APMEX Review: Premiums, Buybacks and Where It Beats JM Bullion

This section establishes what APMEX is as a legal matter, who owns it, how large it is, and which regulator stands behind you when something goes wrong. The answer to the last is that none does, because nothing APMEX sells you is a security.

The company

APMEX is American Precious Metals Exchange, founded in 2000 with a single storefront in Edmond, Oklahoma, and headquartered in Oklahoma City. It put its catalog online in 2004, one of the first bullion dealers to sell over the web rather than over a counter, and that head start is most of the reason it is still the biggest. On August 25, 2026 it marked its twenty-sixth year with the best-dated version of its own scale claims: grown from four people to more than 500 employees, more than 2 million customers served, and more than $18B of gold, silver, platinum, palladium and numismatic product delivered since 2000 (APMEX, GlobeNewswire, August 25, 2026). Claimed and unaudited, but dated. A separate 130 million ounce figure sits on APMEX’s about pages without a date; treat it as claimed and undated.

For current scale, the only independent estimate we found is from the e-commerce database ECDB, which puts apmex.com revenue at $4.56B in 2025, up 55% to 60% on 2024, with 99% of it generated in the United States, a projected 15% to 20% increase for 2026, and first place in the US bullion e-commerce market (ECDB retailer profile, read September 2026). Treat it as modelled, not audited. APMEX is privately held and publishes no financial statements; the CB Insights, Owler and PitchBook profiles carry estimated bands and no access to the books either.

Who owns it

This is the part most reviews skip. In September 2023, MKS PAMP Group made a strategic investment in APMEX; the terms were never disclosed and no party has published the size of the stake (Scottsdale Mint, September 7, 2023; Lenz and Staehelin deal record, showing the Swiss firm as lead counsel to MKS PAMP). APMEX now sits inside Bullion International Group, majority-owned by MKS PAMP and introduced to the market on March 19, 2025 as the holding company for APMEX, OneGold, MTB, Gold Avenue, Bullion.com and the Bullion Card. BIG has kept buying: it closed a majority stake in Germany’s SOLIT Group AG on April 1, 2026, having signed on January 27 (GlobeNewswire, 2026).

That is a structural conflict and APMEX does not present it as one. MKS PAMP is a Geneva-headquartered group whose refining arm, PAMP, is one of the handful of LBMA-accredited refiners whose one-ounce bars are the default retail product worldwide. The group that refines the bar now owns the shop that prices it, sets the premium, quotes the bid when you sell it back, and runs one of the vaults that stores it. Vertical integration is normal in commodities and is not evidence of anything improper. It does mean that when a product page recommends a PAMP bar, the recommendation and the house inventory are the same thing.

Leadership

Founder Scott Thomas remains President and Chairman. Kenneth Lewis is Chief Executive Officer; he joined in 2011 as EVP of Operations, spent two years as COO and has held the top job since 2015, having come from a supply-chain role at The Home Depot (APMEX press release; Equilar and Crunchbase profiles, read September 2026). Headcount is over 500 worldwide as of August 25, 2026. Not public: the size of the MKS PAMP stake, or whether any founder equity remains.

Regulatory status

APMEX is not a registered investment adviser, broker-dealer, bank or trust company, and is not required to be. A coin or bar sold for full payment and shipped to you or to a depository is personal property, not a security and not a commodity futures contract. That places APMEX outside the SEC’s registration regime entirely, which is why there is no Form 1-A, 1-K, D or ADV to read for this review, and why the disclosure discipline governing a Regulation A issuer does not apply to the price APMEX charges you. The CFTC reaches leveraged, margined or financed metals transactions and fraud, none of which is APMEX’s retail business. Consumer-protection law, 31 CFR Part 1027 and ordinary contract law are what bind it.

Hold on to the consequence. Nobody examines APMEX’s markup or reviews its buyback bid, and there is no suitability standard, best-execution duty or fiduciary obligation. The only protection is the one you arrange yourself: a published ask you can check against live spot, and a bid you can check against three other dealers before you ship.

In one sentence: APMEX is a very large, refiner-owned retail inventory of physical metal that quotes a firm ask online, ships fast, and makes its money on the distance between that ask and the bid it will later offer you.

This section walks one order from sign-up to the vault and back out, naming where APMEX is paid on each leg. Only two places move money for or against you: the ask when you buy and the bid when you sell. Everything else is logistics.

1. Sign-up and eligibility

There is no accreditation test, no suitability questionnaire and no account minimum; you create an account with an email address and a shipping address. Because APMEX is a metals dealer rather than a financial institution, it does not run the customer identification programme a broker would: 31 CFR Part 1027 requires a risk-based programme, not a securities-grade KYC file. Purchases of $10,000 or more settled in cash trigger an IRS Form 8300 filing by the dealer; a bank wire from your own account does not.

