I recently read a new book "Good as Gold: How to Profit from the coming boom in copper". The book claimed that copper is running out because China, and India are using so much of it; as this continues copper prices will keep going up and up. Should we all be stashing our pennies?
Pennies are mostly zinc. Since they're just coated with copper, you're going to need a lot of pennies!
That's mentioned in the book. The point is that even these modern day zinc plated pennies are 85% copper. The point is that a small investor can still toss $10,000 at the copper market and get a good return. I'm thinking conservatively based upon the facts I read. In five to ten years that investment is likely to be worth 20 to 30k. If the book is wrong, guess what you still have $10,000 right? You should check it out. http://www.amazon.com/Good-Gold-pro...8&qid=1418142633&sr=8-2&keywords=Good+as+gold
The pre-1982 pennies are 100 percent copper. The new pennies are 85% copper and 15% zinc. I learned all this in the book by the way. I'm considering selling some gold, and putting the proceeds into copper just to see what will happen. I've had these Krugerrands since my grandfather passed ten years ago. They haven't budged, but they sure are pretty to look at.
well like turt said, most pennies are no longer copper and even if you were lucky enough to get some older ones that were you can't just take them in a bag to the scrapper and say give me some money on this. It is against the law to melt down pennies or any coins and do something like that. Now with that being said one thing to consider is you can collect coins. there are some coins that pay quite well, especially older ones. I used to save any wheat pennies that I received because they were older then. They are way older now. Almost all wheat pennies are worth more then 1 cent. If you have these have a reputable coin dealer take a look. I understand that a rare wheat penny can be worth $10 or more. Now before you write this off, it is still possible to get these in change if you use cash. I received one just recently, I was surprised it has been awhile.
Old pennies are 95% copper and the new ones are 2.5% copper. I'm not sure where the book is getting its information. There's no way copper will be valued so I high in 5-10 years. For one, the use of copper wire in networking is slowly dissipating as wireless and fiber technology take over. While heatsinks may use copper, they'll likely move to all aluminum if the price is too high. And why use copper if it starts closing in on nickel. Nickel is a better conductor... Also, copper is very easily recycled. So while it's use in cars and buildings may keep the demand up, it's renewable. At the current time, copper is 3x more expensive than aluminum and nickel is over twice as expensive as copper.
The penny aspect has been addressed. One thing I'll add is avoid the copper bullion nonsense. Most are priced insanely above spot. I've seen some ten times the current rate. They look neat, I grant, but are not a winning investment. At least in any large scale sense.
I don't think that a penny could be worth a dollar unless it was a special penny or an antique. I believe that pennies are only copper plated now, so even the weight in metal would not be worth very much.
If you want more copper in your pennies, maybe you should go for the older ones. I know Canadian pennies made around 50 years ago contain tons of copper, so if you can manage to poke around for a few thousand of those you should be pretty well off on that market.
The wheat pennies are the ones you want to collect, some can still be found in your change but its rare. I would rather search for high silver content coins than copper.