As a Canadian, I was shocked to discover the answer to that question was us! Canada is the winner of the “honkin’ big coin” award. In May 2007, the Royal Canadian Mint unveiled a gold coin that’s as big as a car wheel and as thick as a hardcover novel.

Our giant coin
At 100 kilograms (220-pound), the coin which is 99.999 percent pure gold, is the largest and purest piece ever made by any government. It is available to cram in your purse for a measly $1 Million. (Incidentally, that’s Canadian dollars for all you American readers out there.)

Gold coins as a value investment
Canada and South Africa until recently have been known for their quality gold coins for both collectors and value hoarders, but competition for the lucrative market has heated up.

It has been an excellent investment. In 2000, gold was worth US $263 @ ounce. Seven years on, it is now worth US $653.

Compare that to your bank account. I’ll bet that you don’t have 40% more cash even with the advantage of compounding interest.

Gold coins are not the only contender for your attention.

The other metals are also sky rocketing in value.

Other coins
Pennies, for instance are made out of copper. According to coinflation.com, any Canadian minted before 1981 is actually worth about 2 cents in copper. If you can find a quarter minted before 1967 – it’s metal value is actually $1.85

It is, of course, illegal to melt them down for their intrinsic value.

Pennies, along with their cousins nickels, dimes and paper money are only meant to be “representative” value. But with soaring commodity prices – coins are now starting to have intrinsic value.

The temptation to melt down coins and exchange it for an instant double-your-money at a scrap dealer by certain people must be overwhelming.

Metal has become so valuable, that Vancouver city is being forced to look into replacing all their manhole covers with special locking ones to prevent them from being stolen. In Seattle, when all the copper wiring in a public park was stolen recently, they elected to replace it with lower-value aluminum wiring in an attempt to forestall another future theft.

The Canadian government is steeling our coins
The Canadian government has been aware of this problem for a while. To combat it, they have been cutting our coins with steel.

They also have an alloy recovery scheme where they rake out all the old coins whenever they circulate back through the banks.

So now our coins only have a thin coating of the metal around a much cheaper blank. But even that plan is starting to run into problems as zinc and nickel – the metals of choice – have soared even more than gold!

So take a good look at that dusty jar that you throw all your coins into. It’s worth a lot more than you think!

Deal Shopper

Yesterday while I was trotting up and down the aisles of my local grocery store doing my weekly shopping, I ran across and astonishing sale.

Local honey was on sale for a smoking good price. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Obviously news of the impending international collapse of the honey industry has not yet penetrated as far as the wholesale purchasers for the major grocery chains. Otherwise, there is no way that they would be firing this particular commodity out the door at a loss-leader price.

The Alert

This is interesting, I thought. They must be clearing out the last of the previous year’s production out of their warehouses. Normally they would just replace it during the traditional honey harvest period during the summer and fall.

But not this year I thought.

I loaded my cart up with a couple of years worth of honey supply in preparation to hoard it. I am about to be the envy of tea-drinkers for years to come.

Market Timing

My interest is clearly well ahead of the market reaction – which makes it a good buying opportunity.

Bee Colony Collapse hasn’t even rated page 14 of the mass media yet.

The phenomenon is recent. Beekeepers started reporting that their colonies were dying in significant numbers just this last fall.

Market background

Bee Colony Collapse is swift. Within the course of a week, the bees from an afflicted colony vanish, deserting the Queen and unhatched brood.

Dr. Cox-Foster who is in the faculty of Entomology at the University of Pennsylvania recently testified before the US House of Representatives. She says in part “This disease shows a completely new set of symptoms, which does not seem to match anything in the literature”.

Bee Research

“Bees are leaving the hives to fly away to die. The few bees left inside the hive are carrying ‘a tremendous number of pathogens’ – virtually every known bee virus can be detected in the insects. Some bees are carrying five or six viruses at a time, as well as fungal infections.

Another unusual symptom is that normally when a bee colony gets weak, other neighboring bees will come and steal the honey & pollen. Other opportunistic insects or animals like to take advantage too. But none of this is happening. These opportunistic predators are not coming in – or if they do – it’s weeks later.

Normally beekeepers lose around 10% to an extreme maximum of 18% of their hives during a rough winter.

Apiarists are reporting loses of up to 90% of their colonies. The phenomenon is not restricted to the United States. Europe is also reporting similar frightening loses. Colony Collapse is just starting to appear in Canada. Wild bees are affected as well. Current estimates put the wild colony losses at over 95% in many parts of North America.

No one knows why.

Pending Disaster

Bee pollination is required for over 90 varieties of crops in North America. All our tastiest foods require bee attention – most of our fruits, squashes and almonds for example. Agricultural growers rent out about 1.5 million mobile hives a year for the purposes of pollination.

This year they are not available.

The farmers are getting desperate. Some of them are making the decision not to plant. Almond & apple crops, which are almost 100% reliant on bees, are blooming right now. Farmers are being forced to import valuable pollinator hives from Australia as a stopgap measure.

How can the investor take advantage?

This is a phenomenal opportunity to put money into agricultural products.

Food is not an optional extra. As a result the price of agricultural commodities will shortly reflect the decreased supply. Demand for agricultural commodities is fairly inelastic. There will clearly be consumer demand erosion when the prices of flowering crops start to rise significantly, but consumption will merely switch to non-pollinated plants such as wheat, soybeans & corn.

Increasing Demand

These alternative cereal food crops are already facing significant increase in export demand due to rising populations & standards of living in China & India as well as further pressures from the alternative fuel industry.

In fact many acres of corn & sugar which used to be devoted to food production have been diverted to the more profitable bio-fuel production. In 2007 – this represented 25% of the total (US) corn crop. In 2008 – it is predicted to take as much as 90% of the available crop.

