Dividing costs of aquisition in lots

I assume most of you keep records of how much you pay for coins. I do. What do you do when you buy a 'large lot' consisting of several coin that are not all the same in type, condition or value? Lets say you bought a group of five coins for $10. Do you feel obligated to list them as $2 each or do you attempt to assign $4 to the best one and $1 to the worst with the total adding up to the same $10? That leave the problem of deciding which are $4 coins and which are $1 ones and I guarantee not all would assign the same distribution of numbers. Do you go for interest, grade, rarity or which one spoke to you an made you buy the bunch even though you had to take the losers, too? This is not a question requiring your answer for my specific case but it is the sort of thing you each might face in selecting coins that 'speak' to you.

Five coins are below. Lets say they totaled $10 (they may have in 1917). Which strike you as $3-4 'Winna, Winna, Chicken Dinna' (term stolen from Steve) and which are lousy $1 losers? I know some will say to hold off and buy mint state coins but I'm the impatient type. All are Alexandria billon tetradrachms of Commodus except the first.

Not in the best shape but good animal and bronze diobol:


Pretty but cracked flan - Obverse legend is unlisted missing the M in KOM.


Second digit of date is off flan right of standing figure so it is hard to catalog and which letter it is makes a difference in rarity (R1 or R5) .


Rare one and very unusual with radiate head. Date LKE less than certain but choices are equally rare (R5).



This type is popular with lighthouse but is most common and rough. This could be upgraded with little trouble.


Post coins you have bought in a group or any Commodus Provincial.

 

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If you got a group for $10, then I think it's okay to use $15 or so to allocate to pricing them all, since the $10 was probably a good deal to to some degree.
So maybe:
-1.$2
-2.$5
-3.$2.50
-4.$3.50
-5.$2

This group already came priced individually but was sold as a group for 30% less.


These 3 were from a larger group, glued on a board in a frame and sold to the local shop. So a group from a group.



I bought a group of 13 coins for $13. This was the best and the only one I remember. I no longer on this one

 

i don't really know how i would divide those coins up. when buy or bid on a lot, if there is one coin i really want, i bid what i would pay for that ONE coin. if there are two coins i want in a lot, i'll bid what i would pay for those two...and the "turds" don't really increase what i bid.

here a group of two i bid on, i thought who knows what's under the crud on the left...the right had BD..but probably a nice coin, i'd pay 10 buck for a nice provincial i have to treat. bid 7, 3 shipping (i include shipping in what i'll pay). wouldn't pay anything for the one on the left...no added value to me. it it turns out to be good than great, but if it's a turd...i'm not out anything.




got it for 99 cents plus 3 shipping. here it is treated.




the left coin was a turd, turned out not to clean up at all....just gave away to some fellow here at CT.

in dougs commodus coins and randys sestertius group, i'd want all those coins i would include what they are all worth to me in my bid.

 

I love bulk lots of better quality ancients, I just don't know where to find them.

 

I would give them all the same book = $2.
If I bought the lot because I wanted #2, which I like best, I would say $4 for #2 and $1.5 for the rest.

I buy lots at times thinking I might sell some ancients to folks at my coin club. That almost never works. I bought these lots for 50 Euros each in the same auction. With the vig, postage and cc fee the cost per coin is shown.

Lot of 10 antoninianus Claudius II (268-270) = $8.04

Lot of 7 antoninianus Salonina, wife of Gallienus (253-268) = $11.49
I sold only a few of them for less than half what I paid. My conclusion of this exercise was buy what you like and make someone pay dearly if they want it.

 

I give them all the same cost. I don't give them all the same value.

I buy a lot of lots, especially for ancient Chinese. In groups, they sell for very cheap ($0.50 each for VF/EF Wu Zhus, $0.50 for 4-zhu Ban Liangs, $0.25 for North Song cash, etc). I can often keep the ones I want and sell the rest for a modest markup to cover the cost of the whole lot and then some.

