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One of the quirks of alternative investing is that you end up researching some pretty strange things.  For example, I recently embarked on a silver bullion buying spree.  But that isn’t the unusual part of my story.  The weird part is what I stumbled upon when I looked for a simple and reliable silver counterfeit detection method.  I discovered a device called the CCT silver slide.

What is a CCT silver slide?

Simply put, a CCT silver slide is a quick and easy way to test silver bars and coins for fakes or counterfeits.  The bullion market has been hit by an absolute flood of counterfeit Chinese silver coins and bars over the past decade.  The worst part of this plague is that China’s manufacturing prowess has allowed it to make increasingly sophisticated fakes, some of which are impossible to distinguish from genuine pieces by looks alone.

Almost every bullion piece you can imagine has been imitated by the Chinese, including very popular products such as American silver eagles, Australian Perth Mint products and Sunshine Minting silver bars.  So having an effective way to weed out counterfeit silver is absolutely vital for the precious metal stacker.

How does a CCT silver slide work?

The device works on the twin principals of diamagnetism and electrical conductivity.  These create an effect known as the eddy current brake.  If you place a very strong magnet on an inclined silver surface, it will only slide down it very slowly.  Likewise, a silver coin placed on a large, inclined magnet will also slide quite slowly.  Most other metals will not behave this way, even if they are plated with a layer of pure silver.  Ferrous metals will stick to the magnet while cupro-nickel, brass and zinc alloys will descend quickly, with little or no hesitation.

This video gives a good demonstration of a CCT silver slide in action:

My adventures in buying a CCT silver slide

My story begins a few months ago when I began expanding my silver holdings.  Even though I was buying from reputable dealers, I soon realized that it would be wise to spend some money on diagnostic equipment.  Once I discovered the simplicity and usefulness of a CCT silver slide, I knew I had to have one.

Now this is where things got interesting.  CCT is an acronym that stands for “Cyber Curtain Twitcher”, a pseudonym for a gentleman silver stacker who resides in the United Kingdom.  This colorful man has an unusual YouTube channel where he and an assistant torture and destroy counterfeit coins in a myriad of gruesome ways.  I found his quirky brand of humor to be quite entertaining.

CCT is the personal creator of each and every one of his eponymous silver slides.  Yes, there are other silver slides currently on the market.  But to the best of my knowledge, Cyber Curtain Twitcher was the very first person to conceive of the silver slide idea as a simple, non-destructive testing method to distinguish fake silver coins from genuine ones.  He also constructs his slides to much higher standards than his competitors (which is obvious if you read through the build quality section further down in this article).

I wanted the best of the best – an original CCT silver slide.

2025 Update

CCT now offers his eponymous silver slides for sale directly via eBay!  I have a link to his products towards the bottom on this article.  This supersedes the section of the article I wrote below, but I’ve left it in for historical accuracy.

However, CCT has no dedicated website or formal sales platform for his product.  In addition, there was only one way to contact the man – through the comments section of his YouTube channel.  When I did, he informed me that the U.S. distribution of his slides is exclusively handled by an associate named “Mr. Vegiita” (another pseudonym, of course).

At this point, things began feeling a little cloak and dagger.

Apparently the only way to get in touch with Mr. Vegiita is also through his YouTube channel comments.  When I contacted him this way, Mr. Vegiita informed me that as soon as he received a slide shipment from CCT, he would post a video advertising them for sale.  I just needed to post my comment requesting a slide below one of those videos.

Then the waiting game began.

About a week later, Mr. Vegiita finally uploaded a video stating that some slides were available.  Unfortunately, my YouTube notification didn’t get pushed through, so I was a bit slow in discovering this.  I rushed to Mr. Vegiita’s YouTube channel and left my comment, only to discover that I was too late!  All of the slides had been sold out in the 24 hours since he had posted the video.

But I would not be denied.

Mr. Vegiita offered to put me on a waiting list – a proposal that I readily agreed to.  After waiting a couple more weeks, I received a notification letting me know he had just gotten a few more silver slides in stock in my choice of oak, utile or idigbo hardwood at $80 each on a first come, first served basis.  I sent him the money via PayPal before I even found out if my preferred wood was still available in the desperate hope that shoving the cash into his hands (shut up and take my money!) would obligate him to deliver me something.

Luckily, the utile wood version I wanted was still up for grabs!  Utile, otherwise known as Sipo Mahogany, is an African tropical hardwood exported primarily from Cameroon, Ghana and Congo.  Utile is a beautiful, dark reddish-brown color with a pronounced grain pattern that looks a lot like Honduran Mahogany.  This is because Sipo Mahogany is actually a distant relative of the Swietenia (true mahogany) genus.

Mr. Vegiita was a man of his word and promptly mailed my slide, which I received just a few days later.

I had finally got hold of an elusive CCT silver slide!  And it was everything I dreamed it would be.  But that isn’t surprising considering the attention to detail that Cyber Curtain Twitcher puts into every slide.

CCT silver slide build quality

CCT handcrafts his silver slides from a variety of fine temperate and tropical hardwoods in his UK workshop.  The slide portion is constructed from a series of ultra-high strength rare earth magnets laid in parallel.

