Interview with Darryl Ho, SilverForMalaysia.com
We managed to catch up with Darryl Ho, the person behind SilverForMalaysia.com and had a quick discussion over PM investing.
Q: Hi Darryl Ho. Can you share with us your early days in investing in Silver? What brings you into investing silver?
I’m a person who always look out for long term investment. I started with property investment and over the years has provide good and stable return. Then a friend has recommend me to Gold investment, back then it was only about USD1000 /oz. With that, I started researching about commodity investment and found that people in China, India, US, Canada and even Middle East have been vastly investing in Gold. And particularly the Americans has already started with Silver as well cause of the affordable price. There goes my journey for gold and silver.
Q: What made you started your own trading?
The demand. There’s lots of Malaysians are aware of silver investment but they do not know where to purchase in Malaysia and it’s quite troublesome to buy online from overseas as well. Lots of things need to take into consideration like the import and sales tax that takes up 15%. It’s not worth to get a few oz from overseas as the shipping and insurance are very expensive. I started to get in a few tubes each time and sell to friends and family, that eventually lower down the cost when you get in bulk. When the demand gets higher, I decided to come out with the website and start to sell to public 🙂
Q: Why did you opted to trade on blogshop instead of Lelong.my or Ebay.com.my?
I felt that having a own website provides more flexibility in controlling the content that you want to publish. I wanted to have a more comprehensive set of silver investment guide to create awareness among Malaysians by including a store for purchasing as well. Furthermore, I think response is not that good in Malaysia by selling silver in ebay or lelong. I tried that for a couple of months but it doesn’t work out. That reason also contribute to creating a own blogshop 🙂
Q: Of all your product, which are your best selling items?
I would say Canadian Maple is the all time top seller. Subsequently follow by Chinese Panda and also Australian Kookaburra.
Q: What are the risk involved in shipping silver coins with local courier? Have you encountered any bad experiences?
I’d heard lots of stories that there’s lost of packaging using local courier like PosLaju but I’m lucky that I’d did about 3000 ++ packages so far and all the packages have arrived safely to the buyers. I think it’s always good to have a proper packaging. That at least would not attract much attention during the delivery process.
Q: What is your weirdest order or customer so far?
LOL. That’s a difficult question. Put it this way, there’s neither weird orders nor customers that I’d encountered. But there some funny occurrences. I’m not Chinese ed and mandarin is some sort a challenge when it comes to some unfamiliar vocab 🙂 I have some clients who calls and ask for pricing for silver coins like australian koala, chinese panda in Mandarin. I really have no idea on how those animals are called in Mandarin and that really put me in quite an awkward situation :S But thanks to all these clients and now I can communicate fluently and named those coins in Mandarin perfectly 🙂
Q: You have been in silver since 2009. What differences you see now comparing to when you just started?
To be specific, I was more into Gold in 2009 and very much into silver starting 2010. It was great experience in silver investment in Malaysia in this 2-3 years time. You can see people mindset started to change and are more willing to look into an alternative for gold which is silver. I would say the trend start to boom end of 2010 when people start to realize that the return of silver is about 80%. You now have people selling silver in forum, facebook and lots of blogshop as well in Malaysia. It’s a wonderful thing to see it mushrooming in just a few months.
Q: Lastly, what are your tips to a new silver investor?
I think it’s good to have a good research and understand how silver investment works. Silver investment is not entirely the same with Gold because it’s still an industrial asset that depends on the demand and supply market. The price is much more volatile. It’s good to buy in small amount and have a cost averaging for it. It’s better to do it for long term rather than looking for quick profit from it.
Daryl Ho – silver investor cum trader who believes that commodifty (gold & silver) is the invesment that will never die!
http://www.silverformalaysia.com
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