Here is one I bought. In the end, it was about $30 per coin. I didn't care if the rare spades were fake; what I paid covered the stuff I knew was genuine.



There were dozens of other lots I have bought, but I no longer have pictures of them.

 

I'm a simple man with a simple mind. If I buy a lot of 5 coins for $10, my catalog will reflect $2 for each coin. I have no place in my catalog to give a "real" value, only my costs to obtain said coins. Thus, 2 bucks each.

 

This recently happened to me when I privately bought a group lot of Domitian denarii at an agreed price. In my personal ledger I just recorded how much I paid for the lot and what coins it contained. I don't worry about how much each coin is individually 'worth' in the ledger.

 

I bought this lot for over $450 and five of the coins I will flip on eBay in a group starting at .99. So I only valued one coin in this group.

 

I have bought only a few lots and all those times was for 1 coin in the lot.

The cast offs I tend to price within what I paid for the whole lot to break even or make a small profit.

 

Victor, to me they all are a bit ordinary, please tell which is the chosen one, and why it is special.

 

I enjoy the process of assigning an estimated market value for each individual coin in a 'large lot', arriving at that value after going through similar examples of the type in acsearch, CNG, ebay sales, vcoins, etc. From there, I derive the respective cost prices which go into my records. I try not to let my bias towards any particular coin in a lot affect the value I assign it - it doesn't matter to me if the coins I like best in the lot are or aren't the most valuable; they often aren't.

I haven't done much lot buying in the last twelve months, but prior to that I've picked up some very nice lots as well as some very average ones. The partially photographed lots - I steer clear of completely unphotographed ones - often include nice unexpected surprises in addition to pictured coins that may have made the lot desirable. Some of my favorite coins have come from large lots.

I paid an average of $35 per coin for the 14-coin lot below. On my records, after going through the process I described above, I have an assigned cost price of $14 for the lowest value coin and $114 for the highest.


The high-low range was even more dramatic for the 98-coin lot below. On the low end, I have about twenty coins in the lot with an assigned cost of $10 and under. At the upper end of the scale are two coins with a cost in the $200 range.

It'd be interesting to know what values would be assigned by others, but at the end of the day, it's really just an administrative exercise I find enjoyable and that will matter to no one but me .

 

I like your Commodus group - you managed to avoid any of the one-god-just-standing-there variety. I like the one with the Nilus bust best for its looks, but from what I've observed of sales of Alexandrian coins, rare and interesting types in grotty condition often beat out the common ones in nice condition when the final hamer prices are tallied.

Below are two Commodus provincials that I like. One of them has never been in a group lot sale as far as I know, and I would be surprised if it ever ended up in one. The other one apparently isn't even fit to be included in the least of large lots... it was given to me as an unattributed freebie by an ebay seller from whom I bought a group of truly junky LRBs.


COMMODUS
AE 25. 7.69g, 25mm, MOESIA INFERIOR, Marcianopolis. H&J 6.10.26.4 (this coin illustrated); RPC IV online 4319; AMNG I 540; Varbanov 702 corr. (direction of heads). O: ΑΥ ΚΑΙ Λ ΑΥΡΗ ΚΟΜΟΔΟС, Bareheaded, draped, and cuirassed bust right. R: ΜΑΡΚΙΑΝΟΠΟΛƐΙΤΩΝ, the Three Graces standing facing, heads left, right, and right, respectively: the left holds oinochoe over dolphin, the center drapes arms over others, and the right holds wreath over oinochoe.
Ex Dr. George Spradling Collection; Ex Alexandre de Barros Collection (CNG E143, 12 July 2006, lot 115); ex CNG 47 (16 Sep 1998) lot 833


COMMODUS
Very Rare (only one specimen cited by Karbach). 4.77g, 19.3mm. CILICIA, Isauria and Lycaonia, Augusta, Year 164 = 183/184 AD. Karbach, Augusta, p.54, 81 (same obv die); RPC Online Vol 4 Temp no. 6170 (under "Marcus Aurelius?"). O: Laureate head of Commodus right, AV KOMODO [...]. R: AVGOVSTN(sic) ETOY EPD, horse standing right, head turned left; tree to left.

