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Antique Silver in a Post-Antibiotic Era

Photo Credit: Grannies Kitchen

One of the questions I’m asked again and again by antique enthusiasts is why I believe that antique silver is a good buy. Some people think it is too formal for today’s households. Other people simply view it as an anachronism in a world dominated by smart phones and social media. And to a limited extent, I sympathize with these opinions.

Antique silver will certainly never be used the way it was during the late 19th century, when prim and proper upper-crust Victorians used frilly silver utensils – sugar tongs, fish servers, citrus spoons, etc. – for every conceivable purpose. But that doesn’t mean that I believe silver flatware is dead in the modern world, either. Instead, I think there will be a powerful trend toward the adoption of sterling silverware for a very important practical attribute – antibiotic resistance.

Ever since they were first developed in the late 1930s, antibiotics have been a wonder-drug without equal. They have allowed mankind to nearly eradicate bacterial infections that were deadly in prior eras, including killers such as tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria and typhoid fever. Many of us have never even heard of these dread diseases and, as a result, we largely take their continued medical insignificance for granted.

This is a grave mistake.

You see, we are rapidly entering a post-antibiotic world. It was a good run, having lasted about 80 years, but many of the antibiotics that served us so well for so many decades are now losing their effectiveness.

Antibiotics kill bacteria in two primary ways: by preventing them from building cell walls or disrupting their DNA or RNA replication. But bacteria have a way to fight back against this pharmacological onslaught: evolution. Although nearly all of a bacterial colony may be destroyed by a given antibiotic, there will always be a few naturally resistant germs. These resistant bacteria are then able to replicate unimpeded. Eventually, after a long enough period of time, the world comes to be dominated by these drug-resistant super-bugs.

This is the new, frightening world we are now on the cusp of entering – the post-antibiotic age.

Medical science has gone to great lengths to delay this day of reckoning. In most developed countries antibiotics are only available via a doctor’s prescription. This tightly controlled distribution system is meant to ensure they aren’t taken casually, thus leading to drug-resistant strains. But this tactic only serves to slow the evolution of antibiotic resistant infections – a strategy that has largely run its course by this time.

Medical researchers have also worked hard to develop new strains of antibiotics that bacteria aren’t immune to. Even so, the golden age of antibiotic discovery was in the 1950s and 1960s, when fully 50% of the antibiotic drugs in use today were introduced. Not coincidentally, the mid-20th century saw U.S. life expectancy increase by nearly 10 years.

But as we’ve recently begun to enter the post-antibiotic era, the medical pickings have become increasingly slim. New antibiotics are still being developed at tremendous monetary cost, but they often have dangerous side effects or limited applicability. And it can easily take a decade or longer to bring a new antibiotic drug to market.

As a result, antibiotic resistant bacterial infections are on the rise worldwide. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimate that 2 million people in the United States contract an antibiotic resistant infection every year. Over 23,000 of those people end up dying. These numbers might seem manageable today, but they will undoubtedly rise in the future – possibly dramatically.

This is a situation custom-built for the resurgence of antique silver.

You see, silver is one of nature’s great antimicrobial agents. It is effective in killing not only drug-resistant bacteria, but many viruses as well. Better yet, there is little indication that germs develop widespread resistance to silver-based medicines like they do with conventional antibiotics.

Mankind has a long history of using the bactericidal qualities of silver to ward off disease. The crews of sailing ships used to put silver coins in their stowed barrels of fresh water before embarking on long voyages. This helped keep the water from growing unwelcome microbes. Similarly, early North American pioneers placed silver coins into jugs of milk in order to keep them fresh longer.

The phrase “born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth” means that a person has been born into a wealthy family. But the origins of the saying are quite literal. In medieval times, only the aristocracy could afford silver utensils. The peasants and common folk had to make do with wooden bowls and spoons. However, only real silverware gave newborns (and anyone else who used it) protection against the common infectious diseases of the age.

Silver was a common fixture in the medical profession as recently as the 1940s. Hospitals used to regularly give newborn babies silver nitrate eye drops. This was done to prevent blindness from sexually transmitted diseases like chlamydia and gonorrhea, which can be passed from mother to baby during childbirth. Alas, this cheap and effective method of disease-control was abandoned with the rise of antibiotics.

