Articles from Patrick A. Heller providing commentary on gold and silver. Article are published approximately twice per week covering the latest developments in gold and silver markets and the implications for precious metals investors. Pat Heller owns Liberty Coin Service in Lansing, Michigan and writes the monthly news letter “Liberty’s Outlook.”

A question I am frequently asked by both new and experienced buyers of precious metals is just how much of one’s portfolio should be devoted to gold, silver, and rare coins?
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question.  Factors that affect the allocation decision include someone’s current financial position, their amount of liquid assets, their [...]

It seems apparent to me that, taken in total, the financial news points to a heightened risk of a near term major meltdown in the developed economies.
Without going into details, let me just remind you of some of the issues that may be on the brink of exploding:

European sovereign debt crises in Greece, Hungary, Spain, [...]

On June 16, the New York COMEX had a total of 119.5 million ounces of silver in bonded warehouses to cover more than 600 million ounces of open contracts.  Since then, there have been significant withdrawals almost every day, despite apparent efforts to scrounge up new silver inventories from elsewhere and also to pressure customers [...]

When I attended Freedom Fest 2010 in Las Vegas last week, I found attendees far more interested in purchasing physical gold and silver than I have seen at prior Freedom Fests and other such conferences.  The questions I was asked indicated that the people asking had been doing some research on the subject, not just [...]

Public Law 111-148, the Health Care Reform Act, contains a number of revenue raising provisions buried in the back of the legislation.  In my judgment, the new IRS Form 1099 requirements found in Section 9006 of this law will have the unintended consequence of leading to an explosion of identity theft!
The basic changes to Form [...]

There is an incredible amount of confusion and disinformation about the extent to which coin dealers are required to obtain customer information to use in submitting reports to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) or other government agencies.
In my judgment, this fogginess is a deliberate marketing ploy by some dealers used to persuade customers away from [...]

I have a couple of apologies for my readers.  There have been some valuable comments posted to some of my recent columns that let me know that I didn’t do as thorough a job of explaining context and providing background on some issues.  My proofreaders often get on me about the same issues, but there [...]

The politicians in Washington are beginning to see that their tens of trillions of dollars of bailouts and guarantees over the past few years have failed to save the economy. Now the rumblings emanating from the nation’s capital are that another round of quantitative easing (which used to be properly described as a huge [...]

On June 16th, the COMEX reported total silver inventories of 119.5 million ounces.  Ten trading days later, on June 30, total inventories had fallen to 113.56 million ounces, a 5.94 million ounce (4.97%) decline.
There have been significant declines on nine of the last ten trading days, but this story has received almost no coverage by [...]

On June 16th, the COMEX reported total silver inventories of 119.5 million ounces.  Six trading days later, on June 24, total inventories had fallen to 114.9 million ounces, a 4.6 million ounce decline.
On June 24th, the COMEX silver market had over 137,000 open contracts.  At 5,000 ounces per contract, that means that commodity contract sellers [...]