These N52 neodymium magnets are the most powerful commercially available magnets in the world.  In fact, they are so powerful that people with pacemakers are advised to handle the CCT silver slide (or any other product that contains rare earth magnets) with care, because its magnetic field could potentially disrupt an implanted cardiac device.

CCT then adds a soft felt layer over the magnets so that your bullion won’t get scratched as it slides down the ramp.  He finishes the wood frame with a durable, yet attractive 5-coat melamine lacquer finish.  Finally, he laser engraves a logo on the back that reads “CCT Silver Slide” to brand it as one of his handmade originals.

CCT Silver Slides for Sale on eBay

(This is an affiliate link for which I may be compensated)

The limitations of a CCT silver slide

Of course, no single precious metal counterfeit detection method is foolproof.  And the CCT silver slide is no exception to this rule.  A silver-plated slug of pure copper (which is also diamagnetic and highly conductive) will slide down a rare earth magnet ramp in much the same way as a real silver coin.  Pure gold will also behave like pure silver, although this is generally a non-issue because no one would bother to counterfeit a low-value silver coin by silver plating a much more expensive gold coin.

A CCT silver slide also can’t readily distinguish between silver coins of different finenesses.  Although a coin or bar of lower silver content should traverse the slide almost imperceptibly faster than a higher purity one, you would need a stopwatch to have any hope of telling the difference.  In effect, a 50% or 80% silver coin will behave very similarly to a 90% or 99.9% silver coin (especially if the alloying metal is copper).

In addition, a silver coin struck in very high relief will slide down the ramp faster than expected because there is less surface area in direct contact with the magnets.  Therefore the eddy current braking effect does not have an opportunity to fully engage.

And while a CCT silver slide is the perfect size for testing fractional silver and 1 troy ounce coins and bars, it won’t work well on larger silver bullion.  Yes, it can accommodate 2 troy ounce bars and rounds, but once you get much larger than that you are better off using a small, button-shaped rare earth magnet directly on the test item’s surface.

Because of these (admittedly minor) drawbacks I advise every silver stacker to use at least two different counterfeit detection methods when buying silver bullion.  The ping test, weight test, density test and acid test are all viable alternatives.  A CCT silver slide combined with one of these other, complementary tests will eliminate practically every fake silver coin or bar that you might encounter.

On the whole, I would highly recommend an original CCT silver slide (or, barring that, a small rare earth magnet) to anyone interested in purchasing silver bullion.  CCT – that mysterious silver stacker from the United Kingdom – makes a great product at a great price point.  The money you save avoiding fake silver is well worth the cost.

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There’s an old British financial saying: “safe as houses”.  It means that a financial endeavor is risk free, or nearly so.  Of course, anyone who lived through the 2008-2009 housing crisis in the U.S. might take issue with this wisdom.  Before that debacle, U.S. housing prices hadn’t declined on a nationwide basis since the Great Depression in the 1930s.

It sort of makes it tough to take the adage seriously.

But maybe we don’t need to abandon the maxim, so much as update it for the modern age.  After all, houses are tangible assets, and I strongly suspect that assets you can touch, hold and keep in your physical possession will do surprisingly well in the years to come.  But if houses, which have shown vulnerability in the face of widespread property bubbles, aren’t the tangible asset to own, then what is?

Here’s my working theory.  Maybe vintage watches are the place to stow a bit of your hard-earned money instead of a stodgy old savings account.

Many people might be surprised by this bit of unconventional investment wisdom.  After all, a savings account has traditionally been one of the safest places a person can keep his excess cash.  So why in the world would I think that vintage watches would be better?

Well, financial risk can come in many different dimensions.  For example, with a savings account there is the risk that your bank will go bust and be unable to pay back your deposit.  In these instances, a national bank insurance fund (like the FDIC in the U.S.) will usually pick up the slack, making good on deposits up until a predetermined monetary limit.

So no, I don’t expect many people to lose money in failing banks.  After the 2008-2009 financial crisis, regulators demanded that banks in the U.S. maintain far higher reserve levels than they had previously.  So even in another financial crisis, I find it unlikely that many U.S. banks would fail.

No promises if you live in Europe, though, where your banks are levered to the moon!  In this instance, you might well find yourself relying on the tender mercies of your financial regulators or politicians to ensure that you are made whole.

However, there is another major risk when you place your money in a savings account – inflation.  Inflation gradually erodes the purchasing power of any cash or deposits, including savings accounts.  Now under most circumstances, your bank will pay you interest to offset this inflationary loss, along with just a little bit more so that your account gains value in real (inflation-adjusted) terms.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in normal times.  Instead, we live in an era of financial repression, where bank regulators use depositors as a tool to recapitalize the national banking system.  This comes in the form of bank deposit rates on your savings account that are below the prevailing rate of inflation.

Every month your money stays on deposit in your savings account, you lose just a little bit of purchasing power.  This lost purchasing power is happily vacuumed up by your local bank so that it can keep on doing whatever it is that banks do (which seems to be crashing the global economy about once every ten years, as far as I can tell).

