this post was submitted on 15 May 2026
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United States | News & Politics
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I agree about real estate and things being generally in different stages of FUBAR globally.
What is the argument for precious metals being overvalued? (Beyond just "number too high")
EDIT: I promise I'm not one of those psycho goldbugs - just curious and largely ignorant.
Ok, I maybe am considering buying old jewelry from yard sales and refining it 😂. What I'm thinking is, though, the fact that precious metals still can be found at estate sales and even Goodwill suggests to me that we're nowhere close to the frenzy of a real bubble. People understand the pure is worth $$$, but other forms of it still get dumped off like it's worth less than nothing.
Or do I have things backwards? Should market prices be closer to their goodwill/yard sale counterparts?
So I will preface by saying to not worry about what's bad for institutional investors and the general market. Unless your investing all your savings or something you are doing a cost average as you buy it. I just checked today's prices and it's not as ridiculous as before.
As to why gold is too high, it's kind of a variation of number too high, but look at it outside of a vacuum. Look at something like the Willshire 5000 and compare it to a chart with US dollar index and gold. Gold and silver have had an almost 100% increase since the beginning of last year, while the stock indexes have had like 10-20%.
There is also the substitution effect impacting metals with all the wars/war preparation that some speculate will negatively impact precious metal if there is any true peace in the immediate future. Did you know that every missile that explodes has ~10 - 100 ounces of silver that's instantly vaporized? There is a lot of demand.
But back to you, most people aren't buying physical precious metals to resell later as an investment, it's impractical. Some people store it in case commerce breaks down, and that's completely different. Its value in that circumstance will be completely removed from the conditions of today's world. So you do you.
As a side note, in my experience the Jewlery itself always has more value then the melt value of the metal unless the Jewlery is damaged. Newer silverware might be an interesting idea though...
Thanks for the insight! It makes sense in a big-picture way. The precious metals market has always seemed more irrational than the rest.
I'm thinking of refining, not just melt. take some amount of jewelry with any gold content, isolate the gold bits which are maybe 90%-99.5% gold, then through a chemical process, which can take a fair bit of time and does involve dangerous chemicals and noxious fumes (don't skip the fume hood), refine that material, removing the impurities (other metals), until you're left with (hopefully) 99.9999% gold that can be sold at spot prices or higher.
A similar thing can be done with silver, through electrolysis.
You can do that with E waste, I have seen tick tockers that already have a marble sized nugget of gold from doing it.
But again, the alloy in it's jewelry form is almost always worth more than its metal value. Even old super ugly styles eventually come back into popularity, there is a reason you don't see pawn shops melting down their inventory.
Based on the YouTube videos I have watched about this process it is pretty labor intensive as well. Sounds like a super fun project for a chemistry enthusiast but I wouldn't expect the hourly wage of the work to be particularly high... Although...
https://goldrefiningforum.com/threads/does-anyone-make-a-profit-refining-gold.3063/
This^ thread is of more value than my opinion lol