Cashing in, is only a matter of time.

All us small time scrappers hoarding would not even make a bump in the price of metals, either way... All hoard or all sell no difference in the world market for scrap metals.

I tend to network with the local scrappers and the group consensus right now is that they're holding / hoarding till the price comes back up. Most of them have done it for at least fifteen or twenty years now. They know their stuff. The pattern has been that prices drop in the fall and come back up in the spring.

That works as long as the economic landscape doesn't change.

I think that most of us get the connection between energy prices ( fuel prices ) and scrap prices. When the cost of a gallon of gas goes up the prices they pay at the scrap yard go up. When the cost of gas drops scrap prices drop.

See ... everything is interconnected. It's all about understanding how those connections work.

The next step is to look into the future. It's all just guesswork. I don't have a crystal ball or anything but it looks to me like fuel prices are still dropping. What i'm looking for is for the price to hit bottom & stabilize. When that happens it's likely that scrap prices will stabilize too. (I don't know when that will happen.)

It's all probabilities. You have to ask yourself ... " what's the most likely thing ?"

Is it likely that gas will go back up to 3.80 $ a gallon anytime soon ? If it does, then copper might go back up over 3.00 $ a pound.

I was hanging on to brass waiting for the price to rise. That was a few months ago and it started building up to the point it was taking over. I decided, "screw it!" I will turn and burn. The chance of making more money a bit down the road should not keep me from cashing in a profit that will help me now. You could wait two months and the price drop by half, or you could cash in and bankroll the next 20 scrap purchases.

Storage is not a problem and it does not make sense to pay the scrap yard to take my metal. Therefore, those that sell now will only make this stash more valuable when the bowels of scrap metal relieve themselves.

All this talk of hoarding, stockpiling, whatever........

What if the market stays down longer than you can stay solvent while your "hoarding" your stash? Your burning through working capitol and living expenses while you hope and dream for higher prices. Great way to go bankrupt. That business plan is futile. You might want to work on adjusting your business model to cope with this instead.

Do yourself a favor and look at the historical copper chart for the last 30 years. There was a 15 year stretch where spot never broke over $1.50 per pound.

Originally Posted by mikeinreco

problem is I live in the city.......Storage costs money......This is where I am now..........Do I pay to store more commodities or sell a little at a time.........For instance my storage building costs $131 a month......... thats $1500 a year........Is it worth that to store copper..........will the difference in price make up for the cost of storage.........Sure if I lived on a farm with 100 acres it would be no issue........That's the problem you are going to have trying to get people to hold metals..........

I've got some totes that are 10"x12"x15" that hold about a cubic foot. When filled with stripped copper wire they can hold about 65 - 70 lbs. Actually if I were to compact the wire they would weigh a lot more. In fact, a cubic foot of sold copper weighs approximately 560 lbs. http://www.coyotesteel.com/assets/im...rcubicfoot.pdf If you do the math on how much copper you could fit in a small storage locker, you'll see you don't need a lot of space to hoard a very valuable amount of copper.

Well every one has there own opinion on the storing of material, my opinion is I buy it I sell it it has worked for me for quite a few years, thinking or better yet hopeing the market will turn back to the highs of the last couple of years is a gamble that in my opinion is no way to run a business, copper in the scrap metal business is by volume and value the most precious metal we deal with and can like mentioned in a prior post a way to go into bankruptcy, buying this Commodie for a price gambling it will go up in value just does not make sence to me. Being a former yard owner I can tell you you never gamble with the highest price metals by hoarding them recipe for disaster. My advise to you would be if you want to gable , gamble on items that contain copper, perfect example electric motors, an item that if copper goes back up the coper bearing motors would also go up so you are not tiring up lots of capital and the amount of money you are gambling with would be a hole lot less. Just one more point I would like to make copper has a way of disappearing especially if a few people know you are storing it, so proced with caution best of luck.

If you knew what the price of metal would be in 6 month or a year you would just bet your cash on the futures market and not get your hands dirty picking up metal. Instead of hoarding just buy and sell at a profit and worry about volume.

I take a pickup load of cases in whenever it's full. If prices are low, they go to my yard in town. If they are higher, I'll go out of state to a much larger yard.

My loads are small enough that they won't fluctuate more than $10 between good prices and bad prices.

As for the valuables, definitely. I'm hanging on to all of the "good stuff." I have the space, and the way that I see it, prices won't go down any more. What do I have to lose?

It's a gamble, of course.

These times seem to be one of those moments when the old saying comes true.
NEVER put all your eggs in one basket.
Put your normal scrapping methods on the back burner and fall back on other thinks you know and can do.

if your going to pay to sit buy a safe and cash in everything and use 50% and buy gold or silver or even copper bars and sit on them that same amount of money could fit in the palm of your hand and your still taking the same % of risk on the highs and lows in a years time but all the work is now done and you can move more stuff into that space in the mean time