Mind boggling

For various reasons (okay, well, organisational penury), I've been haunting the pages of Ebay, mostly buying up bits of kit for work. Firewalls I don't know how to program, packetshapers I know go wrong regularly, that sort of thing.

But I've been amazed at the prices people are willing to pay for some stuff - more than it costs new, in many cases.

But I've just be staggered to see a 1oz palladium coin on sale for about £15,000. I had no idea what palladium was worth (although I did know it was on the pricey side) but Google is my friend and you can buy a 1oz ingot online for about $670, so on the order of £400. So that's, what, roughly 40 times the bullion value. For a not very attractive picture.

But is this a low issue coin thing? Well, okay, maybe. So I checked on the Royal Mint site. You've got the Queen's Diamond Jubilee platinum £5 coin - 94g of platinum for £6,400. Now platinum is about $1630 a troy ounce at the moment (slightly cheaper than gold, which surprised me - but the world has changed since I last worried about precious metal prices) - which works out, for a commemorative coin of only 250 issued, at a mark up of about 110%. Which seems rather more sensible. And you do get a nice box to keep it in.