I think every, you know, as soon as they process the stuff, it’s out the door to whoever. The bidder. Yeah, it’s in the New York, it’s in New York vaults.

Yeah, sitting at the New York vaults. But you know, I mean, could it be comics that was buying all this silver? Could it be. It’s tough to say. I really don’t know. But you know, my feelings itself, I’m saying it’s someone who could potentially trade these bars on the, on the exchange at some point. Yeah, well, they got to be going somewhere. And again that’s the mystery to me because the refiners, you know, as much as I like to talk to some of the people in that industry, you know, in those two places aside and metal or they don’t discuss anything about, you know, who their customers are at all, pretty much.

So. But I’d be curious to who, you know, where all that stuff is going consistently. Because again, it’s not building up and they’re not saying, you know, we’re not buying at all, or not buying, we’re not refining at all, you know. So on the other hand too, you know, those two companies can only produce so much, you know what I mean? And I think if there was a huge demand. A good point here. If there was, if there was a bigger demand, you’d see another refiner opening up. But you know, I don’t see that happening. You know what I mean? Okay, well, I mean it would take, I mean there’s other bigger problems in the world right now.

Like you know, oil refineries are being bombed in the Middle east and, and, and horror movies is still blocked and Trump seems to know exactly what he’s doing because he’s playing 17 dimensional chess or whatever people say. I don’t know, I don’t know, man, why can’t we all just get along? But Anyways, yeah, people have different ideologies. I know, I know. Yeah. So what. What about gold? What’s going on with that In. In commercial rare coins and precious metals. Gold sale again, across the board, all bullion sales have pretty much slowed up dramatically. We still have our consistent buyers.

We still have a certain amount of stackers and it. But it, it’s just quiet. It’s just, you know, quiet. That’s the best I can say. You know, there’s. It’s not too busy buying or selling. It’s just much quieter than it has been over the last couple years. So. Okay, so you’re saying this is since the. Since the January 29th decline or crash? It’s been quieter than it’s been since what, 2020, 2021. Yeah. To me, I think it’s been quieter since it’s been since 2020. You know, after just the amount of people coming in the store, just the head count alone has gone down.

So I know on the average from 20 to 2020 to. To now, I would say we’re down probably 60% or something. 60% plus headcount of people that are coming in might even be less than that. So when’s the last time you saw this kind of traffic slow like this? Probably? Well, 2020 in that range, you know, back, you know, during the. The COVID era and you know, when things were really quiet, that was just abnormally quiet. But yeah, I’d say pre2020, because you can’t really use 2020 as a guide. Everything was closed, you know. Right. Except for pre 2020.

Yeah. Quite a bit slower. Yeah. You know, again, the headcount on people buying gold and silver is down substantially. It has been since right before when silver shoot up to 119. It was busier than hell, man. We were lined up out the door. It was just crazy. Lined up out the door for, you know, a couple weeks, a month or something like that. And then as soon as that happened, it just shut off. Flatlined. So, yeah, retail bullion market in the United States is basically flatlined, in my opinion. Well, so that’s. That’s. That tells you or that tells me that.

Okay, if it just flatlined, then okay, so we had a big run up to 120. And then you had customers out the door for about a month. And now you’re back to before 2020, but price has not gone down substantially at all. It’s still. Where are we now? 80, 82, 85. I forgot. Where are we today? Yeah, I think we’re 84 and change or something like that. Last I looked. Yeah. So we’re, we’re whatever happens in 2024, 2025 that introduced a new price zone or a new, a new pricing regime. We’re not, we’re, we’re never going to go back to where we were before.

Something no. Fundamentally changed. But it wasn’t, it wasn’t that retail. It was again it was something on the 1000 ounce bars or some. Do you think it was industrial? I mean what was it? You mean the usage of or what the sales of silver. Why did, why did the price go from 30 to 120 and not go back down to 30? It only, it’s settling like 80, 85, 90. I think that you know, when people talk about industrial uses and you know, that’s probably it, you know. And again I’ve heard that we’re what on our sixth or seventh consecutive year of silver.

You know what I mean? Not enough silver or you know, not enough silver out there. I think what they’ve been saying is and I think we’re just starting to, you know, we’re seeing the results of that. You know. Boy, if the retail starts to go off, I mean I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of retail product out there but we’ll see, you know. What do you mean? If demand picks up? Yeah, I think if retail sales pick up again. I don’t even know how to figure the whole environment that’s going on here with precious metals.

Dealers aren’t able to hedge. Like I said said you can’t lock in prices. The stuff costs two and three times as much to sell the same unit than it did like a couple years ago. You have to be way more capitalized now. One other thing I didn’t mention is the, the refiners for gold and silver metal or NSI have doubled their minimums. So you know, whereas you had to send them, you know, a half a million dollars worth of gold. I can’t even say half a million dollars worth of gold because that’s different than what it would be in 2020.