But vintage wristwatches give you a safe, tangible asset that you can hold in your hands (or wear on your wrist)!  The market for vintage watches has been going from strength to strength over the past decade, and I believe this trend is likely to continue.  The possibility of loss is very low, assuming you choose high quality watches and pay a fair price for them.

So the question then becomes: can carefully selected vintage wristwatches outperform the return you expect to get on your savings account?

Now, I will admit I am a bit of a pessimist when it comes to bank deposit rates.  In most developed nations, short-term interest rates (like the kind banks pay on deposits) are embarrassingly low right now.

For instance, the European Central Bank is keeping short-term rates pegged at 0.25%, the Bank of England is holding them at 0.75% and the Bank of Japan is satisfied with a miserly -0.1%.  Only the U.S. Federal Reserve has managed to decisively move off the zero bound with a current range of 2.25% to 2.50%.

These rates are unlikely to get too much higher before we enter another synchronized global recession.  Central banks will react to this development by driving short-term interest rates down to zero (or possibly below).  At that point, even a lowly 1.0% annual interest rate on your savings account will seem like a sweet, distant dream.

But let’s generously assume, for the sake of argument, that you can score an average 1.0% return on your savings account over the next 10 years.  This means that if you park $10,000 in your bank today, it would grow to $11,046 over the next decade.

I’m going to be blunt here.  The vintage watches I list below will almost certainly beat this return, and most likely handily.  I think these 3 categories of vintage watches could easily achieve an annual appreciation of 2.5% to 5.0% over the same timeframe.  This would transmute your $10,000 stash into anywhere between $12,801 and $16,289 over 10 years – an increase over our theoretical low-interest savings account of $1,395 to $4,883.

And who couldn’t use an extra $2,000 or $3,000?

So what are these magical, better than savings account watches?  I have a few unusual choices in mind.

1) Vintage Rolex Oysterquartz Watches

Everyone has heard of Rolex watches – even people who don’t know anything about vintage wristwatches.  Rolex makes beautiful, robust and thoroughly desirable luxury watches.

But did you know that there is a Rolex watch that nobody talks about?  Yes, it’s true!  Shockingly, there is a type of vintage Rolex that is completely overlooked in today’s secondary market.  I’m speaking about the Rolex Oysterquartz series, which was produced from 1977 until 2001.

Many collectors ignore these horological treasures because, as the name implies, they have quartz movements.  But an Oysterquartz is no ordinary quartz movement.  It is an in-house, high-end, super-accurate quartz movement that Rolex laboriously developed over many years of research and testing.  Better yet, it is estimated that only 25,000 of these unique quartz movements were ever created, making them far rarer than many other Rolex calibers.

Although I don’t believe that most vintage quartz wristwatches make good investments, Rolex Oysterquartz watches are a clear exception to this rule.

I think it is inevitable that the long neglected Oysterquartz will one day be recognized for the gem it is, driving prices up.  But until then, you can get Rolex Oysterquartz wristwatches in stainless steel or two-tone cases for just $3,000 to $5,000.  This is substantially less than what similar Rolexes with mechanical movements go for.

2) 14K & 18K Solid Gold Dress Watches from the 1960s and 1970s

I also like vintage, solid 14 and 18 karat gold dress watches from the 1960 and 1970s.  These classic timepieces were produced by the leading Swiss watch companies of the time, such as Audemars Piguet, Omega, IWC, Longines and Vacheron Constantin.

Vintage gold dress watches simply drip with aesthetic flair and Mad Men zeitgeist.  And, of course, they all sport finely finished, fully jeweled mechanical movements that are works of art in their own right.

Yet prices are still unbelievably low for these enchanting vintage watches, probably because gold dress watches are out of style right now.  Some of the rarer models from the most esteemed makers might run you $3,000 or $4,000.  Slightly more common, but still desirable specimens can be found as low as $2,000, or even a bit less!  That represents a remarkably good alternative for your extra cash compared to parking it in a low-interest savings account.

I recently featured a stunning 18K gold IWC men’s watch from the 1960s in one of my Spotlight posts.  It was unbelievably inexpensive at only $1,720, and sold quite quickly.  But there are many other bargains to be had in this segment of the vintage watch market.

3) Vintage Must de Cartier Tank Watches

Cartier is famous for their iconic, rectangular tank wristwatches.  But the prices for these covetable luxury timepieces can be mind-numbingly high.

Luckily, Cartier produced a line of elegant, entry-level luxury tank watches between 1977 and the mid 2000s under the Must de Cartier nameplate.  They were made from vermeil, which is solid sterling silver coated in a generous, 20 micron thick layer of gold.  In addition, the discerning watch enthusiast can choose between high quality manual wind or quartz movements.

Stylish Must de Cartier tank wristwatches perfectly straddle the fine line between avant-garde fashion watch and traditional luxury timepiece.

But the best thing about these perennially popular watches is their price.  Specimens in good-to-mint condition can generally be found in the $800 to $1,800 range, meaning that even a horological aficionado with a beer budget can afford to own a genuine Cartier Tank.

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