Other Factors

It is expensive and time consuming for farmers to switch from the production of one crop to another. There is significant lead-time before the switch in commodity production can take place in reaction to market forces. It takes years for instance to grow a tree to production stage or before planted asparagus is at the harvestable. Additionally all the farm machinery & infrastructure has to be revised to accommodate the new crop.

Two Ways to Play the Market

Agriculture is, I have found, very difficult to space to place an investment in. This is because most of the access is through the FOREX futures exchange and is not an appropriate venue for the small or inexperienced investor.

The two places that I have found that hold significant promise is the exchange-traded fund DBA (PowerShares) which is traded on the AMEX. This ET fund is a basket of agricultural products.

Another way of playing the scenario is investing in the required farming infrastructure. Aging farming infrastructure in Canada and the US has suffered from a significant under investment – caused by recent low commodity prices that farmers are still recovering from. A very high percentage of it needs to be replaced or upgraded now.

But I’ve already made my investment. My supply of honey is assured for many years to come.

I have an 18-year old car.

Not a beater, but the kind that second-hand teen aged car shoppers dream of getting their hands on – a one owner, immaculately maintained, low-mileage car.

Every year, all the car owners that live in the lower mainland region of Vancouver, BC are forced to undergo a government mandated emissions test. The official purpose of the test is to reduce air pollution by refusing to license vehicles that fail the designated emissions benchmarks.

This year my baby failed.

So I took it to a hand-dandy mechanic right next to the AirCare center to get it fixed. It is there that I learned some little known facts about AirCare.

AirCare has been changing the goal posts. At random intervals it raises the passing criteria. In fact, I was told, it has halved the emission requirements not once, but twice. So it is getting harder and harder, if not impossible, for older cars that met the previous government emissions standards to actually pass. Even if they are in perfect running order and meet the previously mandated specs.

Amazing.

I went all over AirCare’s web site. It is definitely silent on this political strategy. What a convenient way for the politicians to avoid alienating the unwitting owners of perfectly healthy older cars and gain kudos for themselves with the popular anti air-pollution cause.

And even better, apparently there are never any warnings on the web site that these new standards are about to be slipped into place. Interesting. Then they get to really rake the older cars off the road and “improve” their pollution stats. I’m all for that!

But does it really have that net effect?

My car is worth far more than the measly $1,000 that I would get from the government’s “Scrap-it” program. So if I can’t drive my car here, what do you think that I am going to do? — Sell it outside of the Lower Mainland. Just move the pollution to someone else’s jurisdiction.

And two seconds later what do you think that I am going to do?

Well, buy a new car.

Hmmm…… let’s see. To make a new car, that means that the ore has to be mined. It has to be shipped to a smelter. Then the ingots are shipped to a manufacturer in Japan or the States or somewhere else. Then it is turned into a low-polluting car and shipped back to Vancouver where I will buy it. All this time, workers are commuting back & forth to the mine & factory to make my new car. Trains, ships and ore trucks are humming along daily to facilitate the creation.

I know that the politicians must be following the advice of scientific studies that indicate that it would create a net benefit to get rid of an old polluting car rather than keep on driving it. So I guess that it’s much cheaper to pollution-wise to get rid of my car early and start fresh with a new one rather than to keep running it for a few more years. I’m glad that I could help our politicians achieve the NYMBY carbon shuffle award.

I just hope their math improves.

Which brings me to platinum. It is an absolute necessity in catalytic converters for pollution control on all new vehicles. As of May 5 it was trading at a spot price $1,329 US @ oz. This represents an increase of 254% on investment in 10 years.

Platinum gained roughly 15% in the last year based on the 25% increase in car sales in China alone.

Platinum is among the world’s rarest metals. Most of it comes from South Africa (approx 76%) and most of the rest of it comes from Russia. For the purposes of investment, these localities are not politically and legally secure for investment purposes. http://www.moneyandmarkets.com/press.asp?rls_id=764&cat_id=6

It’s sister metal palladium can also be used. But there is a catch.

Car manufacturers must retool their production lines – an extremely costly and time consuming undertaking to accommodate the less costly metal so there is extreme resistance to casually switching back and forth between the metals. The other feature is that the cost of the metal is a relatively small part of the total price of the vehicle, so the price of both metals can soar significantly further before demand erosion will start to occur. The other feature is that both metals are nearly equally as scarce so switching from one to the other would simply make cause the price of the less costly metal to rapidly soar in the near future.

Besides being a necessary component of pollution control in all new vehicles, it is soaring in popularity as high-end jewelry and increasing numbers of uses are being found for it in electronics and high-demand drugs like cancer drugs.

Like gold and silver – platinum has all the essential harbingers of money. It is valuable, portable, storable and exchangeable. And as a result, several countries have started minting this metal as a store of value in their country’s coins. Canada and the US being two of them.

How to invest?

Exchange Traded Funds are starting to crop up. Currently there are two available – one in Europe which is restricted to traders in one country and one in London. As of May 4, the London ETF Securities Ltd. announced that it had accumulated over 6,000 ounces of the metal. This is a very significant amount of metal to be taken off the market. Another ETF is likely to become available in the next few weeks on the New York Exchange.

The accumulation of metal in these ETF’s is likely to push the price of platinum even higher. A recent example of this type of price push recently occurred with the appearance of Uranium Participation & Molybdenum Participation by Sprott Asset Management. These funds in and of themselves escalated the demand for their respective metals and have caused the spot price to soar.

I believe that Platinum is a metal to watch in the future.

PS: Watch your car. Catalytic converters are become an appealing target for thieves who know their way around under the hood. www.purchasing.com/article/CA6414322.html?text=palladium