Silver and gold soared after Hedge Company’s new owner took over in late summer

Tim Harty, The Business Times

If David Ledoux thought he’d ease into his new business venture in Grand Junction, gold and silver prices immediately told him that was wishful thinking.

Ledoux bought precious-metals brokerage Hedge Company, 225 N. Fifth St., Suite 514, from Teresa Mays on Aug. 29, then watched the price of silver shoot up like it never has before. And gold decided to climb into rarefied air, too.

And Ledoux has been busy ever since.

“In six months, silver went from $36 to $120 an ounce in that time. It’s been crazy,” Ledoux said. “Crazy good, obviously, for me, but still crazy nonetheless.

“I’ve never seen anything like it. I think the last time something like that happened was in the late ’70s when the Hunt brothers tried to, well, successfully corner the silver market, and silver went from $10 to $50.

“But this is a different type of situation where you have industrial uses for silver that are outpacing what we’re taking out of the ground. And so, we’ve seen that drastic increase in price in silver.”

Ledoux said gold went from $3,300 an ounce when he started at Hedge Company to $5,500 in January. And as of Feb. 23, when Ledoux spoke to The Business Times, gold was at $5,200, “and silver’s about $88, still almost three times what it was when I took over.”

That made Ledoux a busy boy, and his wife, Karen, who works in the office, has been a busy girl.

In more normal times Ledoux would be helping customers buy and sell silver and gold, but since he arrived in Grand Junction, they’ve wanted to sell, sell, sell.

It makes sense, he said, because they bought it for a much lower price a year or two ago, or maybe 20 years ago. Whenever it was, they’re taking advantage of the price going as high as it did.

“I had a guy come in and bring in 43,000 silver quarters about three weeks ago,” Ledoux said. “That’s 600 pounds of silver. And so he brought that in and said he had those bags from the late ’70s, early ’80s.

“So, it’s been just – I would never have guessed that in this area, this many people had physical possession of that much precious metal.”

People aren’t selling all of their gold or silver. In many cases, Ledoux said, customers will sell their silver to buy some gold.

“When you have enough silver, if you want to turn it into gold, it’s easy to do that,” he said. “Likewise, if you have gold, you want to turn it into silver, it’s easy to do that as well.”

Some of his customers also may feel like Ledoux does about the near future.

“I think the price is still going to be higher than what it is today in the near term,” he said. “They’re selling some of it and then waiting to see what happens with the rest of what they have.”

If that’s the case, Ledoux won’t be seeing a lull in activity any time soon.

If things ever do slow down, the Ledouxs want to travel around Colorado and its neighboring states. That was one of the draws of buying Hedge Company.

Ledoux said he’s a former accountant who has “worked as controllers and CFOs of engineering and construction firms most of my life. Most recently, I was a real estate developer, developing self-storage facilities across the United States. That company got purchased by a private-equity firm, and I decided to do something different.”

Ledoux said he’s 63 years old, and after about 58 years in Houston, Texas, delaying retirement to move to Grand Junction to work sounded pretty good.

“I got out of the humid, flat climate of Houston, where there were 7 million people in the metropolitan statistical area, to Grand Junction, so I’m kicking myself for not getting here sooner,” he said.

Ledoux added he and Karen have found some time on weekends to go to nearby places, such as Powderhorn, Glenwood Springs, Vail and Aspen. They haven’t been to Moab, Utah, yet, but it’s on their list.

Outside of Colorado, a trip to Yellowstone National Park is a priority.

“Me and my wife, we love Grand Junction,” Ledoux said. “It’s nice not walking out of my house and having to take a shower, just going to check the mailbox for mail, because it’s so humid in the summertime.”

The buyer she hoped for

When Teresa Mays was looking to sell Hedge Company a year ago, she wasn’t going to settle for just any buyer. She wanted someone who was going to live in Grand Junction and service the customer base that she, and her father before her, had built.

When she spoke to The Business Times in June 2025, Mays mentioned a potential buyer in Houston who might fill that bill. That was David Ledoux, who completed the purchase of Hedge Company on Aug. 29 last year and has done as Mays hoped.

It’s been easy to do it, because Ledoux wanted to move to Grand Junction, and he sees Hedge Company as a business that isn’t broke, so there’s nothing to fix.

“I just really liked her business,” he said. “I like the transparency of how she does her fees and everything. And that really spoke well to me, as well as she had a great client base. … My intent was to just continue doing what she did, what her family did for 26 years.

“I didn’t change anything about Teresa’s business at all. I tell people there’s just not a pretty face behind the counter. I can’t do much about that. But other than that, it should be about the same.”

Getting in the precious-metals game

In addition to maintaining the customer base he inherited, Ledoux would like to grow the business by getting young people to invest in gold. To accomplish that, he’s been advertising, trying to clear up a big misconception.

“You don’t have to buy an ounce of silver, an ounce of gold. … It comes in one-tenth of an ounce,” Ledoux said. “You can get a tenth of an ounce of silver for 15 bucks or something like that. … One of my commercials says, ‘Don’t let the high price of gold keep you from owning precious metals.’ You can, for a couple hundred bucks every month or every couple months or whatever your budget allows.

“If you wanted to start stacking precious metals, you’d be able to do that by starting with silver.”

The other message Ledoux hopes to convey to young investors is making ownership of precious metals a part of their investment portfolio.

“My goal,” he said, “would be to get younger people to start investing in precious metals. … If they learn about it, I think they’re gonna want to make that part of their investment portfolio or their savings portfolio.”

His honesty is admirable

Ledoux said he has been a coin collector for the past 20 or 30 years, and there are times when people bring him coins to sell, and he has to turn them away.

His reason? As a coin collector, he knows their coins are worth much more than he can pay them for precious-metal value, and he won’t rip them off.

“I give them back the coin, say, ‘No, take this to a coin shop. Don’t sell this to me for $50. You’ll get $300 for this at a coin shop someplace else,’” Ledoux said. “It helps that I’m a coin collector … I take stuff for precious-metal value, but if something has some other type of value and I recognize that, I’m aware of it, I give it back to them and make sure they know to take it someplace else.”