Bullion mintage
Bullion mintage matters
Buying precious metal bullion can be an enjoyable hobby, as well as a secure form of investment. When starting out it is important to set yourself a buying strategy. One key area that should be looked at for anyone collecting in order to see future increases in value is find gold and silver coins with a low bullion mintage. This is one tactic that can be used to both offset any future potential drops in precious metal values, as well as result in an additional premium return when precious metal values increase. The Spot Price Today section will list the latest spot price.
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Bullion mintage refers to the number of coins, rounds or bars which are produced by the mint. This is an important factor to take into consideration in order to determine future demand of the item, which in turn will affect any future value when it comes time to sell. This is a numismatic premium, meaning that the additional premium received down the line when selling will be of a "collector" value, rather than from the value of the metal content.
Several of the popular bullion items have a high bullion mintage, often around 30 million for series such as the American Silver Eagle, Austrian Philharmonic or Canadian Silver Maple Leaf. This means that that 30 million of them were produced for that year, so if you are a collector you should not have a hard time finding them for sale. When it comes time to sell it is unlikely that there will be much of a premium attached to the sale value, as it is expected that this item would be readily available from a number of bullion dealers.
There are many other gold and silver bullion coin series which have a much smaller bullion mintage, such as some years and sizes of the Chinese Panda or Australian Lunar Series coins, these mintage limits can often be as low as a few thousand. If these coins are popular then the supply and demand ratio will be well in your favor, seeing a premium associated with these coins rise.
Within each series of items it is also important to determine any bullion mintage key dates. If you have a series running for 20 years where a single year of silver bullion saw only a quarter of the usual bullion mintage, this will result in that particular year having a reduced supply on the market and therefore is to be expected to return a greater premium from any collectors who are looking to collect the whole series.
When determining what type of bullion coin, bar or round to purchase there are of course other factors that also need to be taken into account, such as the liquidity of the item, as well as the price that you are able to make the initial purchase at. There is no point in purchasing a coin with a low bullion mintage if it has no demand and can’t be easily sold. This is one area where items such as the American Silver Eagle or Canadian Silver Maple Leaf have an advantage, as they are some of the most well known silver bullion coins in the world, so will be readily accepted by almost all dealers, although it is unlikely that there will be any premium above the precious metal value paid for any of these. Of course the upside is that the price that you pay when initially purchasing an American Silver Eagle or Canadian Silver Maple Leaf is also likely to have little premium attached.
The issue with tracking down bullion mintage figures is that they are all over the place, so there is a need to visit many mint and other websites in order to find out the details of a single item. What we have tried to deliver with this website is a single source of reliable bullion mintage data which is free to access and updated often, which will save considerable time when trying to track down any bullion mintage data.
If you are purchasing for the investment value rather than purely to just build a collection for hobby purposes, then once you have gathered the series information it is critical to weigh up the bullion mintage against popularity and any other factors such as the initial purchase prices. This will help you to determine whether or not the particular item represents good value.
Start your journey into discovering the numbers behind bullion mintage by heading to the Main Page.