But they’ve doubled the ounces that you need to sell them. The ounce minimum, not dollar. Yeah. The ounce minimum on. Yeah, yeah. On gold and I think that’s across the board with both ASAI and metal or so what does that, what does that mean? What does that mean to you? Well it kind of means, I think they’re, they’re trying to, they’re trying to eliminate the smaller domestic scrap people that they were dealing with. That’s kind of my feeling on it. And just deal with people that are sitting in larger lots. I think it’s probably more profitable for them.

That’s the only thing I can gather from that, you know. Okay, so that’s the general pattern of what inflation does. I mean, it concentrates capital. It makes small businesses sell themselves to big businesses. So you have all these huge conglomerates and the small people or the small guys are trying to survive while this, while this goes on. But eventually this all breaks up. You know, the process of hyperinflation reverses this process so that the big players become less profitable and the only ones who can survive are the small or the small fish. Right, but that’s, that’s, that’s the opposite process.

But that’s the process that we’re all going to go through. And that’s the breakup of big business, the crashing of the stock market, the breakup of capital into smaller units. And that’s a traumatic process for a lot of people, but it brings society back to, back to an even keel, which we’re nowhere near. So, I mean, we might be close in time, but we’re not close in the process yet. We still have to reverse and then go the other way. Hopefully we’re nearing that point. So we’ll see. When they told me what their new minimums were, and I said, okay, no problem, I can do it, I think they were actually surprised.

But, you know, I do believe both companies are trying to cut out, out the smaller players and get the smaller players to deal with the smaller refiners who are going to ultimately send to them. You know what I mean? Silver. The one other thing I tell you is they don’t, they won’t, they don’t want anything less than 900 fine right now. So if your lot comes in, you know, if you want to sell them 800 fine silver, 700 fine silver, they don’t want to take it right now. They’re, they’re minimum, you know, they have a minimum amount of ounces that they’ll take, which they’ve doubled.

They also have a minimum finance that they’ll accept without hitting you with huge charges. And right now they don’t want anything less. The two big refiners don’t want anything less than 900 fine silver. So, you know, if you’re sitting up, how much, how much silver is out there? That’s less than 90. I mean, stillering silver is more than that. Constitutional is 90%. As a Canadian, maybe Canadian junk is like a Little bit less or something like that. Yeah. That’s why it’s probably not that big of an issue, you know. You know, because I’ve got a couple barrels of that stuff sitting around that less than 900 fine.

And the other thing that I can do is I, I can melt the stuff down the bars, put mostly 900 fine or put 999 in some 925 stuff and salt it with the lesser stuff, you know what I’m saying? To keep. And that’ll keep. I can keep it at a minimum of 900 fine or better by doing that, but I can’t take anything that’s less than 900 fine in big lots and send it in without getting hit with probably a 5 or 10% fee, you know, extra fee or something, if they’ll even take it. So you’re saying you can, you can sneak in, you know, an 80% junk Canadian, whatever it is, shilling.

Oh, yeah. But I mean, you have to be able to keep track of the exact fineness you have in each barrel or something, you know. Yeah, there’s some math that I got to do when I do that. So, yeah, trying to figure it and make sure I keep it above that 9, 900 fine. But I find that interesting. They’re not hedging, they’re not locking in prices. They got bigger minimums. They’ve got. And again, these are the two major companies. I don’t deal with any of the smaller guys out there, so I can’t speak for them and what they’re doing.

And you may get some comments in the comment section and people saying, well, you know, I got a couple small guys that are working with me now, but I can only talk about these two companies I’m familiar with, so. Okay, good. Well, I think the, the reason that they’re not hedging is that it’s just, it’s. They lose money on it because sometimes in silver, the, the spot price just jumps over the futures price and then it becomes unprofitable to hedge. So they can’t take the risk of doing that. I believe that’s. Again, I, I think. Absolutely.

I think you’re absolutely correct too, because now that rings a bell. When I was talking to one of the reps there and they were explaining that is that the, the moves were just so big and so large that it was getting difficult and expensive to hedge. And I think that, you know, some of them may have lost money, you know, you know, hedging for customers or being able to hedge but not being able to lock in a gold price to me is pretty fascinating, you know what I’m saying? In the past you could lock in a gold price.

Here I want to lock in this price. But again, they’re not allowing you to lock in a price until after your lot is complete. Maybe. Well, because when you lock in a price ahead of time too, I think you can also, you know, you can hedge and get front money and stuff like that. And I think that just cost more. I don’t know that. Again, that’s, I can only tell you what I’m seeing from my perspective. I don’t know anything about running a refinery, you know, so. Yeah, so this is all, this is all not instability and gold and silver, but it’s, it’s instability in the dollar.

That’s what’s going on. It’s just, it’s reflected in gold and silver now because right, right now the main money is the dollar and gold and silver are the products, but in reality it’s the other way around. And that, that itself is being reflected in the in and out backwardation of silver that’s preventing these companies from hedging. So again, what, I mean, all in all, what we’re seeing, I think is the flickering of the lights of the dollar system. And we’re, we’re in those stages where, you know, when you have a flickering candle, you know, sometimes it flares up and gets really, really bright and then it goes way, way down.

