Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.
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| Just After This Morning's High Tide Fort Pierce South Jettty Beach Cam - South Beach Zoom from SurfGuru.com. |
It's cool out there this morning after another cold front came through.
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| Surf Chart from SurfGuru.com. |
Looks like there could be a nice bump in the surf about seven days out, but being so far out, there is a good chance it disappears before actually getting here. We'll see.
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The price of silver rose by more than 142 percent for the year 2025. In the first two weeks of 2026, silver’s price jumped by almost another 30 percent from where it was on December 31, 2025. Over the course of last year, the price of gold soared more than 64 percent, platinum zoomed more than 127 percent, and palladium gained over 74 percent.
The outstanding performance of silver in particular was due to the difficulty of manufacturers being able to find the silver inventories required to fabricate their industrial products... It is an essential component of a wide range of products, including electric vehicle batteries, cell phones, weapons systems, and sanitary food processing equipment...
However, quickly rising silver prices are disrupting industries that handle high-purity forms of the metal. That includes products such as ingots and coins.
In the fall of 2025, higher silver prices had prompted people to liquidate such a large quantity of silver items that multiple refiners started to build up backlogs of metal to process... Refineries were operating at capacity, so they had the economic incentive to focus on processing only the purest forms of incoming metal to maximize their output.
Although almost all refiners are now accepting lower purity forms of silver to process, there may be a lag in turnaround time of at least a couple of days to maybe two weeks to obtain an assay of metal submitted for melting and refining...
Here is the link for the entire article.
Price Volatility and Capacity Problems with Precious Metals and Numismatics - Numismatic News
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In my 1/16 report I talked about decision strategies. Today I'll elaborate on the strategy I recommended, which might be called the Maximum Expected Value strategy.
Basically, that strategy considers the probability of finds of various values. Putting it into equation form, it would be something like Expected Value = (probability outcome 1 times value of outcome 1) + probability outcome 2 times value of outcome 2 + (probability of outcome 3 times value of 3) and continuing for as many different outcomes as you want to consider.
In academic studies the outcomes are limited to a relatively small number and the values of each outcome is defined. To apply game theory to metal detecting requires some adaptation, because the various outcomes will not be so neatly defined. For example, instead of being a precise outcome, each outcome might be an entire category, such as modern coins, jewelry, perhaps including silver, modest gold, and valuable gold, shipwreck coins, or even caches. The values will often be the economic value of the finds, again a range instead of a precise value, but that isn't always necessarily the case.
To illustrate the logic of the strategy, it can be put in the form of an equation. Lets say you have detected a particular site several times and always found a good number of coins, usually somewhere around $1.50 in total value. At that site you also occasionally find a gold band or some modest but not real expensive piece of gold. Your estimate might be that you get one of those about every fifth hunt and the average value would be around $150, so that would be 0.20 (the probability) times $150 (the typical value estimate. And there is virtually no chance of finding anything really expensive at that site. So EV = (1 times 1.50) plus ( .20 times $150.00) = 1.50 plus 37.5 = 39. You could compare that expected value with the EV of other sites, which might produce different finds and have different probabilities and values. If you evaluate such sites according to the EV numbers, you would choose the highest EV sites first because that site would be expected to produce the highest value of finds over time.
So how do you know the expected probability of a find? You develop an estimate based upon your past experience at the site, and you can revise that probability estimate as you gather more experience. On first visits, you might have some guess, perhaps based upon observations or research.
You don't have to be so precise. It is an estimate - hopefully a good estimate and one that improves with experience. The basic idea is to consider the types of finds, probabilities of each and the value of each type. Consider, for example, another site in a very exclusive private club beach where you find very little change, an occasional gold band, but every once in a while something very expensive like an expensive diamond ring or expensive watch. The high value item would shift the equation a lot even if the probability is much lower than the less valuable categories. From an economic perspective, high value finds, even if they are very low probability, really have a huge impact on the total expected value. I talked about that before.
While modern coin values will not provide much economic incentive more frequent finds provide another kind of value. They provide information about the distribution of items on a beach, They also might keep you interested while awaiting the high value but rare finds.
Common finds usually aren't worth much. There is an exponential increase in value with rarity. Very valuable items are rare. The exponential effect of rarity on price is huge. A mint condition coin is much more valuable than one in poor condition. You seldom find a mint condition coin.
Here is a little chart I once made to illustrate that.
Going left to right, rarity increases while the value decreases. Or to flip it around, as finds become less common, they become more valuable.