 

Had I the money, those two lots would definitely be something I'd go for, without question.

 

I've only ever bought one lot, and those who have been around a little while probably are familiar with it. I purchased a lot of 10 sight unseen from an esteemed forum member. He included two free coins as well. I just divided the price by 12 for my records.



I feel these coins are worth more than the $5.42 I put for the cost of each. In situations where I feel a coin is worth a lot more than I paid then I'll comment on that in my "Notes" section for each coin.

Maybe I need to buy more coin lots.

Here's my Commodus provincial:


Commodus; Philppopolis, Thrace; AD 180-192
AE, 4.07g, 18mm; 6h
Obv.: AY K? M?...-KOMOΔOC; laureate head right
Rev.: [Φ]ΙΛΙΠΠΟ[ΠOΛEITΩN]; coiled serpent with something in it's mouth

 

I've bought several large lots over the last few years. Initially, I planned to assign specific relative values for purposes of record keeping.

That never happened. It was just too much work and there wasn't much point in doing so. If I had purchased the lots hoping to sell some to defray the cost of the keepers, perhaps that exercise might have been more relevant. Then again, ultimately all that matters at the time of selling is the estimated current market value and what someone is willing to pay.

If you really want to apportion cost of each coin in a group lot, the most accurate way would be to research current sales of each coin, estimate the current value for each, add all of the estimates together, use that total as the denominator for assigning a percent to each individual coin, and then multiply that fraction by the actual cost of the group lot to arrive at what you paid for each coin in the group.

Like I said... too much work

As for Doug's recent group lot of Alexandrian coins from Commodus through the Severans, I will be forever envious. Same for the two group lots shown by Zumbly.

The Commodus coins in Doug's group lot may seem grotty but for Commodus Alexandrians they're all actually pretty nice. Coin quality at Alexandria seems to be lacking during his reign. The same is true for Elagabalus. Here are a couple of yucky examples in my collection. Both need to be reshot as my photography has (arguably) improved since these were taken.


EGYPT, Alexandria. Commodus
year 27, sole reign, CE 186/7
tetradrachm, 24.5 mm, 11.5 gm
Obv: MAKOMANTωCEBEVCEB; laureate head right
Rev: head of Zeus Ammon right; L K Z
Ref: Emmett 2568.27


EGYPT, Alexandria. Elagabalus
year 5, CE 221/2
tetradrachm
Obv: AKAICAPMAAVPANTωNINOCEVCEB; laureate head right
Rev: head of Zeus Ammon right; L-E (most likely E; could be B, year 2)
Ref: Emmett 2961.5 (or .2, but most likely year 5)

 

Getting to the point, the question is how much cash value we assign to coins like zumbly's second or Victor's top center. Both belong in a specialist's collection and would make no sense to people looking for a Commodus or Constantine. The concepts of best known and worst known get difficult when they are the same 'only known' coin.

TIF's plan is more or less what I did but how do you research sales of a coin that last sold before most people here were born? There is no demand for things no one knows to exist. I am amazed that Victor had to pay $450 for that lot because it suggests there was someone else who recognized the lurking prize.

I admire these groups, too. If I had known zumbly would post the first one, I would have selected my other recent lot of 32 odd coins which I actually ended up listing at $2 to $150 for his same average of $35. I hope everyone realizes the Commodus group were not 5 for $10 - that was an illustration as suggested when I said

The question, like most, showed there are different ways to look at every question. My main interest is figuring out what to do with the unwanted and duplicates in my groups. Thanks for the help.

 

Cost plus shipping divided by the number of coins. I keep it simple and don't think too much about it.

 

That's my approach!

 

Just make sure that you capture the cost of the bottle of wine or the 6-Pack as you are looking over the coins...