But as we fully enter the post-antibiotic era, the advantages of solid silver flatware will become increasingly obvious. The more you use silver in your everyday life, the more protection you gain against infectious diseases. Eating with real silver place settings is a start. Adding other solid silver items, such as cups, bowls and pitchers offers additional benefits. Big spenders can splurge on luxurious silver coffee or tea sets in the pursuit of a healthier, germ-free lifestyle.

But where does one find sterling silver utensils in a post-antibiotic world? Our economy no longer produces non-stainless steel silverware in large quantities. And what little real silverware is still being made today is only offered at premium prices. So if you want to inoculate yourself against the rise of the super-bugs, you’ve got one realistic alternative: buying antique solid silver flatware and hollowware.

And that’s why I think owning antique silver is a trend for the 2020s and beyond. Yes, I concede that it may take a decade or two for average people to figure out that science isn’t going to bail them out with some improbable miracle drug. But they will figure it out; their health (and that of their family) depends on it!

In my opinion, those who have the financial means will buy antique silverware by the bucket load. Those without the means will settle for old silver-plated utensils (which I consider a poor substitute for the real thing). The poorest of the poor will be relegated to using cheap, but plentiful stainless steel.

I don’t know about you, but I’m buying antique sterling silver before the rush, while prices are still ridiculously low. The post-antibiotic world has finally arrived, and it is just a matter of time until everyone else figures it out.

Read more thought-provoking Antique Sage trend articles here.

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Read in-depth Antique Sage antique silver investment guides here.

Buying PCGS Old Green Holders & NGC Fatty Holders

Photo Credit: Continental Coin and Jewelry

Listen closely, because I’m going to tell you a secret about the rare coin market that every numismatic investor should know.

The field of numismatics is dominated by third-party grading services these days. Coins submitted to these firms are graded by experienced industry professionals and then sealed in hard, clear polycarbonate cases. This simple concept revolutionized the trade, giving coin collectors and investors confidence that the coins they’re buying are both genuine and properly graded.

However, there is a certain mythology surrounding certified coins housed in PCGS Old Green holders and vintage NGC Fatty Holders. Coins found in these early holders generally trade for slight premiums over coins of the same grade in more recent PCGS and NGC slabs.

But why is this the case?

In order to understand the reason PCGS Old Green holders and vintage NGC Fatty Holders sell for higher prices than newer slabbed coins, it is necessary to examine the early history of the grading services.

Before the advent of third-party grading, the coin market was the Wild West. Unscrupulous dealers frequently over-graded the coins they were selling, while simultaneously under-grading any coins they were buying. Dubious telemarketing firms and boiler room operations cold-called people trying to sell “investment grade” coins that invariably turned out to have been cleaned, damaged, over-graded or otherwise compromised.

Now this might not have mattered for the kid buying a common-date, circulated Mercury dime from his local coin shop. But it created a major trust problem with more expensive coins that were worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars. The lack of uniform grading standards was tearing the numismatic community apart. It wasn’t hard to foresee a bleak future where average coin collectors – fed up with grading inconsistencies and problem coins passed off as good – would simply choose to quit collecting.

Something had to be done.

Enter a consortium of professional coin dealers led by legendary numismatist David Hall. These innovators believed that if coins could be independently graded by a well-respected numismatic organization and then encapsulated in tamper-resistant packaging, it would create a market where these certified, or “slabbed”, coins could trade sight unseen as commodities. The resulting company, PCGS (Professional Coin Grading Service) officially launched in February 1986. Its primary competitor, NGC (Numismatic Guaranty Corporation), was founded just a year later in 1987.

But in order to convince the market that their new product was worthwhile, the dealers behind PCGS and NGC knew that they had to be scrupulous to a fault with their grading. If a coin was borderline, it was better to knock it down a grade and preserve the integrity of the firm and, by extension, the entire idea of third-party certification. As a result, early submissions to both PCGS and NGC were almost always conservatively graded by today’s standards.

It was only many years later, as the certified coin market gradually came to mature, that PCGS and NGC found they could relax their grading standards somewhat. Therefore, collectors and investors tend to place a small premium on coins housed in earlier slabs from either major grading service.

PCGS Old Green Holder & NGC Fatty Holder Morgan Silver Dollars for Sale on eBay

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The very earliest PCGS holders are known in the numismatic community as “Rattlers” because the entombed coin could sometimes move slightly in its case. These early PCGS cases featured white or green labels and smaller-sized holders compared to more modern slabs. The company produced Rattlers (PCGS Generation 1.0 to Gen 1.2) from its inception in 1986 until September 1989, when the firm discovered that they could be counterfeited.

