Ones that got away...

I had a coin in my Vcoins cart for weeks, but never pulled the trigger because something else always came up.
Well today I looked and it's no longer available, and the cheapest one like it I can find is about 2x the price.
I tell myself that I can't afford to buy every interesting coin I come across, and there will be more opportunities in the future...but I'm still kind of kicking myself!

The coin in question was a denarius from the Roman Republic.

(Photo courtesy of CNG Coins)
Not this exact one but the same type. I have yet to add a Republican coin to my collection and I really like these Cassius Longinus coins with the togate voter dropping his ballot into the election box. Seems to capture the spirit of the Roman Republic. Plus, it was struck during the lifetime of Julius Caesar. (63 BC.)

Oh well. There will be others. I guess it's a pretty small problem to have.

Anyone else have a similar story of the coin that got away?

 

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I shop @ma-shops quite often. Sometimes I see a coin out of my
collecting interest and I book mark it. I study it, try to learn about
it and then I think some more for a few days. A few times, like you,
I've been disappointed by it being sold when I return.

 

I feel regret that a coin I was watching had sold, but also kinda feel a relief that I don't have to save money and buy that coin anymore, and that i'm free to look for another coin, and the cycle goes on. And it's no wonder most of the favourite coins in my collection were acquired without any plan.

 

I feel your pain. This got away from me..I just couldn't bid any higher..daughters college tuition and then my ones car repair wiped out my play money! This is a new reverse variant with ground line. This could actually help resolve the questionable description of the ground line or animal leg/ sacrifice debate.
Not to mention it has the best ram I've seen in a long time! Getting a little teary-eyed writing this.
Elagabalus, Antioch

 

My experience over the years is that if I can talk myself out of buying a coin 'right now', I should. My favorite 'find' came on a VCoins list and it took me less than 30 seconds to have it bought and paid for. If you regularly find others you want more, it is likely that you will find another you want. If I were to have only one Republican coin, it would not be this type but I agree there is appeal in the voting scene. There are still four of this type available on vcoins at the moment and a couple of his other major voting type (with the AC tablet). If you search old posts on Coin Talk, you will find a hundred posts where one or the other of us points out the RR coins we like best. You night enjoy 'shopping' on some of those posts. The link below shows a couple thousand possibilities including yours.
http://numismatics.org/crro/results?q=fulltext:Cassius+Longinus
They have over a hundred of 'your coin'.
http://numismatics.org/crro/id/rrc-413.1
Picking a first may be difficult.

 

I had a similar experience a number of years ago that actually had a happy ending. I fell in love with this As of Germanicus , but kept procrastinating and coming up with reasons why I shouldn't buy it. After months of deliberating, I finally decided to make my move, but alas it had just been sold. Several years later, I found the same coin offered for sale again from the same dealer. This time I bought it immediately.
My attitude now if I miss out on a coin, is that there will ALWAYS be another.

 

I only buy coins from auctions so never had a situation like the one described, but I would be annoyed. For the moment.
But similar things have happened in auctions.
Usually I prepare a wish list before the auction. There are 3 categories of coins I add in the list - 1. coins I really want 2. coins that would be good additions 3. 'I'll grab it if the price remains really low'
Sometimes next in line is a coin I really want, the price is normal but not a bargain, so I decide to leave it as another one from the list comes after a few lots and I want that one more. And often I lose that also, because of exploding bids.

So then I realize it was a mistake leaving the first coin, but who could have known.

Another silly mistake from a few weeks ago - one of the coins from my general wish list (trying to get one for a year but lost them for various reasons, anyway not rare) appeared in an auction, in a "payable" condition. Saved it, did not put a proxy/pre-bid (I decided to stop this habit) and was pretty optimistic about it.
The mistake was that I didn't pay attention to the auction table. The coin was live on Saturday evening. I was convinced it's on Sunday afternoon. So when checking the website as I wanted to see what is the current bid, I saw it sold for 50 EUR. 15 minutes before. I would have gladly paid 100. Fail.

But for me personally, these situations are annoying just for a few seconds. I do not specialize on something in particular. I mainly collect Roman Imperial - 1st, 2nd and 3rd centuries; I started to like RR because of beautiful designs; Greek and also Provincials. I do not collect everything, but not specializing on a small segment helps in this case - interesting coins will constantly appear.

In auctions there is another thing that "comforts" me. Losing a coin with a hammer price of 50 EUR doesn't mean my (absent) 55 EUR bid would have been the winner. And, if the coin is not a major rarity (and I don't afford those) something similar will appear.
I had pleasant surprises quite often - I lost bidding wars, bidding 100 EUR for coins I personally appreciate at 50, and after a month I got very similar coins paying 30-40.