2. Pricing: the ask, and the payment-method trap

APMEX prices every product as spot plus a per-unit premium, repriced continuously through the trading day and locked at checkout. Your price is fixed at the moment of the order, not the moment the metal ships.

Two mechanics sit behind the headline number and both work against a small buyer. The first is the payment tier, the most expensive thing in this review. APMEX’s user agreement states it without euphemism: the prices shown under Check/Wire are the list prices which already reflect the 4.0% cash discount, and the prices under CC/PayPal are the full list prices (read September 2026). Check, eCheck and bank wire keep the discount; card, PayPal and BitPay forfeit it. Because the 4.0% comes off the full price rather than off the premium, the card price is the check price divided by 0.96, 4.17% more money, which takes a 5.20% premium to 9.58%.

The second mechanic is quantity. The “As Low As” figure is the lowest per-unit price at the largest quantity tier, not the price of one bar; per-unit prices step down at successive thresholds. APMEX confirmed the structure by suspending it for two days in August 2026, extending “any quantity pricing” to every order size as a birthday promotion (GlobeNewswire, August 25, 2026). Read the quantity table before assuming the advertised number is yours. A single-bar buyer normally pays more than the headline, including this review’s.

3. Payment and settlement

Bank wire, check, ACH, PayPal, credit card and, unusually for a dealer this size, Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash are accepted. Card, wire, PayPal and crypto orders ship within three business days of confirmed payment; paper checks wait for clearing. An unpaid or cancelled order after the price is locked is where the user agreement’s market-loss clause bites; it is on the reading list below.

4. Shipping and insurance

Shipping is free on orders of $199 and up and $9.95 below that, domestic only (APMEX free-shipping page, read September 2026). APMEX insures every shipment in transit for the sales value of the enclosed product and ships through Registered US Mail and UPS. Two things follow. The insurance runs to delivery, and delivery to an unattended porch is still delivery, so request a signature on anything you would mind losing. And once the box is in your house, your homeowner’s policy almost certainly caps coins and bullion at a few hundred dollars. That gap is where most first-time buyers are uninsured without knowing it.

5. Sales tax

State law, not APMEX policy. APMEX applies the rate at checkout in the states that impose one; most states exempt investment-grade bullion, and several tax numismatic and collectible coins while exempting bullion, so the coin you pick can change the tax. We could not verify the current state list (unverified at publication), and it changes by legislative session; check APMEX’s state page against the product category, not just the state.

6. Storage, or not

Take delivery, leave the metal with APMEX in Citadel, or buy the vaulted version through OneGold, the joint venture APMEX runs with Sprott. Three products, three cost structures, priced below.

7. Selling back

APMEX runs a standing buyback. You request a quote online, lock the bid, print a label, ship insured through APMEX Logistics, and wait for verification and payment; roughly one to three weeks end to end (APMEX sell-to-us pages, read September 2026). The bid is quoted live per SKU. APMEX publishes no “we pay X% of melt” schedule for either metal and neither does JM Bullion; both use live bid tools, and APMEX’s education pages explain what a bid-ask spread is without saying what its own is (unverified at publication).

This is the fast-moving section and the one to refresh first. As of September 17, 2026 the menu divides into four things that cost very different amounts to own.

Physical coins and bars, shipped

This is the core catalog and the reason people come to APMEX: gold, silver, platinum and palladium in sovereign coins, privately minted rounds, and bars from one gram upward, across tens of thousands of SKUs. The breadth is APMEX’s only genuine moat. If you want a specific year, a mint mark, a proof set, a fractional Britannia or a 10 oz bar from a named refiner, APMEX has it and the discount dealers do not. Three price bands behave completely differently:

• Generic bars and rounds: the cheapest way into an ounce. Lowest premium, widest acceptance, no collector value, tightest buyback spread.
• Sovereign bullion coins: Gold and Silver Eagles, Maple Leafs, Philharmonics, Britannias. A legal-tender guarantee of weight and fineness, universal dealer acceptance, and a structurally higher premium for it. Across dealers, the cheapest 2026 1 oz American Gold Eagle was $4,596.24, a 3.8% premium over melt, against a $4,676.16 average of fourteen offers (FindBullionPrices, updated September 5, 2026). The 1 oz Gold Maple Leaf ran cheaper, as it usually does: $4,629.10 at the low, a 1.9% premium, on a 2.7% current average and a 3.2% trailing average. Eagles are the dearest of the sovereign coins because the US Mint’s dealer pricing starts higher.
• Numismatic, proof, graded and limited-mintage product: where the premium becomes a multiple rather than a few percent, and the resale bid stops tracking metal. A separate hobby with a separate risk profile.