PCGS quickly responded to this threat by updating the Rattler with a clear plastic exterior ring, barcoded label and reverse hologram sticker. These holders are actually old Rattler holders encased in a separate, clear plastic collar. These more counterfeit-resistant transitional type holders (PCGS Gen 2.0 to Gen 2.2) ran from September 1989 until January 1990.

By early 1990, PCGS had completed the engineering necessary to switch over to a single-piece, stackable holder with the familiar green label and reverse hologram sticker. These improved Old Green holders (PCGS Gen 3.0 to Gen 3.1) were used from January 1990 to September 1998. Because of their long production run, these holders constitute the bulk of Old Green holders in existence. It is important to note that the green label dye color was not always stable on Gen 3.0 slabs, sometimes leading to blue or yellow discoloration.

Because the earliest white label PCGS holders (Gen 1.0 and Gen 1.1) were only used during the first month of the company’s operation, they aren’t commonly encountered today. Due to their extreme rarity, these very early white label PCGS holders have an elevated degree of collectability among some coin enthusiasts, even when they don’t hold very valuable coins.

In contrast, the beloved Old Green holders span all the way from PCGS Gen 1.2 (first released in February 1986; this first generation were also Rattlers) all the way to PCGS Gen 3.1 holders, which were discontinued in September 1998. Today’s coin collectors and dealers often refer to Older Green holders by the abbreviation “OGH”, which you will frequently find used in online auction titles.

Thankfully, NGC’s holder history is somewhat less convoluted than PCGS’s. NGC’s first slabbed coins came in slick-looking, all-black holders. But this only lasted from August 1987 until December 1987, when the color was changed to white. This aesthetic change was made because while the original black background made bright gold and silver coins look stunning, it diminished the visual appeal of bronze and heavily toned silver coins. The early, all-black NGC holders are considered the most desirable early slab to many collectors, sporting prices that can reach into the thousands of dollars each, regardless of the coin they contain!

All-white NGC holders were produced from December 1987 until 1997 with only minor updates along the way, like the addition of barcoded labels in 1993. These are the vintage NGC Fatty holders (also known as “Fattie” holders) that many coin buffs treasure today. These slabs acquired their name because of their distinctively thick, “soap dish” shape, which was replaced in later generations by a slimmer, more streamlined form.

Now that we’ve got the history out of the way, we can talk more about why you might want to buy PCGS Old Green holders or vintage NGC Fatty holders.

PCGS Old Green Holder & NGC Fatty Holder Pre-1933 U.S. Gold Coins for Sale on eBay

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First, some collectors simply enjoy the history that these older slabs carry with them. Many of these coins were traded back and forth during the late 1980s certified coin bubble, when Wall Street briefly burst into the numismatic realm. Investors bid up some coin series, like classic U.S. commemorative coins, to such absurd heights that even now – some 30 years later – prices are still off their all-time highs by as much as 90%!

As an aside, I believe this means it is a great time to buy many series of older, numismatically-oriented coins. After all, do you know anything else that still costs the same amount of money it did in the 1980s?

But for most collectors and investors, the primary reason to buy PCGS Old Green holders and vintage NGC Fatty holders is because you’ll have a better chance of getting a solidly-graded coin for the stated numerical grade.

Even though third-party grading companies strive for consistency, coin grading is an inherently subjective endeavor. Sometimes graders – even professionals – come to work tired or have an off day. When the difference between a single numerical grade – like an MS-64 and MS-65 – can be anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars, making certain that you’re getting what you’re paying for can be priceless.

Of course, our discussion of vintage NGC Fatty holders and PCGS Old Green holders wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t broach the topic of crack-outs and re-submittals. Older PCGS and NGC slabs were often so conservatively graded that a cottage industry arose in the early 2000s centered on removing (or cracking-out) under-graded coins from their holders and then resubmitting them to the grading services in hopes of acquiring a higher grade.

Cracking coins out of older holders was so lucrative that it kicked off a veritable decade long gold rush from the late 1990s to the late 2000s. By that time, the third-party grading services had discontinued the strict grading of the PCGS Old Green holder/NGC Fatty holder era. So a conservatively graded coin in an older holder might very well come back from one of the companies with a one or (very rarely) two grade increase!

