A Beginner’s Guide To Investing In Precious Metals
Depending on your situation and temperament, precious metals can be a very smart investment. No matter how the stock market fluctuates, and no matter whether mutual funds stray into the terrain of bulls or bears, some things are always valuable assets. Although a large net worth on paper can vanish in a market crash, a box of solid gold bars is likely to retain its worth for the foreseeable future. This fact is intuitive, and is one important reason why people continue to invest in precious metals like gold despite the fact that these materials appreciate slowly and can be inconvenient to deal with in many cases.
If you are set on investing in precious metals, gold is almost unanimously hailed as the smartest choice. Gold is often considered a good investment during times of social or cultural turbulence, but even in a steady financial climate gold tends to keep pace with inflation and retain its worth over years, decades, and even centuries. When you invest in gold bars, you can feel secure that as long as you are the owner of such valuable items, at least some part of your net worth will be tangible and reliable, no matter what the global financial market may bring in the years to come. When you transform your cash into gold or another valuable metal, you are all but guaranteed stability, as gold has stayed in step with inflation for over five hundred years. However, because gold is so stable, you are unlikely to see much of a profit from your investment. Many financial advisors recommend applying no more than five or ten percent of your investment budget to the purchase of metals, because although reliability is an important factor in a successful portfolio, there is more to investing than just protecting your money.
In general, investing in physical precious metals is less speculative than investing in metals futures, but purchasing actual gold or silver bars has its own set of problems. One of the major difficulties with investing in precious metals is storage. Because these materials are so valuable, it can be difficult to create a satisfactorily secure environment for them. Many investors choose to store their precious metals in a bank vault, safe deposit box, or other area that is protected by professionals who have the most advanced security technology at their disposal. However, other metal owners prefer to have their assets close to hand at all times so that they can always be certain that they can access their investment. Depending on your personality, having your gold, silver, or platinum within reach can either increase or decrease your peace of mind.
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Investment Grade Molybdenum
Commodities are physical substances like grains, food and metals. An investment is the purchase of a financial product or other item of value with the expectation of favorable returns in the future.
Well, I prefer metals for preservation of my wealth. The question is what metal would you pick to preserve your wealth? Now the next thing to keep in mind is not to be biased in any way. That is, to buy a certain metal because someone tells you to, or to buy a certain metal because it is on an upward price trend or buy a metal because you read an interesting article on it.
#1 on my shopping list. I look at is a the ability of a metal to actually promote or enable life of plants and animals on this planet. This means that you can actually grow food with it or grow trees. You can actually use the metal by sprinkling the powderized form on your soil and let the microbes in the soil slowly break down the metal and make it available for the plants to consume. Hydroponic or Aeroponic growing of food uses about 17 life giving elements that are added to the water to give complete nutritional support for plants.
Unfortunately, there are only 7 elements of the 17 needed for plants that are an actual “metal”. These are called transition metals. Transition metals are known for their ability to conduct electricity, their hardness, high density, malleability (a material that can be worked with or hammered into flat sheets), ductility (able to be produced into a thin wire).
These 7 investment grade metals are Molybdenum, Cobalt, Copper, Zinc, Manganese, Iron, Nickel. Nickel is documented as a essential nutrient in some plants. Nickel is not used in some high-end hydroponic formulas.
#2 on my shopping list. I now have 7 transition metals that are used in growing food and are capable of being in my metal portfolio. But, I only want one metal. I will now consider the amount of this metal available on Earth. The next step would be the abundance of the metal or scarcity of it. Here is a list of these 7 metals and the amount in parts per million in the Earth’s crust.
Molybdenum 1 ppm Molybdenum is most valuable here because of scarcity
Cobalt 25 ppm
Copper 60 ppm
Zinc 70 ppm
Nickel 84 ppm
Manganese 950 ppm
Iron 56300 ppm
#3 on my shopping list is the melting point. I want a metal that can withstand high working temperatures. There is something called metal “creep” and that is the expansion or deformation of metals when they start reaching temperatures near the melting point. I like metals that don’t creep or change shape in high temperature conditions eg: Jet engines, Furnaces or anywhere where safety is priority.
Molybdenum has the highest melting point of any life giving metals. Molybdenum has the sixth highest melting point of any element on Earth, which is incredible!
Molybdenum 4753 Degrees Fahrenheit Melting Point
Iron 2800 Degrees Fahrenheit M.P.
Cobalt 2723 Degrees Fahrenheit M.P.
Nickel 2651 Degrees Fahrenheit M.P.
Manganese 2275 Degrees Fahrenheit M.P.
Copper 1984 Degrees Fahrenheit M.P.
Zinc 787 Degrees Fahrenheit M.P.
#4 on my shopping list. The metal is an investment so I Do Not want it to rust, oxidize or corrode. If this happens you can surely say goodbye to your investment. Molybdenum does not react with water or air at room temperature and will not corrode. Molybdenum will keep a beautiful lustre (silvery blue). Copper and iron are definitely OFF my shopping list in this category.
Research this incredible metal for yourself, it has many uses.
Carlo Biancardi (London, Ontario) April 2011