APMEX storage

APMEX offers storage for metal bought on the site, branded Citadel, so the bar never ships: no transit risk, no home-insurance gap, instant resale. The terms answer the two questions that matter. Citadel states that every customer’s product is fully allocated and completely segregated into an individual sub-account, never co-mingled, and held at a facility operated by Brink’s Global Services USA (APMEX Citadel pages, read September 2026). That is the strong version of dealer storage: not an unsecured claim on a private company, but identified metal at a third-party vault.

You pay for it. Citadel is tiered by portfolio size: 0.55% a year up to $1,000,000, 0.50% to $10,000,000 and 0.45% above, billed monthly. That headline rate is more than four times OneGold’s 0.12% and above every large gold ETF. Segregation is worth something; 55 basis points a year compounds against a metal that pays no income.

OneGold

OneGold is a joint venture of APMEX and Sprott, the Canadian precious-metals asset manager, and the most interesting product APMEX touches. You buy fully allocated vaulted metal in fractional amounts, hold it digitally, and can redeem it for physical delivery in amounts as small as one gram. Vaults include the Royal Canadian Mint and Comex-approved facilities run by MKS PAMP, APMEX, Brink’s and Loomis International (OneGold storage documentation, 2026).

The fee schedule is published and unusually clear. Storage is billed quarterly on the average daily balance at 0.12% a year for gold and 0.30% for silver, with a minimum of $5 per quarter (OneGold fee and storage pages, read September 2026). There is no transaction commission; OneGold earns a spread inside the quoted price and states that every customer gets its lowest premium regardless of size. There is no account minimum beyond the smallest fractional unit.

That $5 quarterly minimum governs whether OneGold is cheap for you. Twenty dollars a year is 0.12% only at $16,667; below that the effective rate rises sharply, and at $2,000 it is 1.00% a year, worse than any gold ETF.

IRA-eligible metal

APMEX sells the products that qualify for a self-directed IRA and routes the order to a custodian; it is not itself the custodian and cannot be. Internal Revenue Code section 408(m)(3) exempts certain bullion and specified coins from the collectibles prohibition only if the metal is in the physical possession of a trustee, meaning a bank or an IRS-approved non-bank trustee, not a safe in your basement. The Tax Court made the cost of getting that wrong explicit in McNulty v. Commissioner, 157 T.C. No. 10 (November 18, 2021), where a couple who took American Eagles home from their IRA were taxed on the full $411,000 as a distribution. APMEX routes IRA orders to four IRS-approved custodians: Equity Institutional, STRATA Trust Company, GoldStar Trust Company and The Entrust Group (APMEX IRA pages, read September 2026). The custodian, not APMEX, sets the setup, administration and depository fees. Four choices beats most dealers, and it also means pricing four schedules yourself; APMEX will not do that for you.

What has been closed or wound down

We found no product line withdrawn in 2025 or 2026. APMEX also runs a wholesale arm and the sibling site bullion.com; the retail catalog is the business.

This section counts every dollar that leaves your pocket between deciding to buy gold and banking the proceeds of a sale. APMEX charges no account, annual, inactivity or commission fee, which is exactly why the cost is easy to underestimate: its entire revenue on a bullion trade sits inside two numbers you have to look up yourself, the premium in the ask and the discount in the bid.

The minimum

There is none. The only threshold is shipping: free at $199 and up, $9.95 below (APMEX free-shipping page, read September 2026). On a $150 silver order that $9.95 is 6.6% before the premium, so the practical minimum is $199.

The premium, the fee that is not called a fee

On September 17, 2026, with gold spot at $4,310.80 an ounce (USAGOLD daily precious metals market report, September 17, 2026), APMEX listed a 1 oz PAMP gold bar in assay at $4,534.96 as its lowest price (apmex.com product page, read September 2026). That is $224.16 over spot, a 5.20% premium, on the cheapest form of gold there is: a plain one-ounce bar from the refinery that now owns the dealer.

That 5.20% is not a one-day artefact. The independent tracker FindBullionPrices recorded APMEX’s 1 oz gold bar at $4,183.99 against a spot of $3,976.58 in July 2026, a premium of $207.41, or 5.2% on the nose. APMEX’s premium is set in dollars and lands in the same place as a percentage across a $335 move in the metal, which tells you something useful: when gold falls, APMEX’s percentage premium rises.

Apply the card rule to the same bar. A card buyer pays $4,534.96 divided by 0.96, which is $4,723.92, a $413.12 premium, or 9.58% over spot. Nothing about the bar changed. You paid $188.96 for the convenience of a card.

Now set that against the price anchor that reset this market. Costco sells 1 oz 99.99% gold bars from PAMP Suisse and Rand Refinery to members, capped at four bars per membership per 24 hours. On September 16, 2026 its full 1 oz listing range ran $4,199.99 to $5,349.99 across designs, but the bars actually in stock were tighter: $4,359.99 to $4,459.99, a 2.0% premium on the cheapest and a 3.2% average across the in-stock range (Costco gold inventory and price tracker, September 16, 2026). Those are the tracker’s own premiums against its own spot reference, which is why we quote rather than recompute them.