Unfortunately, the crack-out gold rush days are long gone. Most of the coins that could reasonably have been expected to upgrade have already been resubmitted by now. But that doesn’t mean that older PCGS and NGC holder coins aren’t still quite desirable. There are plenty of vintage NGC Fatty holders and PCGS Old Green holders that house really, really nice coins for their grade. In addition, many collectors feel that vintage holder coins have a better chance of getting CAC approval.

As a final bonus, resubmission upgrades remain a possibility in some niche numismatic markets that have languished since the turn of the millennium. So common-date Morgan silver dollars, Walking Liberty halves and classic U.S. commemorative halves might provide those with a keen eye the (admittedly slim) possibility of buying a legitimately under-graded coin, as long as you stick to lower priced examples. This is due to the fact that with these coin series, the value increase from moving, for instance, from MS-62 to MS-63 might not cover the third-party grading service’s resubmission fee.

Consequently, PCGS Old Green holders and NGC Fatty holders often command 5% to 15% premiums over newer holder coins of the same type, date, grade and mint. The next logical step up the value ladder is getting a “green bean” CAC-stickered coin. But a CAC stickered specimen can set you back an additional 20% to 100% (!) over an identically graded non-CAC coin, depending on a multitude of different variables. Given the massive price differentials, a lot of value-conscious collectors and investors opt for coins in vintage holders instead.

PCGS Old Green Holder & NGC Fatty Holder Classic U.S. Commemorative Coins for Sale on eBay

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Now for the caveats.

It is vitally important that you buy the coin, not the holder. An old holder is merely an indicator that a coin might be interesting. There are, without a doubt, over-graded, thoroughly ugly coins that reside in PCGS Old Green holders and vintage NGC Fatty holders. It is up to you to avoid these over-graded dogs yourself.

An unethical seller may try to distract you from a lower quality coin by emphasizing the fact that it is housed in a vintage holder. But that doesn’t mean the coin is automatically good. The old holders simply give you a potential edge in the very competitive world of investment grade numismatics.

I would also like to warn you that PCGS has started to issue coins in “throwback” holders. These PCGS throwback or retro holders are new issues with “tribute” labels that are similar to those found in older holders. Happily, they all have a tell which allows for easy identification. Every PCGS throwback holder has “PCGS GEN X.X” in a shield printed on the rear label. If you see this, you know it is a new holder.

To the best of my knowledge, NGC has not issued any Fatty/Fattie holders since 1997.

Although they aren’t a magic silver bullet, early PCGS Old Green holders and vintage NGC Fatty holders can be a great way for savvy coin investors to pick up solidly graded rare coins at a reasonable price.

Read more thought-provoking Antique Sage coin articles here.

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Read in-depth Antique Sage rare coin investment guides here.

Is 2020 Finally the Year to Buy Antique Furniture?

Antique furniture has had a tough couple of decades. After reaching dizzying heights in the late 1990s, the market for high end antique furniture peaked out around the year 2002 according to the ACC Antique Furniture Index. Since then, the old furniture market has gone nowhere but down, down and then down some more.

At this point, prices for many high end pieces are off by as much as 50% to 80%. Low-end and mid-range furniture is doing even worse, if that’s possible. It can be difficult to give away some Victorian and Edwardian pieces these days.

I’m not going to delve into the many reasons why antique furniture has trended down for the past 15 plus years. Instead, I’m going to posit a simple, but radical idea: maybe 2020 is finally the year to buy antique furniture.

Now I’m going to restrict my analysis to the lower-to-mid range of the market here. I’m not talking about gilt-walnut French Louis XVI chairs or English George III mahogany breakfronts that (still) get auctioned at Christie’s and Sotheby’s for tens of thousands of dollars. Yes, those pieces might be good (or even great) buys at today’s depressed prices, but they are outside the scope of this article.

Instead I want to discuss the other end of the vintage furniture market – the old dressers and slightly banged up end tables that you might find at a thrift shop or antiques mall. These pieces have almost universally been neglected in today’s uncompromising trend towards ultra-modern interior decorating.

What has happened is that young people have largely been buying what is cheap and on-point, stylistically speaking. And nothing epitomizes this trend better than IKEA flat-pack furniture.

