As for bidding on items, if you look through finished sales, you will see that even for identical items, such as 1 oz Gold Eagle or Buffalo, there is wide range of sale prices, so just bid at the extreme low end of the range. Other bidders will beat you on most of the items, but you will pick up a few items this way. Looking right now, I see that most of the buffalos are going for more than your purchase price, although a few are about what you paid.

I had not seen Bullion Direct until I read your write-up. Thanks for the info. If I don’t feel like dealing with the crowd at E-Bay, they are definitely an option.

Jason: It’s true that I don’t really use physical gold as an investment and that’s why I don’t plan to buy any meaningful amount of gold or silver. My investment in precious metal is through the mutual fund I own and it’s correlated to gold price though not as direct as gold ETFs (such as GLD). The reason of not using physical gold as investment is that I feel gold price is now large driven by demands (oddly enough, once gold is produced, it will almost never disappear so there are actually more and more gold in market), and it doesn’t really generate any income or return other than price appreciation. However, the price may not appreciate for very long time (gold price fluctuated between $300 and $400 for nearly 20 years until it took off in early 2001). If you invested a large amount in gold in early 80s, I could have actually lost money to inflation. During the same time, however, stock markets have generated very nice returns so I could be well ahead if I invested the same amount of money in stocks than in gold. But, as you said, owning some physical has more psychological impact than financial impact if we don’t see investing in gold only from the perspective of returns.

There are some predications that gold price could go as high as $1000 in a couple of years, if that does happen, it will make investing in gold at today’s price look like a bargain. But nobody will know ahead if that will be the case.

I never thought about buy gold on eBay (as a matter of fact, I never bought anything on eBay) for obvious reasons. Did you every have any bad experience? It’s possible to get a good bargain, but I feel there are just too much to worry.

I don’t think I will ever sell it unless I need the money very badly, which I don’t expect to happen. As investment, maybe physical gold isn’t a very good option as the price didn’t appreciate a lot until about 5 year ago and the price can stall for a very long time. And that’s way I have no plan to put any big money into gold.

I didn’t use Kitco, though I heard quite a lot about it. From my only experience with Bullion Direct, I think it is quite good though I have no first-hand comparison with others, at least the price is better than Kitco.

Do u plan to ever sell it or just keep it as and investment?

I never heard of buillion direct, I thought kitco was the only dealer.