How APMEX compares with the discount dealers

A same-day, dealer-by-dealer grid is what a reader most wants and what this research cannot honestly produce: dealer pages reprice hourly and the trackers timestamp snapshots inconsistently, so we could not capture all four within the same hour. Take the dated readings we did get, and note that they disagree.

On the 1 oz American Gold Eagle, one 2026 comparison puts APMEX at $80 to $120 over spot and SD Bullion at $60 to $90, SD Bullion ahead by one to two percent in May 2026. A second, from April 2026, puts JM Bullion at $30 to $55 over spot for check or wire and APMEX at $40 to $75 (SD Bullion and APMEX comparison, 2026; BullionHunters, April 2026). Both cannot be right about APMEX, and one quotes Gold Eagles at $2,695 and $2,712 in a year when gold traded above $4,300, the clearest possible warning about the genre. These sites are paid when you click through; treat every number as a prompt to open the dealer’s own page.

The direction holds across all of them: SD Bullion cheapest, JM Bullion in the middle at roughly $0.50 to $1.50 below APMEX per American Silver Eagle, APMEX the most expensive on the products all four stock. JM Bullion also won the 2026 Bullion Dealer of the Year public vote with 43.5% of the ballot, its third consecutive win (Bullion.Directory, 2026), a popularity poll and not a price survey. The structural point survives the imprecision: on a product every dealer stocks, APMEX has no pricing advantage and does not claim one. Its case rests on catalog depth, inventory certainty and shipping speed.

Storage, insurance and custody

Take delivery and the marginal cost is a safe deposit box or a home safe, plus the insurance gap above. Leave the metal in Citadel and the fee is 0.55% a year below $1,000,000, 0.50% to $10,000,000 and 0.45% above, allocated and segregated at Brink’s. Hold it in OneGold and it is 0.12% on gold, 0.30% on silver, minimum $5 a quarter. Two storage products from the same company, a four-fold difference in the headline rate, and no page that puts them side by side. Inside an IRA the custodian charges setup, administration and depository storage itself, usually the largest recurring cost in the structure.

The exit fee, which nobody prints

When you sell back, APMEX quotes a live bid per SKU. There is no published schedule for either metal, and its education pages define the bid-ask spread without stating its own (unverified at publication). That absence is the finding: the most important number on the way out is the one you have to ask for. The only published gold bid we found in the sector was a competitor’s, Money Metals Exchange at $4,237.85 on the 1 oz PAMP bar, 1.7% under the September 17, 2026 spot, and the worked example below leans on it.

A worked example in dollars

Take a reader who wants five ounces of gold on September 17, 2026, in a state that exempts investment bullion from sales tax, and who intends to hold for five years. Five ounces at spot is $21,554.00. Assume gold rises 20% over the five years, to $5,172.96 an ounce, so the metal is worth $25,864.80 at the end. Assume the dealer buying it back bids 2% under spot, which is a touch worse than the 1.7% Money Metals published in September 2026 and is the only exit assumption in this example, so the sale grosses $25,347.50 in every route below.

Route 1: APMEX, PAMP 1 oz bars, paid by bank wire. Five bars at $4,534.96 cost $22,674.80, shipping free, premium paid $1,120.80. Sell for $25,347.50. Net gain $2,672.70, or 11.79% on the money you put in, against a 20% move in the metal. The cost stack took 8.2 points of the move.

Route 2: APMEX, same bars, paid by credit card. Five bars at $4,723.92 cost $23,619.60, premium paid $2,065.60. Sell for $25,347.50. Net gain $1,727.90, or 7.32%. The card took $944.80 out of a $2,672.70 gain, 35% of the profit, for a convenience worth at most 2% in rewards.

Route 3: Costco 1 oz bars at the in-stock midpoint. Five bars at $4,409.99 cost $22,049.95, premium paid $495.95. Costco does not buy metal back, so you sell to a dealer at the same assumed bid and gross $25,347.50. Net gain $3,297.55, or 14.95%: $624.85 more than the APMEX wire route and $1,569.65 more than the card route, on identical gold.

Route 4: the liquid alternative, a gold ETF. Put $22,049.95 into a physically backed gold ETF. You never see a bar and you give up possession, which is the reason many readers want metal at all. In exchange you pay 0.40% a year in SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) or 0.25% in iShares Gold Trust (IAU) as of 2026, roughly $88 or $55 in year one, and you sell in one second at a spread of pennies rather than in three weeks at a spread of points. On the same 20% move GLD returns about 17.6% after fees and IAU about 18.5%, before tax. Read that against Route 3: the ETF beats even the cheapest physical route here, and the gap is the premium, not the management fee.