I feel compelled to use quotation marks around the word “furniture” in this context. In reality, these self-assembled, wood-like constructions hardly qualify as furniture. In order to keep price points low, IKEA furniture is made from the very cheapest materials – usually wood-chip pressboard or MDF with a thin wood (or plastic!) veneer applied overtop.

The result is a piece of furniture that looks alright as long as you don’t inspect it from any closer than the other side of the room. And, after a year or two of regular use, you can expect the veneer to start peeling off and the pressboard to sag. In short, the entire thing will begin to gradually melt back into the pile of wood dust and glue that it came from.

And then it will invariably end up sitting out at the street corner waiting for the trash collectors.

This is a problem. Many people, particularly younger people, are increasingly environmentally conscious. But flat-pack furniture flies in the face of this ethical obligation. It is everything that is wrong with our modern, consumption-oriented lifestyle. Do you really want to be the person that buys a piece of flat-pack “furniture”, only to throw it out after a few years when it ceases to be structurally sound or good looking?

Enter low-end antique furniture.

Vintage furniture has some major advantages over your average IKEA flat-pack furniture. First, it has green credentials. The stuff is generally at least 50 years old, and often 100 or even 150 years old. This is the ultimate reuse opportunity. Nobody is cutting down any virgin forests to put these pieces in your local thrift shop. No noxious industrial chemicals are being used to bind plantation-harvested wood-chips together here. Old furniture made a century ago from good, solid wood represents the pinnacle of sustainability.

And that leads to antique furniture’s next advantage. It lasts forever and looks good doing it. You don’t have to worry about your circa 1900 oak dining table falling apart because your drunk friend thought it would be funny to dance on top of it. Your 1930s Art Deco dresser is going to be just fine even if you slam the drawers shut every morning in a pre-coffee rage. Old furniture will survive serious amounts of abuse and last for centuries (provided you don’t try to kill it with fire).

You can also pick whatever look or style strikes your fancy. Anything from Victorian excess to Mid-Century minimalism is available in the marketplace. In fact, there is no reason why you can’t mix and match styles. A growing trend in interior decorating is eclecticism, combining pieces of wildly varying appearances in the same space. Even if most of your apartment, loft or townhouse is decorated in purely modern themes, there is no reason you can’t incorporate an antique statement piece for a truly stunning contrast.

But perhaps the best reason to choose antique furniture over pre-fab, flat-pack junk is the price. The antique furniture market has been hit so hard by the Great Recession that prices for some pieces are hardly any more expensive than their IKEA flat-pack equivalents. In other words, for the same price as a dumpy, self-assembled glue and particleboard nightmare, you might be able to afford a real piece of vintage furniture constructed from oak, cherry, walnut or even mahogany.

20th Century Vintage & Antique Furniture for Sale on eBay

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Don’t believe me?

Cruise on over to IKEA’s website and take a look. One of their dining tables will run you somewhere between $150 and $400. A living room entertainment stand goes for between $100 and $400. Even a simple end table will cost you $40 to $150. Of course, IKEA does sell even cheaper furniture, but it is the nastiest of the nasty – the kind of stuff more befitting dumpster divers than young bohemians.

In contrast, a quick perusal of eBay reveals a set of 4 matching solid walnut Mid-Century end tables for only $299. An antique quarter-sawn oak storage chest is available for $290. A sleek 1960s oak dresser is a measly $80. Any of these pieces would fit beautifully in a modern living space.

And if the thought of buying old furniture on eBay puts you off, there is every probability that similar treasures reside at your nearest flea market, yard sale or local antique shop. Craigslist is another possibility if you’re looking to source vintage furniture locally.

The quality of old furniture is far nicer than anything you can get in a flat-pack. Better yet, the prices are right where you’d hope they’d be: rock bottom. If antique furniture gets any cheaper, people will resort to turning it into firewood rather than selling it.

So is 2020 finally the year to buy antique furniture? I think the answer to that is a resounding “Yes”! The future is trending towards good quality, environmentally-friendly vintage furniture at affordable prices – something flat-pack IKEA junk can’t hope to match.

Read more thought-provoking Antique Sage trend articles here.

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Read in-depth Antique Sage investment guides here.

Can Jade Slabs Be a Precious Metal Alternative?

I’ve been obsessed with rough jade for a few years now. I’ve been particularly interested in jade slabs and jade blocks, which are roughed-out or semi-finished pieces of jade that are ready to be fashioned into finished goods. And this got me thinking.

