Are you Kidding Me!!

$15000.00 for this..


Maybe a host coin for a make over.

 

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Well, it is an exceedingly rare type, but yeah...too many zeroes.

 

I wonder how many excess 'zero's' the rest of the group reckons?? To me AT LEAST one.

As much as I LIKE the scare/rare types in 'budget' low-grade, I'd be hard pressed (logically) to even consider offering close to a grand for it.

I wonder what all of you would seriously consider as a 'fair' price.

 

For perspective, this brought 1000 euro + commission in 2014:

 

Two here. I'd take it for $150. More than that, and I'd settle for admiring Joe's, which is free.

 

There comes a point in this question where I wonder about authenticity. The coin has roughness worn smooth as if it were a pocket piece but the look would be hard to tell from a cast worn smooth by similar service. If there is some evidence that both are genuine, I'd place it well over double the price of Volodya's perspective piece but with my current (lack of) expertise I'll fall in with JA and be an admirer of Joe's coin. For the $150, I can buy some relatively pretty bauble. The coin is, in common with winning lottery tickets, something I will find for free (or in a junk box) if I am meant to have it.

 

When I consider buying a coin, i look for the "wow" factor - something that is truly impressive. No matter how rare a coin is, if there is nothing visually appealing about it, it's not worth having. And if the coin is so worn that its attribution and authenticity isn't certain anymore, it's not worth having.

In Australia, there's a rare coin called a holey dollar - a Spanish dollar which has been holed and counterstamped with the date 1813 and the name of the Australian issuing authority. A nice one is worth $200,000+. I came across an example in a coin shop for about $15,000 that was in worse shape than the OP coin - the story was that someone had used it as a washer on a rotating clothes line. Everytime the clothes line was rotated, it probably lost a few thousand dollars value.

The OP coin would be a truly amazing find - and worth having - if you found it in a junk box. The holey dollar too. But the things I would buy for $15,000!

 

Wow, historical or not, I would rather have $15000 worth of gordian III ant. then that.

 

Interesting!

It seems most of us believe the OP coin, however 'rare', is worth about $150-$200.00 in that condition. And that would be about as high as I could convince myself to offer.

 

A coin is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. It only takes two determined, slightly crazy bidders, to make the price $15,000.

On a different day, at a different auction, when sanity prevails, I'm guessing the coin will meet the CT estimate of $150.

At $15,000 it's a high risk investment.

 

So this coin falls in no-man's land at that price. Who is going to stretch their budget to pay 15K for such a poor example, even if authentic? 15K is pocket change if you're a millionaire, but what sort of millionaire would want that coin for even pocket change when he/she could afford a much better example? It's priced for nobody.

 

I agree with this. The coin could never be authenticated to the point that if I were the owner I would not loose sleep over it.

 

I agree here but stop short of wanting $15k worth of GIII. More than one of us here have coins more rare than this one but price comes from demand and many people know this coin so might want a bargain example. I once knew a collector who owned a very worn Athenian dekadrachm. Most of those coins are very high grade and did not circulate enough to get honest wear. We figured the coin had served as a pocket piece. Soft silver pocket pieces could go from VF to VG in a couple decades. This was years ago before most of the known dekadrachms were discovered. I admired the coin.

A question for Mat: If a nice Colosseum coin would be worth $100,000, would you rather have $100,000 worth of Gordian III? I know I would rather have $100,000 worth of assorted $50 coins (that would be 2000) but I can't quite grasp having 2000 Gordian III ants.

No coin is worth losing sleep over. That is why I hate to see people spending the kid's college funds on coins. I'm not a dealer; it is a hobby to me. I wonder if it is a hobby to billionaires who buy the big stuff.

 

If it's possible to be completely confident of authenticity (which in this case is a VERY big if--it may indeed not be possible,) there absolutely are collectors who would happily pay $1500-2000 for this, just to be able to boast that their collection included a Colosseum sestertius. I agree with JA though; I can't imagine who the target market is, even in theory, for this horror at 15K.

 

This is very accurate, and part of the reason why "problem" coins are discounted so heavily, especially when the original type gets to be more expensive. The first coin in this thread looks utterly fake to me but if it were genuine, it would definitely be worth over a thousand dollars in my eyes, but certainly not $15K.

I've even bid on a few lower end examples despite having a higher grade coin myself: it's a fascinating type and I'd love to have one which I could keep around the house to admire while mine is locked away at a bank!

I'm certainly not a billionaire but there are several billionaires (and even more many-hundred-millionaires) deeply interested in coins and I can absolutely say they are almost all diehard collectors which live and breathe coins. Unless you're specifically buying "the finest known" of extremely popular types, the vast majority of coins today are simply not expensive enough to be counted as a substantial investment for the super-wealthy. A $10 million coin collection would be just 1% of $1 billion; hardly worth the time and effort for someone who is only interested in "investing" that $10M with no interest in the coins they're accumulating.

That's not to say people haven't gone down that path, but from the collectors I know, it's far less common of an approach than one would think. The top prices are mostly realized by passionate collectors who care deeply about what they're buying.

 

$15000.00 for that!!??

 

It was just sarcasm, Doug.

 

But TIF said I could!

Regarding the OP coin - I may be a bit more of a gambler than some here, but I would totally go up to $300, and another $50 for a Sear cert to see if the gamble paid off.

 

Even if I had several hundred thousands in my bank account (which I sadly don't have ), I would not pay $15,000 for that coin. It is just so worn and pitted. I have no problems spending thousands on a truly magnificent example of something, and I've done so 2 or 3 in my life when my budget allowed for it...but this coin would not be one of those.

If I showed this coin to someone else, especially someone who wasn't a die hard Roman fanatic, they just wouldn't get it. It's just not beautiful at all, most of the details are gone and unreadable, and it is not that far from being a slug. On the other hand, I could show someone else my $35 AE's of Constantine and Constantius II (my cheapest ancient coins) and even if they were not coin fans, they could still appreciate the design, enjoy the symbolism of the portraits, and get something out of them because there is enough there to experience and enjoy.

 

Most of the wealthy who by coins for investment, do so for the same reason they buy a race horse. It's the thrill of the gamble. To a true collector, it's the thrill of just having it.