The silver problem

Gold’s cost stack is annoying. Silver’s is disqualifying for short holds, and it is physics rather than greed: moving $1,000 of silver means moving far more metal for the same value. With silver at $65.52 an ounce on September 17, 2026 (USAGOLD), the tracked premium on a 2026 American Silver Eagle ran 6.36% to 7.90% through August 2026, averaging 6.87% (FindBullionPrices premium history, 2026). That is lower than the folklore, and the folklore is still right about the risk: the same series recorded 5.30% on April 24, 2026 and 19.16% on February 17, 2026. Silver premiums triple in a panic, and a panic is when retail buyers arrive.

Work the round trip at the calm number. Buy at 6.87% over spot and sell back at spot, the friendliest exit anyone will give you, and silver still has to rise 6.9% to get level. Sell back at 5% under spot, the ordinary treatment for sovereign coins and our assumption rather than a published figure, and the required move is 12.5%. Buy in February at 19% over and it stops being a rounding error. No dealer choice fixes any of it.

This section is short by necessity. APMEX does not manage money, run a fund, publish an IRR or quote a target return, so there is no unrealised mark, no sponsor-set net asset value, and no gap between a claimed figure and a realised one. That absence is a point in its favour, worth saying plainly after a year of reviewing platforms that do quote returns they set themselves.

What APMEX claims is about scale, not performance: more than $18B of product delivered and more than 2 million customers since 2000, claimed and unaudited but dated to August 25, 2026, plus an undated 130 million ounce figure on its about pages (APMEX, GlobeNewswire, August 25, 2026; apmex.com, read September 2026). The one independent number is ECDB’s estimate of $4.56B in apmex.com revenue for 2025, up 55% to 60% on the year, with 99% of it in the United States (ECDB, read September 2026), which is modelled rather than reported.

So the honest way to assess APMEX’s track record is to ask what a customer realised: the metal’s return, minus the spread, minus tax. On gold the return has been extraordinary and the spread a rounding error against it. Spot closed at $4,310.80 on September 17, 2026 (USAGOLD). The all-time high is $5,589.38, set intraday on January 28, 2026, confirmed by CBS News, StoneX Bullion, EBC Financial Group and Investing News Network, and the first print to clear gold’s 1980 high in inflation-adjusted terms. Gold therefore sits 22.9% below its January peak, and every buyer who paid a 9% card premium near that high is a long way from whole.

That is the realised-return lesson, and it is the opposite of the usual one. The platform did not cost you the return; the entry price did. A 5.20% premium is recovered by a 5% move and is invisible over a decade. A 9.58% premium paid near a cyclical top takes years to close, and it is self-inflicted at checkout.

This section establishes how long it takes to turn metal back into money, what that costs, and what happens to your position if APMEX stops existing. Physical bullion is the most liquid alternative asset in this publication and the slowest to sell, and both are true at once.

There is no lockup

Nothing about buying from APMEX restricts when you can sell, to whom, or how much. You own the metal outright, the structural advantage over every fund, LLC-share and interval vehicle covered elsewhere on this site.

The exit routes, ranked by speed

Sell back to APMEX. Request a quote, lock the bid, ship insured with APMEX Logistics, wait for verification, get paid: roughly one to three weeks. Lock first and ship the same day.

Sell to another online dealer. Identical mechanics. The bid is per-dealer and per-SKU, so three bids on a five-figure lot cost an hour and routinely move the proceeds by more than the shipping.

Sell to a local coin shop. Same day, cash in hand, no shipping risk, and a lower bid, because the shop carries inventory risk, rent and a smaller book. It wins below roughly $2,000, where shipping and insurance eat the online dealer’s better bid.

Sell OneGold holdings. A click, and the real argument for the vaulted product: no shipping, no verification wait, no assay question, settlement in days.

What the exit costs

The spread, and only the spread. No redemption fee, no exit load, no gate, no queue. On generic gold the round trip is the ask premium plus the bid discount, roughly 7% at APMEX’s wire price against a 2% bid; on sovereign silver it is the 12.5% above; on numismatic product it can be far worse, because the bid reverts toward melt while the ask carried a collector premium.

If APMEX fails

Metal already delivered to you is yours. Metal in an unallocated or pooled storage account at a failed dealer is a general unsecured claim in bankruptcy, which is why you insist on allocated and segregated storage in writing. Both of APMEX’s storage products pass that test on their own terms: Citadel states fully allocated, completely segregated sub-accounts at Brink’s, and OneGold states 100% allocated holdings in third-party vaults. Neither is a claim on the dealer’s book. An order paid but not shipped when a dealer fails is an unsecured claim, which is the argument against letting large paid orders sit unshipped.

