What are the best places to look for precious metals you can recycle for the highest return?

In answer to that question, most precious metal investors think first of gold and gold-plated jewelry, of scrap from industries that use gold and platinum in the products they make, and of hard-to-collect aerospace scrap.

Don’t Forget to Check Out Pawn Shops!

On this blog, we have often advised our readers to go hunting for jewelry and precious metal scrap at factories, in jewelry stores, and at estate sales. Today, we would like to discuss another source that might not be on your radar . . .

With Hispanic Heritage Month taking place now, it seems like a good time to ask how much gold has been mined in Latin America over the past centuries.

To be sure, there is a long, fabled and strong historical link between gold and Latin America. Back in the 16th Century, Spanish monarchs became obsessed with the idea that there were as many as seven cities in South America that were made of gold. They even believed that there was an emperor named El Dorado, who was clothed with golden garments and ruled these cities. So in 1540, Spain sent an explorer named Francisco Vázquez de Coronado to the New World, where he searched in vain for these golden cities.

We have written on this blog about recovering gold from sources like printed circuit boards, cell phones, remote-control devices, and digital cameras.

Today, let’s look at other sources of recyclable gold scrap that you might have overlooked.

You can find gold, silver and platinum objects in estate sales, in garage and yard sales, in old buildings, in your yard or on the beach – in lots of places. But there are other discoveries you can make when you are hunting for precious metals and precious metal scrap – discoveries that can dramatically increase the amount of money you can make from the objects you find.

As spring arrives across North America, more and more of us can head into the great outdoors to prospect for gold. Here is some new equipment that can help precious gold prospectors find more gold in the summer months ahead.

Are you just about to do some spring cleaning in your home, garage, or place of business?

That’s great. But spring is also a great time to make some new plans for profiting from precious metals. Here’s a checklist of ways to make sure that this spring and summer will be the most profitable time you have ever seen for collecting – and profiting from – gold scrap, silver scrap, platinum scrap and more.

We want you to make money when you invest in precious metals.

Why? One reason is that if we can help you make money by using our testing and recycling processes, we will make more money too. But that isn’t the most important reason. The most important reason we want you to do well and make money is that we want to support you. Also, the more successful you become as a precious metal investor, the better it is for our entire business sector. That’s another way of saying that when more people make more money, everyone in the universe of precious metal investing benefits.

Gold is a metal that is known for its beauty. So why is it used in so many medical devices that are used where no one can see it – inside the human body?

Gold was trading at about $1,300 in 2018. Today, the price is more than $1,900. Those are the facts. Yet what do they mean if you are someone who likes to invest in gold? Are prices about to level off, rise even higher . . . or fall?

You have probably heard it said that now that there is war in the Ukraine, the flow of precious metals mined there will be shut off. Some people have even been saying that when that happens, the prices of platinum and other metals that are mined in Ukraine will rise exponentially.

Conspiracy theories seem to crop up about topics and celebrities that people find fascinating.

• JFK? He didn’t really die . . . and conspiracy theorists know he is coming back.

• The walk on the moon? . . . it never really happened.

• The world’s money supply? . . . it’s all controlled by a secret society that’s headquartered in Switzerland or under the Great Pyramid.

Okay, you can doubtless add more conspiracy theories to that ridiculous list. But we want to add some others of our own to it. They are all conspiracy theories, or at least crazy theories, about gold.

The words of a classic rock song by Bob Dylan tell us, “The times they are a-changing.”

They really apply if you invest in platinum scrap, gold scrap and silver scrap. Here are some trends that will cause major changes for precious metal investors in the next five years.

Year 2022 is shaping up to be the year when Covid-19 goes away, the year when America either rebuilds its infrastructure (or doesn’t), the year when you seriously consider buying an electric car – and lots of other big changes will happen in your life.

Another big change seems to be happening too, which is that everywhere you turn, people are talking about cryptocurrency. This seems to be the year when cryptocurrency – also known as bitcoin or bitcoins – is no longer something on the sidelines of people’s investing strategy. It has moved to center stage and people – even people who don’t know exactly what bitcoin is – are intensely interested.

Have you ever seen a video of sharks that are feeding? It’s not nice to watch, because sharks get into a “feeding frenzy.” They’re not asking other sharks whether what they are eating is tasty or a healthy choice. They’re just going wild, trying to satisfy their instinctual desire to eat.

Although people who invest in precious metals are a lot smarter than sharks, they sometimes engage in similar behavior. When they get the idea that they can make a lot of money by making a certain investment, they get into a kind of frenzy and can make investments that are unwise.

Have you ever seen a stack of squashed, pancaked old cars piled in the corner of an automotive recycling yard, just waiting to be hauled away to a metal scrap yard?

It’s a sad sight. But even sadder is the fact that each of those squashed cars probably contains small quantities of gold that nobody bothered to pull out. And that problem is about to become even bigger because with every passing year, more and more electronics are getting shoehorned into modern cars. Within a few years, cars – especially electric and hybrids – are going to contain bigger and bigger quantities of gold. Remember, every printed circuit board that is found in a car contains small amounts of gold that can be extracted and recycled.

From Blackberry to iPhone and Beyond . . .

Scientists and lay people (otherwise known as “the men and women in the street”) love to predict the death of precious metals. They like to believe that gold, silver and platinum will lose value because they will be replaced by other materials and other chemicals in a lot of devices and applications.

“Isn’t the pandemic creating a lot of demand for precious metals,” a caller asked us recently. “Gold, silver and platinum and even cadmium are used in medical devices and medications, and isn’t the demand for those things increasing because of the pandemic?”

“The gold price dropped from $1,783.90 an ounce at the end of October to $1,763.90 on 3 November, as the US Federal Reserve indicated in a statement that it would `begin reducing the monthly pace of its net asset purchases by $10bn for Treasury securities and $5bn for agency mortgage-backed securities.”

“Gold Prices Forecast for 2022 and Beyond: A Buy, Hold or Sell?” by Nicole Willing, Capital.Com, December 9, 2021

If you look at trends in precious metal prices over the last decade, you will notice that prices have risen steadily. There have been some ups and downs, but prices have generally trended up.

If you then look at the trading prices of stocks and mutual funds, you will see a much different pattern. Some stocks have risen steadily in value, sometimes dramatically so. But you will see that other stocks have fallen dramatically in value and, in some cases, the companies that issued them have simply ceased to exist.