Yesterday morning I woke up early and logged onto my brokerage account. I had a couple trades I wanted to execute and I also wanted to check a couple of positions.
This is pretty normal for me, as I’m logging in and out of different accounts multiple times a week.
Only this time, I couldn’t login. The brokerage was having some technical difficulties and they only way I could access my account was to call on the phone. Well, we all know how that goes… you end up waiting on hold listening to elevator music.
For me, this was a major inconvenience. Time matters when you are trading stocks, so I hung up the phone and tried to login to a different account I have through a different brokerage.
And that one was having problems too!
Really, it was pure coincidence, but it drove home the point to me…
What would happen if my money in a bank was inaccessible?
It could be due to an internal problem that the bank experiences, or it could be something larger in scale like a banking holiday or even a full bank collapse.
Now, I’m not predicting anything like that. The reality is that much of the modern financial world has many safeguards to prevent large scale financial disasters.
And that’s what everyone thought previous to the 2008 housing market crash, where many banks started to go under for negligent lending.
The point is that “the thing” that will cause a major hiccup in the financial system is unknown. That’s the whole point. If we knew what the next “thing” was, then we could prevent it.
Anyway… back to yesterday morning where I couldn’t login into a couple of my brokerage accounts…
Nothing bad happened. My accounts weren’t liquidated or hacked or anything like that. But, it gave me a quick reminder of how important it is to hold precious metals. Gold and silver mainly.
Now, I’ve written many times about why you should hold gold and silver. Earlier this week I talked about how the next threat – inflation – can be combated with holding precious metals.
I know that I sleep more comfortable at night knowing that at least a certain portion of my wealth sits in gold and silver.
If you are looking to start investing in precious metals, or you’re simply adding to your existing holdings, I recommend calling Austin at David Hall Rare Coins. You can call him at 800-759-7575 or email him at austin@davidhall.com
Be aware that your order should be at least $1500, as you will not pay any sales tax over that amount.
As a disclosure, I don’t get any referral fee or any type of business out of making this recommendation. In fact, I recommend them because I have been a happy customer in the past and will continue to make purchases in the future.
If you’re still curious about precious metals and don’t want to make the leap into purchasing yet, then here is something you can do: Go to your local coin dealer, collectable shop or jewelry store and start asking questions. Most dealers should give you a fair rundown of what you should buy, what you should look for and what you need to know.