We found no indication of financial distress at APMEX. It is owned by a refining group, was estimated at $4.56B of online revenue in 2025, and the bullion-dealer failures of the last two decades were thinly capitalised operations running leveraged or unallocated programmes, not inventory-backed retailers.

This section establishes what forms arrive, at what rate the gain is taxed, and why physical metal is one of the few assets taxed more heavily than a stock on a long-term gain. None of this is advice; it is the statutory framework as at September 17, 2026, and your facts will differ.

The rate: 28%, not 20%

Physical gold and silver are collectibles under Internal Revenue Code section 408(m)(2). A long-term capital gain on a collectible is taxed at a maximum rate of 28% under section 1(h)(4), not the 15% or 20% that applies to long-term gains on stock. High earners add the 3.8% net investment income tax under section 1411, for a federal ceiling of 31.8%, plus state income tax. Short-term gains, on metal held a year or less, are taxed as ordinary income at rates up to 37%.

The comparison that matters: the same 20% move, realised after five years, is taxed at up to 28% federal if you held bars and up to 20% if you held an equity. Physically backed gold ETFs are grantor trusts and are themselves treated as collectibles, so switching to the ETF does not fix the rate; it fixes the spread and the liquidity.

The forms

You receive nothing from APMEX when you buy. No 1099 is generated by a purchase and no cost basis is reported to the IRS, which means your records are the only record of your basis. Keep the confirmation, invoice and payment record indefinitely; losing the basis on a $22,000 gold position is an expensive filing mistake.

On a sale back to a dealer, a Form 1099-B is issued only for the items and quantities that 26 CFR 1.6045-1 makes reportable, tied to the size of a regulated futures contract: bar and coin lots of certain weights and fineness, and pre-1965 US 90% silver coins above a face-value threshold. Several widely held coins, including American Gold Eagles, fall outside it, and the dealer SKU lists that circulate are not IRS guidance (unverified at publication). The rule that always holds: whether or not a 1099-B is issued, the gain is reportable by you, on Form 8949 and Schedule D. Non-reporting is paperwork, not a tax exemption. On the way in, cash payments above $10,000 oblige the dealer to file Form 8300; a bank wire from your own account does not.

Inside an IRA

Metal inside a self-directed IRA escapes the 28% rate entirely: traditional IRA distributions are ordinary income and qualified Roth distributions are tax-free. Section 408(m)(3) permits the holding only if the metal meets the fineness standards and is in the physical possession of a trustee. Bullion owned outright generates no income and no debt-financed gain, so there is no unrelated business taxable income, no K-1 and no state partnership filing, which distinguishes it from farmland and private-credit vehicles. Any sales tax paid at purchase adds to your basis. Physical bullion is the simplest alternative asset to administer and the most expensively taxed.

This section separates the risks that can end you from the ones that merely annoy, then gives the dated record. On the record APMEX is, by this publication’s standards, close to clean: no regulatory action anywhere, one antitrust case won outright, one still open.

The risks that matter

Entry price. The dominant risk in bullion is not fraud or custody, it is paying too much on the way in. A 9.58% card premium needs a 9.58% move to reach break even before tax, and premiums widen exactly when demand is highest: the tracked Silver Eagle premium hit 19.16% on February 17, 2026 against 6.87% in a calm August. It is the one risk you fully control.

Product selection. Numismatic, proof, graded and limited-mintage coins carry premiums the bid does not honour. Every dealer sells them because the margins beat bullion, and the buyer who wandered from an Eagle to a proof set has taken a hobby position without meaning to.

Counterparty and custody. Metal you hold is yours. Metal in an unallocated pooled account at any dealer is a claim. Metal in an allocated, segregated vault in your name at a third-party depository is close to the safest ownership in this publication.

Concentration and drawdown. Gold is not a low-volatility asset. Against the $5,589.38 high of January 28, 2026 and $4,310.80 on September 17, 2026, the metal gave back 22.9% inside eight months. Anyone who bought it as a substitute for cash has mispriced it.

Counterfeits. Real, and mostly solved by buying from a major dealer and keeping the assay card intact. It is the argument against a private seller’s discount, and a reason the APMEX or Costco premium is not entirely dead weight.

The legal record

The one concluded piece of litigation involving APMEX is an antitrust case, and APMEX won it. A-World Trade, Inc. v. APMEX, Inc., No. 2:20-cv-01032, filed in February 2020 in the US District Court for the Central District of California, alleged under Section 1 of the Sherman Act and the Robinson-Patman Act that APMEX led a predatory-pricing and collusion scheme among roughly fourteen online metals sellers to corner the eBay market. Judge Stanley Blumenfeld Jr. dismissed the complaint with prejudice, finding that the incentives in eBay’s own “daily deals” discount programme explained the apparent coordination among APMEX, Pinehurst Coin Exchange, Scottsdale Mint and the rest. The Ninth Circuit affirmed on April 28, 2022, No. 21-55262 (Justia; Bloomberg Law, April 2022; Cooley, May 23, 2022, reporting the same outcome for co-defendant Liberty Coin).

