State of the Market

The Greek market may be soft, but it seems like I'm paying more and more for every coin I buy (probably because my taste keeps getting more expensive).

 

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As a collector who has become more attracted to the “dark side” as of late, I am most drawn to coins that I can appreciate and understand from a historical perspective. Therefore it doesn’t surprise me that the first century Roman material would be hot. Beginners in ancients are going to gravitate towards the 12 Caesars and so forth before venturing into obscure late Roman or Byzantine rulers who they’ve never heard of.

 

Can't say about all ancient coins, just about my area of interest - provincial coinage of Judaea and Decapolis. I see clear trend to polarization. While exceptional quality and rarity coins beat records, anything not so rare or F or below is very significantly down compared to 20 years ago. Generally speaking, collectors have deep pockets, but total number of them is nowhere near it was then.

 

@KSorbo
It's not our fault that the average person today knows what Lady Gaga had for breakfast, and whom Johnny Depp slept with last week, but don't even know who the president was 50 years ago, and much less anything about the civilizations that shaped our world today. If anything, they should be ashamed about that. Hopefully some will pull themselves out of that ignorance thanks to wanting to get into ancient coin collecting. I know it's difficult for many to believe the world existed before them, but life becomes more meaningful an interesting when you can actually understand the forces that went into shaping our world.

Then perhaps when someone tries to sell you pseudo science online with nonsense you see on YouTube about how the Roman Empire fell because of the free grain dole, or diversity, or because the denarius was devalued, or because of lead plumbing, or other such nonsense, you'll know better and laugh, because you'll be well educated and not ignorant. It's hard to sell bad ideas and junk to people who are actually well educated. Even "reputable news sources" are full of junk history. I once read in a major newspaper how the Roman Empire fell because of Marius...yeah, that Marius who died in the first century BCE before the empire was even a thing. I almost died from laughter. Never mind the nearly 600 years of mostly stability and prosperity after his death, I guess you can overlook that when all your knowledge comes from celebrity magazines and things you heard someone else say at work.

 

CNG just sent me a advert which contained a bit of interesting information. In it they claimed to have ...111 printed auctions.....444 electronic auctions that generated ..... $447 million in total sales. The part I found most interesting was....19,191 registered users. This last number is the most interesting as it suggests the number of active collectors of essentially ancient coins is rather limited. Of course this last number is a bit of a mystery. Is it their total auction base, or is it the number that they send their auction cats to ?

 

I wonder how many of that number has placed a bid or made contact in the last year/5 years. Contact figures changed with the Internet. In 1990, paper catalog mailings had to be limited to those who paid or who were likely to generate future business (you got catalogs if you won enough on a regular basis). Now, it cost no more to contact 19000 e-people than it does to contact the 500 (guess - what is the actual number?) who spent over $10k last year. Registered uses vary from people who bought half of the last sale to those who never have placed a bid and have no intention of ever owning a coin. One could make quite a 'clip art' collection without ever touching a coin. How long after one of us dies does the name remain in Registered user status? When I retired onto a fixed income in 2003, I discovered how long it took for some companies to give up on me and stop sending catalogs. It cost them money to keep inactive names on their list. This has changed. About 30 years ago I heard a major dealer define a 'serious' collector as one who spent over $1000 a year on the hobby. What is that cut off number today? How many different people spent $1k (or $10k or $100k) on ancient coins in 2018? How many worldwide accumulations of ancient coins exist that exceed each of these values in coins? How many of those were assembled by a person who died long ago and the family has not bothered with the coins? Such statistics would be very hard to assemble.

 

I would read it at face value. 19,191 people have created a user name and password on their website. There is no way we can know how many of those people have actually bid in a CNG auction but it's probably safe to say the number is lower than 19,191.

 

That number has to be a typo. Even a smaller site like VCoins has many multiples registered users than that.

 

I'd agree with some aspects of the CNG market report original post. In addition there are some coins that appear very hot and I believe are being manipulated pricewise. These have essentially increased about 300 - 400% over the past 5-6 years.

I bid on approx ancient 8 coins, largely Roman and a few Greek out the NYICS auctions and won none of them. In addition I bid on a few inexpensive (< $1K) but interesting 20th century world coins and won none of those.

After the NY, I bid recently in a few good 2nd tier auctions. From these I actually won 75% of my lots although these were interesting but less expensive coins.

One area that has gotten stronger I believe is very late Roman. This has become of greater interest because of the rise of internet information and also the publication of some major history books on this era.
One book is: Peter Heather: The Fall of the Roman Empire, Amazon top history books of 2018

Once a very obscure area, there is increasing interest in the fall of the Empire and the transition to Hunnic and Gothic warlords ruling Europe. For example out of the NYICS, the Heritage tremissis of Romulus Augustus (the last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, 475-476 AD) had major scratches on both sides and was "NGC choice XF marks". Is that a new grade designation btw? not xf details but "marks", the marks being in small print well under the title. Anyhow it realized $66K which is a significant amount for one of these.

On my own part an interesting late Roman coin I got this week is the siliquae of
Jovinus: Leu Numismatik, 25 May, 2019, lot 782. He was an usurper and reigned from 411-413 around the time of the 1st sack of the City of Rome in 410 AD.