Would it be possible to invest in jade slabs as a precious metal alternative? I know this sounds a bit crazy, but bear with me (if you’re the adventurous type).

In order to be considered a reasonable bullion alternative, an item must be a good store of value. But what makes something a good store of value?

It might be instructive to look at the premiere tangible asset that is already synonymous with that role: precious metals.

Gold and silver are elements possessing exceedingly fine properties. They are highly resistant to corrosion and oxidation. They are extremely malleable and ductile. They are excellent conductors of heat and electricity. And they are both quite beautiful.

Like the precious metals, jade also has superlative physical properties.

For those who don’t know, there are actually two kinds of true jade – nephrite jade and jadeite jade. Even though these stones have completely different chemical compositions, they possess very similar physical properties, which is why they are both classified as true jades.

All jade is exceptionally tough. In fact, jade is tougher than steel! This is one of the reasons that pre-historic people fashioned jade into axes, daggers and other useful tools.

In addition to being tough, jade is also renowned for its hardness. Nephrite sports a Mohs hardness of 6.0 to 6.5, while its near-twin jadeite is slightly harder at 6.5 to 7.0. Although these values don’t rival the hardness of rubies (9.0) or diamonds (10.0), jade is still harder than steel and cannot be scratched with a knife blade.

Jade will also take a very fine polish. The very best jades can be burnished to a mirror-like finish that looks eerily glass-like in its perfection. This makes it a superb material for carvings, jewelry and other decorative purposes.

Jade is a rather dense gem as well. Nephrite has a specific gravity of 2.90 to 3.05 gm/cm³, while jadeite ranges from 3.20 to 3.45 gm/cm³. Although it is not nearly as dense as gold or silver, jade is substantially denser than the average rock. This is because most ordinary rocks have a high quartz content, which gives them a specific gravity close to that of quartz – around 2.65 gm/cm³. It is one of those strange laws of the universe that valuable materials are, more often than not, high density materials.

However, interesting physical properties alone are not enough to endow a material with store of value status.

Durability, for example, is another prerequisite. Being highly corrosion resistant, gold and silver last pretty much forever. And they are more or less indestructible. If you are attempting to destroy precious metals, the best you can do is powder and scatter them, or dissolve them in impractically strong acids.

Jade once again proves itself very similar to gold and silver in terms of its durability. Archeologists regularly recover fully intact ancient Chinese and Meso-American jade artifacts that have been buried for thousands of years. If you were to expose a piece of jade to the elements for a few decades, it would remain curiously untouched (other than perhaps growing a bit of moss). If you were to deposit a specimen of jade in the corner of your basement for a couple centuries, it would fully retain its original appearance and properties.

And the fact that jade is tougher than steel means that the mythical greenstone is nearly impervious to mechanical damage. Prior to the mid 19th century, the native Maori people of New Zealand used jade clubs called “mere” to crack open the skulls of their enemies in tribal warfare. Their jade weapons almost always escaped these conflicts undamaged and can be viewed in museums today, hundreds of years later.

In other words, jade is as close to being eternal as any physical substance on earth can hope to get.

Rarity is another attribute that drives the desirability of jade, making it a compelling store of value and an intriguing bullion alternative. Jade is often found as boulders in alluvial deposits. And it isn’t uncommon for these water-worn boulders to weigh hundreds of pounds or even tons.

This might seem like a contradiction. How can anything found in the form of gigantic boulders be rare?

The answer is that most of those boulders are extremely low quality jade that isn’t fit for any kind of use. Gem quality jade has an unusual combination of saturated color, fine texture and high translucency that is extraordinarily rare in nature.

For example, a jade prospector may sort through tons of rough jade nodules in order to find a single pound of medium quality material. And that assumes he has been lucky! A Wyoming prospector called USMiner has posted a series of jade prospecting videos on YouTube that detail the challenges faced in looking for high quality jade. I’ve posted the second video in his informative “Green Gold” series below, which I highly suggest you watch:

But a material must possess other attributes besides durability in order to be considered a legitimate store of value.

For instance, a raw material must be usable. In other words, it must be possible to turn it into a useful or desirable finished good.

Jade fulfills this requirement with flying colors. Jade jewelry is ubiquitous in the modern world, from bracelets to pendants to earrings. Jade carving has grown into a cherished global tradition, with a thriving industry centered in China and Hong Kong joined by a fledgling one in New Zealand, Canada and the United States.

