I’m just looking around eBay and noticed that a lot of modern silver proof sets are basically trading at or very near melt + face value of the other coins. I know there is a lack of demand for a lot of modern coins but selling at melt +face surprised me. Also this is not just limited to a few postings I just didn’t want to keep taking photos but there are quite a few examples of this
It’s too bad, but a few ago I saw that dealers are busting up modern silver Proof sets and throwing the coins in their silver junk boxes. Just a couple jiggles, and these coins are marked and ruined. These are pretty sets, but now it’s bye-bye. On the other side, people are paying from $100 to well over $200 for 2025-S cents. I Googled the mintage, and learned that there are 297,503 cents in the clad Proof sets and 124,184 in the silver sets. The 2025-S cent is hardly a rarity which is worth those prices. Five years from now, the people who paid those prices, and still holding those coins, will be sorry.
As the prices for silver rose quickly from last year to early this year, these sets quickly lost any premium they had. Most dealers won't even pay close to melt (I saw 10%-20%+ under melt at peak silver-with some not wanting to buy at all).
The big problem when gold and silver prices are high is that the dealers don’t want to buy it because they don’t want to be left holding the bag. These prices are like yo-yos - constantly up and down.
...unless buyers are beating down their door looking for it, and they need to replenish their inventory, right?
I don't go to my local coin shop that often, but the last time I was there, it had an unusual number of customers. I asked them why, and they told me that the silver price had taken a little dip. I think that lower prices tend to get the savy buyers come to the door. The lemmings buy when prices are high.
When I was a kid, I remember a pawn shop was selling uncirculated mint sets at face value of the coins and I only have 20 bucks on me at the time and I bought $20 worth of Mint sets at face value. I ended up making a lot of money on that. I also remember not going back and getting the rest. I’m definitely not making that mistake again. I’ll buy all the sets I can at melt
I'm really happy with what the price of silver has done to all the stuff I collected from the US Mint. Not that many years ago, I was so far in the red, all I could see was a large loss. With the price of silver today, I'm so far in the green, I can only smile. Never saw that coming but I'll take it.
Only that "melt value" isn't strictly applicable for small transactions like this - it's the price for "good delivery bars", nominally around 1000 ounces, and accredited and regulated. Sometimes, silver coins trade above melt. Lately, they've been trading below melt. But at these silver price levels, proof coins have no additional value over any other silver coin, and the face value of non-silver coins in the set makes only a trivial contribution to the final value.
by the way that was after tax not before tax. The selling price was 311. And typically Silver in hand trades slightly higher than the Futures that you see published Wall Street Journal today said 6127. But I’m buying Silver under market value, no matter how you want to measure it and buying $19 and change in proof coins at face value. This seems absolutely positively crazy to me
If that's what it's selling for on eBay, that is its market value - in that market, at least. And the seller might have had a hard time getting much more for it elsewhere, although it's hard for me to imagine what they get after eBay fees would be competitive with some of the big online buyers/sellers. I've bought a lot of silver on eBay below melt over the years, some of it well below even the "going rate" on eBay itself. I made some money off some of it. I was underwater on some of it for a long time (I was buying when silver was on the way back down in 2011). But if you like proof coins, this is a good time (and that's apparently a good place) to buy!
Watching YouTube videos of coin shops they started paying spot minus when silver was spiking. It didn't matter what ... Morgan/peace dollars, sets, etc.
I have quite a few 2026 silver proof sets. I was looking to trade a couple at a dealer and couldn't because they had about fifty of them at the shop already. I don't mind. I'll just keep them stashed.
