When you lose an auction lot by one notch … grrrr.

My question then is - did the coins you failed to win at auction sell for more or less than the price of the coin you'd rather pay more for at a dealer? In other words, if you put in a dealer's price as your max bid (including buyer's premium), do you still lose? I'm curious what your bidding strategy is, because I'd guess that I win around 50-75% of the time. I only buy a handful of coins a year though, and it's a disposable income hobby to me and not driven by profit.

 

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I base my bids on recent prior sale results, percentages over Grey Sheet numbers and the PCGS Coin Facts numbers. The Coin Facts numbers tend to be on the high side. Going back 12 or 13 years ago, I used to win as often or more as you using them. In retrospect, I often overpaid.

Now it seems that those Coin Facts numbers aren’t high enough to win, at least in Heritage auctions. For me, it always seems to boil down to one other bidder. I come in second very consistently, and it’s getting tiresome. One would think that I would win now and then, but I don’t. The last time I did win an auction it was at Stacks’-Bowers, and it was a medal, not a coin. I actually ended up getting that item for one bid less than I had offered.

The buyer’s fee is a source of frustration. Some bidders seem to ignore it. They treat it like it isn’t even there. It’s amazing that some people can just ignore another 20% tacked on to the price.

 

I have definitely overpaid too. For example, a couple years ago I paid nearly VF20 price for an F12 1903-S dime. It was from the John McCloskey collection, and I'm pretty sure it's the same 1903-S he mentioned in a 1980 Coin World article that first described the thin and thick ribbon reverse types. Because his work led me down a long path of collecting all the Barber dime transition anomalies, I just had to have it. I have no idea why another bidder also wanted it so badly.

I have occasionally ignored BP when upping my set bid during a live auction for a coin I'd waited a long time to find. On a $200-300 coin an extra $40-60 doesn't bother me since I buy so few coins and it's entertainment money. So yeah, I'm that bidder you hate to run into.

 

I am referring to thousands of dollars, in one case tens of thousands. I can live with overpaying by $40 to $60, even a couple hundred. Thousands of dollars is a game changer.

I bid on one item that had sold for a high of $18,000, including the buyers’ fee previously, I bid $22,000 plus the buyers’s fee which brought to total to $26,400. I figured it might sell for $20,000. I was still the runner up, as usual. You could put the same coin in front of some these bidders at a dealers’s table, and they wouldn’t pay anything near to what they bid in auctions. They go to these auctions and go crazy.

 

I guess it's the same thing on a whole other level. 20% extra on $20k is just pocket change to them, same as $40-60 is to me. It's the hobby of kings either way.

 

"I'm not going to be a loser" can be a very expensive attitude, especially if 2 or more bidders have it and want the same coin. Never bothers me when a coin goes for way more than market value. I just figure it was a contest among folks with the "winning attitude" and lots of moolah. Does frustrate me when my bid is market value or up to 10% above and still lose by a notch.

Cal

 

The trouble with this market is the “l’m going to buy that no matter what I have to pay,” attitude is the norm now, not the exception. It shows that some people don’t have very high expectations about the future for the U.S. dollar. We saw the same thing in 1979-80 when inflation was far worse than it is today.

 

I wonder how much of it is dollar-future fears, and how much of it is simply "I've got more dollars than all the other people, and I expect I'll keep getting more dollars faster than they do, so what the heck."

 

If the auction is online, it's not a question of how far the winning bidder was going to go, because a snipe program will just beat the current highest bidder by the minimum amount a second before the auction ends.

 

Outside of eBay, sniping can get pretty expensive once the bid is more than a few hundred dollars. Look at the bid increments for Heritage in the pic below. These can be reduced by ½ if you are willing to wait for the coin to come up and then do a cut bid. You can only cut once per lot and cutting isn’t available for some lots. I don’t know of any automated services that can do this. And remember there will be a 20% premium, so a 50 increment is really 60.

Cal

 

@Michael K so be it, like I said there will be another, it's not like I'm bidding on the 1933 Saint.

 

The Heritage chart actually looks like this on their website:

I got nailed by this once as an inexperienced bidder when I bid during the live auction. Note that while the bid increments on the right are fairly consistent in that they line up with the same or similar amounts going across, the bid ranges on the right (live auction) are much smaller amounts. I think I crossed the $200 threshold and instead of bidding $10 more, I was bidding $20 more. I was not happy because I thought the chart was deceptive. Live and learn.

Although it is another strategy if you really want a certain coin and the market value is right around one of their thresholds. I've observed that other bidders seem to be reluctant to cross into the next increment. I've won a few coins by setting my max just over the line. It may have been coincidence though.

 

Right now our US Dollar is fairly strong vs the Euro. One Euro equals $1.10 American and I remember when that exchange rate was much worse for us. That means when I go on Italian eBay to buy a coin that's 100 Euros it will cost me roughly $110. American.

 

Bid structure at Heritage is even more complex than shown in the increment table. Until a predetermined time before the auction goes “live”, you can raise the current bid to the next increment plus any additional dollar amount. That’s why you can see odd hammer prices, like 1,176, in their sales records.

Cal

 

Exhibit A
Yes I did