And then it goes, you know, in and out until it just goes out. So that, that move to 120 was, you know, a big flare. And then now, now we’re back in the, the dying phase. But it’ll flare up again until the entire dollar burns out. And then we’ll see what happens then. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think we’ve established some pretty, you know, floors here. I mean, it sure seems like we’ve established floors with gold. Gold, you know, what, 4, 500? It feels like maybe. Again, that’s just my assumption. And then, you know, silver seems like we’ve established a floor of what, 65 to 70 or something like that, you know, so.

And again, these moves are just crazy for, you know, first, you know, oil’s up, gold and silver and down, everything’s down in the red. And it looked like this week it just completely disconnected from all that as well, you know, So I have no clue. I gotta listen to guys like you. I gotta, I gotta listen to you or other guys to figure out that end of it. So I don’t know. I’M guessing myself. Yeah, yeah. My expertise is just in physical product. Buying and selling physical product and who I sell it to and what I can tell you from what they’re doing and stuff like that, that’s pretty much where I’m comfortable, you know.

All right, well, I think you’re doing a good job and to, to, to survive in this environment as a small retailer, I think you really have to actually believe in your products because otherwise it’ll just, you know, who’s. Who. What other kind of dealer is willing to stack a year and a half worth of product and just have faith that you’ll be able to sell it at some point? It’s, that’s got to be very scary, you know, Honestly. No, I mean, yeah, I think it. Anything but silver. I mean, because I know, I mean, my thing, I know this is a crude way of doing this, but to me, this is silver, you know, and if I could and I, I’m in a segment of time like this and all I need to do is just wait out this just for a little bit.

You know what I’m saying? Yeah, I know, but that’s what I mean. You have to, but you have to believe that, that, that it’s. Believe. Yeah, yeah. Like, if you, if you understand that it’s just, it’s just a different form of trading except you’re dealing with actual physical stuff rather than some number on your brokerage account and trying to, you know, like you said, confident in my, Confident in my product. And I’m 100 confident in my product. I mean, did I yell and scream when I kind of saw it go from 119 down to 70? Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I, I did a little bit. I watched my net worth kind of drop quite a bit there sitting on all that stuff. However, I didn’t see it at all because it happened on a Friday. And I signed off because I’m on Israel time and I don’t, I don’t go online on Friday night, Saturday. So next thing I, I looked, it was Saturday night and it had already gone down. So it was like 120 when I, when I turned off the phone. And then it was like, I turned on the phone, it was like 71, 72.

I was like, what? I know, that’s exactly. But you know, I, I wasn’t panicked about it. I wasn’t upset, you know, I, I just, I was okay with it kind of. I mean, I lapsed, I giggled. I was like, oh, my God, okay, it’s happening again. Oh, no, not Again, I did. I felt bad for people that were buying from that level up because, you know, the new people, I felt bad for a lot of the new buyers that were buying, you know, at these higher levels. I really did. I felt more for them than I did for me because they don’t understand.

They don’t have that confidence like I do, you know, So I really did feel for those people. And when I talked to them, I said, relax, relax. You know, have confidence that this stuff is just going to continue to climb in your lifetime. It’s going to do this. You’re always going to get that. This. You know what I mean? So in the long term, you’re always going to do well with precious metals, gold or silver. You’re never going to go wrong. In my lifetime. In your lifetime, it’s never reverted back to the low. You know what I mean? It just, again, done this.

I love my wiggly finger thing, but when I talk, it’s my customers understand this. This is what silver and gold does, you know, so. And as long as you can hold through, you know, the little down moments, I think you’re always going to do well with precious metals. Yeah. You know what I saw today that the. The only sector that is. That has kept pace with Gold since 2000, the only one that I found has been the semiconductors. Well, that has, yeah. Ties in with, you know, silver at least. But. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we’re in a whole new different world now with AI and all this stuff.

So that makes sense, I guess. Yeah. Hopefully not for long. Yeah. All right. Well, Brian, if there’s anything you want to share with the people watching before we sign out. This is Brian Kuzmar of Commercial Rare Coins and Precious Metals. That’s the name of his YouTube channel. There will be a link in a pinned comment below if you want to check out his videos. This is the fish tank that appears in his videos, so you might be able to recognize some of the fish. And so, Brian, what’s your closing message? You can catch me on X Also as Brian Kuzmar.

I know my name, not the company name, where I really, you know, I have a lot of fun out there as well. And unlike YouTube, I can interact with people kind of more. I don’t know if that’s always a good thing. I can interact with people a lot easier than I can in the comments section on YouTube. But you can catch me in all those places, and I really appreciate it. Rafi, always a pleasure talking to you. So. All right, you too.
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See more of Rafi Farber on their Public Channel and the MPN Rafi Farber channel.