Took a few years off from collecting, now suffering from sticker shock!

I started an Imperial Roman coin collection about 4 years ago. I quickly fell in love with hobby, however, after a series of unfortunate, purchase-related events, I became disgruntled and decided to give it up

But, you know what they say, time heals all wounds! I decided to pick up where I left off while implementing some strategies to avoid the pitfalls. I had previously created a spreadsheet where I documented price, condition, variety, etc from whatever sale information that I could find for the coins that I wanted in my collection. I've been going through and updating everything with sale information from the last couple of years and, holy crap!, everything seems to be up by 50% or more. That seems like a rather large increase over only a few years

I was trying to do a bit of research as to why the price of ancients has increase, but I couldn't find anything specific. I did find some articles about the prices of collectables increasing in general, and they seemed to think that things have blown up because everybody has gotten super bored while being quarantined in their homes over the past 1+ years.

Have you guys noticed the price hike? Am I imagining things? Are my target coins outliers? And, if the price of these coins have gone up that much, do you think it's because of the pandemic? Or is there another reason?

Not a big deal, I just have to recalibrate my expectations and move forward. I just thought that it was an interesting observation and wanted to see if you guys could fill in any blanks.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

It's not just you, @Cherd. We've all been astonished at auction prices over the past year.

 

Yes, the past year especially has seen many ancients coins jump in price. I've had to look at other avenues to get new coins & even then it's sparce.

Hopefully, prices will go down in time.

 

Too much money sloshing through the economy, all competing for a limited supply of goods and services, predictably leads to asset price inflation.

 

1. In the past 2 years, I've noticed, that the price of low end ancient coins, and the price of medium priced ancient coins, the two types of coins that I collect, seem to have increased a lot. I'm not sure how much exactly. Maybe 20% to 50%. Especially for auctions.
2. I've heard, that coin collecting has become more popular, because of the pandemic. People were stuck in their houses, looking for things to do.
3. If I remember correctly, when I talked with a CNG employee in March, she said, that a lot of people in China were winning CNG auctions. I didn't ask, if they were buying ancients, or moderns, or what. If more Chinese citizens are buying ancients, and if that is a relatively new phenomenon, then that could be contributing, to the increase in the price of ancient coins. I don't know, if more Chinese citizens are investing in ancient coins, or collecting ancient coins, or both. This may be happening in other countries as well. More people living in cities. More people with disposable incomes. A general increase in the average person's standard of living, perhaps. And the world population continues to increase, while the number of authentic ancient coins can never increase (except for found hoards, which is significant. And the number of fakes, especially convincing fakes, can increase). Related to what @ToughCOINS said.
4. I'm guessing that, now that people can buy ancient coins on the internet, that has led to more people collecting ancients. I started collecting ancients in 2018, because of the internet. Before that, I mostly collected US coins, because I live in the US, and it's easy to buy US coins at coin stores and coin shows. Of course, collecting coins may have suffered, because of the invention of video games. But internet buying and selling may have offset that, or more. Of course, the internet buying and selling has been around a long time. But maybe internet buying and selling is still picking up steam. Also, the first generation of persons, who started to use the internet a lot, are now older and more established in their careers, or maybe even retiring, and therefore have more money and time, to spend, on ancient coins. Also, many persons in that generation, collected coins when they were children, because there were no video games, when they were children.
5. Stimmy!
6. Number 5 explanation : Pandemic stimulus checks, and other types of pandemic related government stimulus, causing inflation, related to what @QuintupleSovereign said. Perhaps this is contributing to rising ancient coin prices.
7. Perhaps the pandemic, has made it more difficult, for persons to search for hoards of ancient coins, and to sell their found hoards to dealers. I don't know. I'm not very familiar, with how dealers acquire the ancient coins, that they sell. Do many of them travel, to various countries, to acquire ancient coins? Traveling has greatly decreased, because of the pandemic. In other words, I wonder, if the supply of ancient coins for sale, has been affected by the pandemic.

 

The Dow is up about 44% in the past 12 months. S&P 500 is up 41% over the same time. Houses are selling for over the asking price in many areas, often sight unseen. Gasoline prices have just about doubled. You have to ask yourself whether the “things” you own are worth more, or are the dollars by which they are quantified worth less?
If the price rise in ancient coins is a fad, then it would make sense to moderate one’s spending until the coin market cools back down. But if the dollars themselves are declining in purchasing power, it makes sense to be more aggressive in acquiring coins. It is trading a depreciating asset for a (likely) more stable one. After all, a nice Roman denarius or uncirculated double eagle will probably always have a value in the market, even if the world economy craters, even if you are trading for coyote pelts and bushels of potatoes.

 

I don't think that it necessarily explains the recent price jumps, but the internet in general has surely had a huge influence on the hobby. If not for the internet, I wouldn't even know where to start in finding ancient coins to collect in the first place!

I'm sure that all of you are also correct to some extent in blaming the stimulus money. Apparently you can't dump 5 trillion dollars into a 20 trillion dollar economy and not see some extreme effects. Who woulda thought?!

I've been apprehensively waiting for the hyper-inflation ball to drop. Once the economy gets fully back up and running again, we'll see what happens.