The same plaintiff came back in state court and that case is still open. A-World Trade, Inc. v. APMEX, Inc. et al, No. 22STCV19919, was filed on June 17, 2022 in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Spring Street Courthouse, before Judges David S. Cunningham III and William F. Highberger, again pleading antitrust. The docket lists APMEX alongside JM Bullion, SD Bullion, Bay Precious Metals, Pinehurst Coin Exchange, Silver Gold Bull USA, Silver Towne and Texas Gold and Silver Exchange, so three of the four dealers compared here are defendants. The aggregator shows the matter pending and does not date that status line, so read it as of our September 2026 check rather than as a court-confirmed position (Trellis and UniCourt, read September 2026). No judgment, settlement or damages figure is public.

We found no SEC, FINRA, CFTC, FTC or state securities enforcement action against APMEX, Inc. as of September 17, 2026, and for the reason given above there is no filing history to examine either.

The complaint record

APMEX is BBB accredited with an A+ rating, accredited since 2004, with 197 complaints in the last three years on its Oklahoma City profile (BBB, read September 2026). JM Bullion’s Dallas profile carries an A+ and 159 complaints in three years, 85 closed in the last twelve months, though one secondary source reads the same profile as 123. APMEX is the larger business, so a larger absolute count is expected, and neither figure is revenue-normalised. The A+ on both measures responsiveness to complaints, not their absence.

Trustpilot is where the numbers fall apart, and it is worth settling. APMEX’s live Trustpilot page showed 4.0 out of 5 across 9,954 reviews in September 2026. That is the figure to use. Snapshots and third-party scrapes of the same page over the past year produced anything from 1.5 to 4.4, one aggregator headlines “8,000+ ratings” for the same business, and an earlier desk memo of ours carried 3.9. We trust the live aggregate over any scrape, and we print the spread because a single Trustpilot number for APMEX should not be quoted without it. JM Bullion’s live page showed 4.1 across more than 2,000 reviews, with 2026 snapshots from 3.6 on 1,765 ratings to 4.4 on 2,319 (Trustpilot and usgoldandcoin, 2026). All of this is unverified customer report, evidence of nothing but pattern.

The patterns are what to take from it, consistent across BBB, Trustpilot and PissedConsumer’s roughly 160 APMEX reviews: shipping delays, order cancellations during volatile markets, difficulty reaching customer service, refund delays, and buyback pricing below expectation. The last is the direct consequence of a bid never published until you ask.

The conflicts, named

On a PAMP bar bought at APMEX and stored at a MKS PAMP vault through OneGold, one group is the refiner, the retailer, the price-setter, the market maker on the way out and the custodian. You are the only party in that chain without an interest in the spread.

This section is the decision, stated in terms of your situation rather than the platform’s features.

APMEX is for you if

• You want a specific product the discount dealers do not stock: a particular year, mint mark, assay card, fractional sovereign coin, larger bar from a named refiner, or a graded piece. This is the whole case for APMEX and it is a good one.
• You are buying enough at once that shipping and comparison are trivial, and you will pay by wire or check.
• You want inventory certainty: shipping in three business days rather than backordered, which matters more in a fast market than a $30 price difference.
• You want vaulted fractional metal through OneGold at 0.12% with a position above roughly $17,000, where the quarterly minimum stops biting.
• You are funding a self-directed IRA and want one source for qualifying product routed to one of four named custodians.

Skip APMEX if

• You are buying plain bullion and price is the whole decision. Costco’s in-stock 1 oz gold bars ran 2.0% to 3.2% over spot on September 16, 2026 against APMEX’s 5.20%, with SD Bullion and JM Bullion between them.
• You can only fund with a credit card. The 4.0% forfeited discount is the most expensive fee in this review.
• You are buying under $199, where shipping alone is 5% or more.
• You are buying silver to hold under about three years. The 12.5% round trip on sovereign silver coins is not a dealer problem and APMEX cannot fix it.
• You want exposure to the gold price rather than possession. IAU costs 0.25% a year against a one-time 5.20%, and settles in a second.
• You are selling a small lot under about $2,000, where a local shop’s same-day cash beats an online bid minus shipping and three weeks of waiting.

This section puts APMEX beside the dealers it is usually compared with, the retail anchor that reset the market, and the liquid alternative most readers should price before buying metal.

Table: The big US bullion routes, September 2026

Kitco is absent because we could verify no figure for its retail or storage terms, only its price data.