Losing a coin means, one way or another, that somebody wanted it more. He/she was faster when buying it for a fixed price / was willing to bid more on an auction / paid more attention in spotting a rarity or something similar.

 

I won’t bother anyone with all the coins that have «gotten away» from me over the years, but there are a few that I’ve beaten myself up over not having bought. Like @ambr0zie , I usually buy at auctions. However, one of my buying «rules» is to not get caught up in bidding wars, and to remember that «there will always be another coin». On the odd occasion, there won’t be another coin though. At least not for a very long time.
In the case of the OP coin, however, one can safely assume that the opportunity will present itself again. And again and again.

 

That is a beautiful coin and a happy ending! :thumbsup:

 

@dougsmit Yes the opposite has happened to me too, where I see a coin come up and I go for it then and there. I guess it all balances out in the end.
Thanks also for the links! Republican coinage I have not delved too deeply into, but I look forward to seeing what all is there.

@svessien Yeah at least the one I missed isn't a great rarity or something else hard to find.

 

My new year began with the pleasant surprise of finally having “won” a Julius Caesar portrait denarius at a reasonable price. Turns out biddr incorrectly showed the coin as “won” and I had ended up with the exact same bid as the preceding (winning) bidder. :-(

 

Was your bid a proxy one?
I know the Biddr rule is that the proxy bid is executed a fraction of a second after a live bid.

Few months ago I lost this coin, my proxy bid being equal to the winner's live bid

 

It was one of the auctions that did not use biddr checkout, and I had submitted the pre-bid a couple of days before the actual auction. Not sure how it even got recorded if there was already an equal bid on the coin. The coin showed up with a star icon along with the two I actually ended up getting, so I assumed I had got it as well.

 

I have lost out in auctions/ but never one for sale at fixed prices on MA-shops. Even, when looking at past auctions "unsolds"....If I "want" the coin, I click buy in a split second decision. With rare coins in high quality, one must seize the opportunity without hesitation.

 

Many of you advocate to be patient and the coin will show up
again. I just hope I live long enough for that to occur.

 

I purchase from both auctions and VCoins/ma-shops. In terms of "the one that got away" the usual issue is money. I just can't afford to buy every coin I like. I'm currently watching five coins on VCoins. They're all affordable, but if I were to spring on all of them, I would be sleeping in the shed...

Instead, I just have to hope they'll be available for some time. For the nicest coins, this doesn't happen.

 

Dead on.....
Most coins are easy to get/ like the Athenian Owls/ must be 400+ in next Leu auction/ even Alexander III AV staters/ Carthaginian AV Staters come up in large numbers. However, even common coins like AV Romanus III Histamenon are tough to get in MS. Merovingian coinage is all extremely rare/ esp. Royal issues.

 

I don't usually put a coin in my VCoins shopping cart unless I'm ready to buy it, but I do keep many coins on my watch list practically forever. I currently have almost 100 different coins parked there, from as long ago as June 2020, not counting quite a few that have been sold to someone else since I put them on the list. And the same is true at MA-Shops, although my watch list there is a little shorter. Sometimes I just scroll through the lists and imagine buying everything on them if I had infinite amounts of money!

And yes, there are coins I wish I had purchased, but dithered about for too long. The specific example I can remember is this Roman Republican denarius of L. Rubrius Dossenus, which was on my watch list at MA-Shops for several months last year:



Eventually, I tried to buy it, but got a message that it had just been sold. (Quite a coincidence! I suspect that the coin had actually been sold some time before, but the dealer forgot to remove it until I tried to buy it.)

I have looked for a similar example ever since, and there have been many of the type up for sale (both at retail and at auction), but I have never again seen another one that shows all the details so clearly, particularly the wolf's head at the back of the cart. So I still think of it as one that got away.

 

99% of the time an auction loss is no big deal to me; either my bid is one that I knew had no chance, or else it's a type I know will come up again in two weeks.

One particular stand out is of course a very common coin, but one that has been out of budget for some time. I was the underbidder on this Lysimachos tet way back in Ares 1 in 2019


https://www.biddr.com/auctions/aresnumismatics/browse?a=673&l=704250

There are nicer coins out there, but this is the nicest one I have ever seen hammer for significantly less than the $1k mark. Unfortunately, it was right towards the beginning of the auction, and I knew I wouldn't be able to afford any of my other targets if I bid that one up to 550. Did end up winning a very nice Athens tet at least.

 

In fact, the list I posted recently of my favorite Roman Republican coins (in no particular order) does include this specific type as the final coin of the nine I chose, along with one other voting scene:

https://www.cointalk.com/threads/fo...m-if-you-got-‘em.300099/page-585#post-8197415