the_highlander

Reading my books ive been hearing of stories of people cornering certain areas of the coin market.

im wondering how hard/easy this would actually be to achieve.taking the 1856 small cent as an example say.

This has a mintage of 2000 coins, i reckon someone with a good bit of money could easily corner the market in this key coin.If the slowley started purchasing all available, and continued to do so, removing from the market say 30-40% of them over a few years.The price would then rocket as few would be available at which point the purchaser could start to off load his coins at prices vast to what he bought them at.The price after off loading so many would start to fall a bit of course but never back to the former level, as the people that bought at high level and the people holding them would mostly now be un-willing to sell at a big loss.


Im sure there are examples of this happening,maybe even between dealers manipulating the bid/ask price by doing phantom sales between themselves to manipulate the price guides and market.

I know through traditional auctions this practice goes on which is known as ringing, where a lot of dealers that frequent a auction house will colude together to not bid against each other to get the goods at substantialy less prices, after which they then hold an auction between themselves with the members of the ring all spliting the diffrence between the sell price between themselves and the buy price of the ring.The uk government prosecuted quite a few dealers that were found to have done this and auction houses are always on the look out for it.Very hard to make a conviction though.

Does anyone have any stories of similar in the coin buisness.