Where each reader goes is not close once you name the goal. Cheapest ounce you can hold: Costco in 2026, the discount dealers second, APMEX third. Lowest-friction exposure to the gold price: IAU at 0.25% wins on every axis except possession, so say out loud whether possession is the point. A particular physical item: APMEX is the first place to look and often the only one that has it, and the extra points of premium buy a real thing. Fractional, vaulted, redeemable metal: OneGold at 0.12%, good above about $17,000, expensive below it, and four times cheaper than APMEX’s own Citadel.

This section is the sequence, and then the six documents to read before any money moves.

The sequence

1. Price the trade before you create an account. Open APMEX, one discount dealer and one comparison site, look up the identical SKU, and write down the ask at each in the payment method you will use.
2. Create the account. Email, address, phone. No accreditation, no questionnaire, no minimum.
3. Ask for the bid. Request APMEX’s buyback quote on the exact item and write it down with the date. The ask minus that bid is your round-trip cost.
4. Choose the payment method deliberately. Wire, check or eCheck preserves the 4.0% discount; card, PayPal or BitPay forfeits it.
5. Check the sales tax at checkout against your state and the product category, because a numismatic coin and a bullion coin can be taxed differently in the same state.
6. Decide delivery or storage before checkout. If delivery, request a signature and plan where the metal will live and whether it is insured there. If storage, compare Citadel at 0.55% with OneGold at 0.12%.
7. Keep the paperwork forever. The invoice is your cost basis and no one else is recording it.
8. On the way out, get three bids. Lock before you ship, and ship the day you lock.

The six things to read before wiring money

1. The user agreement, for the Check/Wire and CC/PayPal tiers and the market-loss clause on a cancelled or unpaid order after the price is locked.
2. The shipping FAQ, for the $199 threshold and the exact point at which APMEX’s transit insurance ends.
3. The buyback pages, for the lock mechanism, who pays return shipping, and how long payment takes.
4. The product page’s quantity table, because the advertised price is the largest tier’s.
5. The Citadel or OneGold fee page, for 0.55% against 0.12% and the $5 quarterly minimum.
6. The custodian’s own fee schedule, if this is going into an IRA. APMEX does not set it, it is the largest recurring cost in the structure, and most IRA buyers never read it.

APMEX is a well-run, well-capitalised, honest business that is not the cheapest place to buy gold and has stopped pretending it is. 3.5 out of 5 is what that earns: a point and a half comes off for a price beatable by two to three points on the products most readers want, for a payment structure that quietly doubles the premium for anyone who reaches for a card, and for an own-brand storage product at 0.55% a year sitting beside a joint venture charging 0.12%. Nothing comes off for integrity. There is no performance claim to test, no sponsor-set net asset value, no lockup, no gate, no carried interest, no fee buried in a filing. A dealer whose entire cost is one visible number and one you can ask for is a relief, even when the number is high.

The thing that changed the analysis in 2026 is not APMEX. It is Costco. A warehouse club selling PAMP and Rand Refinery ounces at 2.0% to 3.2% over spot has put a public, checkable floor under retail gold pricing, and every dealer’s premium is now measured against it. APMEX’s answer is catalog depth, and it is a real one: Costco stocks a handful of SKUs with a four-bar daily cap and will never sell you a fractional Britannia. But the case for APMEX has narrowed from “the big trustworthy one” to “the one that has the thing you want,” and that is a smaller business to be in.

We would raise the rating to 4 on two changes. First, a standing buyback schedule, even as a percentage band by product class, so the round-trip cost is visible before purchase rather than on request; no major dealer does this, which is exactly why doing it would be worth a rating point. Second, the 4.0% cash discount restated as a card surcharge at checkout, so the number a card buyer sees is the number a card buyer pays. We would cut the rating if premiums widened materially against the Costco floor, or if order cancellations in volatile markets escalated from a complaint pattern into a documented practice of cancelling locked orders when the market moves against the dealer.

What to watch, with thresholds. Premiums: check the 1 oz PAMP bar and 1 oz Gold Eagle against spot and against Costco each quarter; what matters is whether APMEX’s gold premium stays under 5.5% for check or wire, having printed 5.2% in both July and September 2026. Ownership: whether MKS PAMP increases its stake, whether BIG keeps buying retailers after SOLIT closed on April 1, 2026, and whether the PAMP relationship is ever disclosed on product pages. Storage: whether Citadel’s 0.55% comes down toward OneGold’s 0.12%. Litigation: No. 22STCV19919, undisposed in September 2026. Complaints: the BBB three-year count on the Oklahoma City profile, 197 against JM Bullion’s 159, and whether cancellation complaints rise during the next sharp move. Tax: any change to the 28% collectibles rate under section 1(h)(4).

Nothing here is investment advice. We take no referral fees from any platform we review and hold no position in any of them.