The remarkable stone has been treasured for many centuries – particularly in China, where “The Stone of Heaven” as it is known has long been a national obsession. Today, fine antique jade artifacts from the Chinese Ming (1368 to 1644 AD) and Qing (1644 to 1912 AD) Dynasties, as well as exquisitely carved pieces from the Indian Mughal Empire (1526 to 1857 AD), are avidly collected by wealthy jade enthusiasts worldwide.

Incidentally, historical or cultural significance is another important factor in determining whether an object is a good store of value. Gold and silver score superbly on this metric, having been equated with money for thousands of years in most societies.

While jade cannot compare with the legendary status of gold’s monetary cultural dominance, it is rapidly finding its own niche nonetheless. For instance, jade has been associated with high status and prosperity in East Asia for millennia. In China, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and parts of Southeast Asia, jade has no problem standing shoulder to shoulder with gold and silver as a valuable precious material.

Jade’s history in the West, however, has been somewhat shorter and more ambivalent. The Spanish conquistadors first encountered the exceptional green stone in Central America in the 16th century when they conquered the Aztec and Mayan civilizations. However, the Spanish were only interested in gold and silver, not jade. As a result, the precious stone lay at the periphery of European thought for another 400 years.

It was not until the late 19th and early 20th century that European jewelers began to experiment with jade – undoubtedly because of the growing influence of Orientalism in Western art. Since that time, jade has gradually been accepted as a bona fide gemstone all over the world.

Rough jade is typically found in rounded nodules with an opaque rind covering the stone. These nodules are usually formed via hydraulic action when a primary deposit is weathered into a river. However, somewhat coarser jade nodules can also be formed by wind-blown sand or other debris scouring their surfaces. When this happens, the stone is called a “slick” or “wind slick”.

Over the course of millions of years, the weathering process tends to erode away any lower quality material, leaving only the hardest, highest quality jade. This makes rough jade nodules from weathered secondary deposits particularly desirable.

While rock hounds have eagerly collected fine jade slicks and boulders for many decades, everyone else in the West largely ignored the precious “Stone of Heaven”. But as the Chinese economy boomed over the past 20 years, demand for jade has inexorably risen, driving prices ever higher. Meanwhile, Westerners have gradually become more familiar with jade’s many fine qualities. As a result, hard asset investors are beginning to realize that stacking rough jade like they stack gold or silver might be a very profitable, if unconventional, idea.

Unfortunately, the opaque rind on rough jade nodules means that you typically can’t see into the stone in order to assess its quality. Because of this quirk of the gemstone, jade is sometimes known in China as “the gambling stone“.

This is one of the big reasons why I like jade slabs and jade blocks as investment pieces. With semi-finished jade, the exterior rind has usually been either mostly or completely cut away, revealing the true quality of the material inside. This means that when you purchase rough jade slabs or blocks, you have the advantage of pretty much knowing exactly what you’re getting.

Some more traditional precious metal investors might be skeptical of investing in jade. And if you fall into that category, I completely understand your reluctance. Jade isn’t for buttoned-down conservative types. Like most alternative investments, the stone is rather illiquid – so you have to be committed for the long-term when you buy.

And yet when we look at its physical properties, jade compares quite favorably to the precious metals. It not only looks amazingly beautiful, but also has an unmatched combination of hardness and tenacity. This renders it one of the most durable substances on earth – easily the equal of gold and silver in this regard.

It is also a very rare gemstone, and getting rarer every day as demand skyrockets. The easy to mine river deposits have been exhausted within the past few decades, leaving nothing but small, remote alluvial deposits and difficult to access, hard-rock primary deposits.

Jade also has a rich history that has endowed the hallowed material with a special place in East Asian culture. The West is definitely playing catch-up here, but I think that Westerners will undoubtedly recognize the prized stone as a compelling store of value in the future. Jade is a luxury raw material par excellence – fit for the very finest jewelry, carvings and objets d’art.

Jade may not be gold or silver, but I believe that jade slabs and jade blocks are an underappreciated bullion alternative for the savvy tangible asset investor. For those who want to learn more about jade, please read my two investment guides titled “An Alluring Enigma – Rough Jade” and “A Jadeite & Nephrite Jade Investor’s Buying Guide“.

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