Hello to everyone, I have a question that has been perplexing me lately, so I thought who should I ask but the experts. So, here it goes....... Lately there has been quite a bit of news coverage regarding the recovery of at least one if not two war ships off the coast of the United States. In at least one, if not two, there is comment about the many rare coins that have been, will be, or should be recovered. If you are a dealer in rare coins do you welcome these finds, or do you liquidate your stock of coins before the market explodes and your rare coins are not as valuable?
Well I'm not a dealer, but I do know what usually happens when such finds are made - very little. There are rare exceptions and sometimes the value of a given coin will drop somewhat when newly found examples come onto the market. But as I said - this is rare. That is because the numbers of the newly found coins entering the market is not large enough to affect the market adversely. It can, and often does, have the opposite effect. You see, one of the primary factors that makes the value of a given coin go up is that there has to be enough of them readily available to attract collector interest. This interest actually creates the market for the given coin and causes the price to rise. A good example of this would be Morgan dollars. Morgan dollars exist in huge numbers, in almost every date & mint. They are in no way rare or even hard to find - dealers have literally scads of them at any given time. The thing that drives the values of the Morgan dollars is that everybody wants one - they are immensely popular. And they are popular because they are easy for collectors to find. If a collector wishes to purchase any date, any mint of Morgan dollar he can likely find so many examples of it in about 5 minutes or less on the internet that he will have a hard time deciding which one to buy. So - when somebody finds a shipwreck and they recover a number of coins, and it is usually gold because silver is corroded by seawater and the silver coins often have little market value, it can actually make the market for these coins more liquid and drive the prices up - not down. If there are only a few examples for a given coin available - it can be quite difficult to sell them actually. Sometimes this because of cost - but more often than not it is because the limited availability of the coin keeps it below the radar of collector interest. There are many examples of this.
One major thing that some of the recent shipwreck recoveries have done is prove the existence of certain coins or mints. With the bars recovered on the Central America wreck, many older bars were proven to be forgeries. This shook up the numismatic community. Shipwreck coins often bring new collectors to the fold, so most dealers welcome the coins into the market. What we (dealers) hate, is the Mint or Government "FINDS" coins and releases them to the public at below current prices. The GSA hoards buried many dealers. A couple of years back the Mint "FOUND" 1999 quarters and wanted to sell them at levels much lower than the current market prices. Luckily, many jumped on the bandwagon and the Mint decided that these particular coins did not remain in good enough quality to be sold.
