Yes.. I strongly believe the coin market IS dropping.

I am Glad I Listened to Dave Bowers Advice in 1986....

Besides Proof Gold, another area which Doug's graphs show as having done well over this long time span is Early and Key Dates. This is precisely what Dave Bowers was advocating in the mid 80's: Focus on the keys, and scarce/rare coins. I therefore set out to chase 1790's Large Cents, Dollars, half dollars, quarters, etc.

Granted, early type and key/rare dates were NOT cheap back then, but as the graph and my own experience shows the investment was worth it. Even accounting for auction/purchasing fees and inflation, there is still a net gain to be shown, besides the enjoyment I had in owning historically significant coins. This, BTW, was the key driver for me behind my coin purchases, not a desire to make money fast.

 

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The market is dropping? Well no matter,cause I just like to collect coins for the hobby not how much they're worth. But if the market is low that means I can get some great coins for cheap! :eat:

 

Exactly.:high5:

 

Very good point. Quite true.

 

Actually, Doug, I did notice that. I looked at all 3,000 listings.

There's some value in what you're saying, but here's my concern : It doesn't take many mega-high end coins to dramatically skew the numbers. For instance, consider a $300,000 coin and a $300 coin. The big one completely dominates; the $300 coin can swing all over the place and have almost zero impact on the aggregate index. In fact, you can have 1 big one and 500 small ones and the big one still rules 20:1 in the example above (since the big was 1000x the small e.g. 500x20 = 1000).

When I look at all 3,000 coins, I don't feel it is indicative of the market as a whole. They should add a "weighting factor" to the more common issues so they have more impact on the index. Just MHO.

 

Actually, his point about flatness is still just as valid; most of those graphs are zoomed in to "fill the screen". His point was to graph from 0 to zenith, which does have a flattening effect.

BTW - I agree that coins are not "investments".

 

Im just hoping coins from this decade will not end up like sports cards from the 90's.
If I want to sell them Im hoping that someone will buy them for a decent price is what I mean.

 

my suggestion then is to not buy a lot of modern top-pop stuff. With all of the registry set collectors, a lot of people don't realize just exactly how common the 2nd highest condition is in a lot of these coins and when everyone decides to stop chasing registry sets, the market is going to flood with semi-high end common date coins. (Purely my opinion and prediction.)

Most of the coins that the dealer that I work for will buy are collector coins (rarer dates), otherwise he doesn't pay much of anything because they take much more of a niche buyer for him to sell them.