Royal Canadian Mint considering marketing silver ETRs

The overwhelming demand for its new Canadian Gold Reserves’ Exchange Traded Receipts has got the Royal Canadian Mint considering launching a similar product for silver.

In an interview with the Globe and Mail Tuesday, Royal Canadian Mint CEO Ian Bennett said a number of potential investors–who attended a road show to launch the Mint’s wildly successful Cdn$600 million IPO for gold exchange-traded receipts-expressed their interest in a Canadian Silver Reserves Exchange Traded Receipt.

The Royal Canadian Mint’s gold Exchange Traded Receipt IPO was initially expected to raise C$250 million at C$20 per share, but raised an astounding C$600 million in only three weeks, thanks to strong institutional and individual investor demand. Thirty million ETRs were issued at an initial price of C$20.

Each ETR represents ownership in actual, physical gold bullion weighing about 0.0109 ounces of gold with no middleman.

In a statement issued late last month, Bennett observed, “By selling a security representing direct ownership to the physical gold stored at the Mint, we have creatively leveraged our 100-year-old gold refining and storage expertise to help investors confidently own gold.”

Surprisingly, U.S. customers are, by far, the largest buyers of Royal Canadian Mint gold and have been since 2008 although the U.S. Mint is the number gold bullion supplier to the world.

During the gold ETR road show, Bennett told the Globe and Mail, “A lot of people…expressed an interest in silver. That is something that the fertile minds of our bankers and the people at the Mint are going to be looking at.”

However, the silver product would require a lot more room to store the silver bullion equivalent than is currently required to store gold bullion equivalent for the gold ETR program. – Mineweb

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Posted by Silver Guru on Dec 14 2011. Filed under Silver Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry