Why are world coins so cheap?

absolute nonsense compare this with any usa coin.......................







when the usa produce a coin as nice as this french 20 francs you can boast..........................

 

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Smart money for the future? Foreigns......that's if you've got an eye to the future. A lot of these coins were issued in smaller numbers when compared to US issues and they circulate, so pristine examples will be rare down the road. Just can't bring myself to do it though. Danged collector in me don't collect for profit but for some enterprising young lion?........."

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Enterprising young lion here! :hail:

May I look into your crystal ball master?

But seriously, I would be greatly honored if you could share some of your thoughts regarding a few coins you feel are undervalued in the current market.

 

I just bought a huge tin full of US coins at an auction the other day,really cheap,I only had one person bid against me and he dropped out after 2 bids, they are classed as world or foreign coins to me.
I should make a killing selling them to US collectors after I have sorted them.

I don`t find them anymore attractive or collectable than coins from anywhere else.
The US produces more error coins than just about the rest of the world put together, this maybe from shoddy workmanship, poor materials or inferior minting processes, or even a deliberate ploy to wet the appetite of US collectors.
US coin collectors have this habit of encasing their collected coins in plastic and assigning them a number that differentiates them from a similar one with some miniscule mark.
This all adds to the price.

 

Various factors, I think. First, it's not that "world coins" (following the concept that "world" is something that has nothing to do with the US ) are cheap - that is a generalization which I find way too broad. What is certainly true is that in the US, many or most coin collectors collect US and nothing else. And that is probably influenced by the geographic position of the US, and by the fact that you have a long tradition with one country and currency name - it's been one and the same US dollar for more than 200 years.

In other countries you may have a longer history of coinage, but you may also have some kind of cut-off date. It is pretty much impossible to collect all British or Swiss coins, for example, so you set a certain date as your individual starting point. So a Swiss collector may say that his Switzerland collection starts with 1850, but he also quite likely to collect coins from other European countries. Guess this also helps to keep prices from going up all too extremely.

Of course disposable income influences the number of coin collectors and what they are willing/able to pay. But Germany and Switzerland for example are not that different from the US when it comes to how many collect coins ...

Christian

 

We already did:
http://coins.ha.com/c/item.zx?saleNo=392&lotNo=6522
also, I don't think that coin was designed by Augustus St. Gaudens...
All a matter of personal preference.

 

Most of the "world" coins that are available are usually common dates. If you do some research you'll find that there are a lot of valuable (high dollar) world coins that hit the auction market.

 

Well this was cheap on Sunday, I bought a coffee jar full of world / foreign coins for £50, some British silver too.
Then I found this 1905 HalfCrown, its got to be worth $800-$1000 of anyones money

 

Nice pick up!!!:thumb::thumb::thumb:

 

I agree with Christain.

After WWII, Americans had the cash and the influence to collect anything they wanted. This lasted up to the 1970's, then we even out with Western European collectors. By 1995 Eastern European collectors began to join the club en mass. Now it's the Indo & East Asians that have the cash to purchase and subsequently raise the value of any coin if it's in their demand.

 

I actually think Yugoslavian coins are kind of neat, though I don't focus on them in my collection.

I think a lot of collectors when they start off focus on their home country, and for Americans there is more than 200 years' worth of coins to go after. If you are one of those collectors who keeps trying for the best condition and buying upgrades, you could spend your whole life on that. Some people will branch into world coins but focus on their ancestral homeland - if they're Irish, they'll collect Irish coins, and so on. The majority of Americans are from a few countries originally, so you'd think if they collected world coins they'd be more inclined toward those, but I don't know if that pans out though.

It's harder to collect coins that aren't in English because people like to know what it says. Maybe you speak another language or can figure it out, but then there are the countries that use other alphabets, and that's a whole different challenge. I think Asian and Middle Eastern coins are not popular here mostly for that reason. Plus a lot of Asian coins are counterfeited, and that makes someone like me hesitant to even try that.

To the person who said that world coins don't have designs as good as U.S. coins, that's an ignorant statement. Sure, you can find a lot of examples of lousy designs, but there are thousands of beautiful ones too. Read these threads and see the pictures people post.

 

Shhhhs. Dont tell every one. It will push the prices up

 

This question has puzzled me too. I love rooting around in bargain boxes and picking up a Victorian farthing for a quarter. That just seems like a great trade to me, no matter what the books say about it. At a recent convention I was able to pick up a dozen such coins, nice big, well-worn brass coins from the mid- to late-19th century, mostly Victoria but also Napoleon III, and a few from Republican France; all for just a few dollars. Amazing bargains to be had in non-US coins from that era, at least from my perspective.

 

USA coins are at least bigger.

 

Like the people ?

 

I can't tell if you're serious or not.

 

He is referring to the picture that moneyer12 posted

 

Because it comes to down to $$$, if you don't have money to feed your family you ain't going to be spending on coins. Just so happens most of wealth is in America, EU and US combine to make up close to 50% of world GDP and US by itself makes up 22% of World GDP. As we starting to see this shift eastwards we are seeing prices for world coins go up, chinese coins started sky rocketing and even in last 2 years for example we seen Latin American coins go up in value significantly.

 

I got a little over 14# non-US coins in 3 separate dealer liquidation auctions a while back. I posted some errors, but have found more, and I intend to show all of them in a thread once I get them all ID'd and in 2x2's.

I only paid around $180 combined. There were proofs, silver coins, and all the way back to 1761. Probably 1000 coins give or take, and overall I think they went for far less than what they should have. (I got them for) I don't much care what's hot now, as I collect for my collection and I go where I feel the best deal takes me.

I agree that non-US coins are underpriced and as more people around the world improve their condition they will ask the same question we respond with when people ask "why collect coins?" .............. "What better to collect than money?" Then by the time I'm retirement age I'll make a killing.... maybe

Maybe you, too, should hold what you have and get what you can "while the market is down"

 

Did you know that the Franklin Mint produces coins for many different countries?

 

is it a circulating coin??????

no!!