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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;SuperDave, post: 2425784, member: 1892&quot;]First, there&#039;s no reason for you to have to expend effort looking all around for auction results:</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="http://www.pcgs.com/auctionprices/default.aspx" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.pcgs.com/auctionprices/default.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcgs.com/auctionprices/default.aspx</a></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Forgive me for phrasing it this way, but it&#039;s <i>foolish</i> to use &quot;coins&quot; and &quot;retirement&quot; in the same sentence. If you devote maybe 20% of your actual retirement/investing activity into rare coins, it might be worthwhile as long as you&#039;re only worried about your money <i>not shrinking</i>. Coins are <b>far</b> too subjective a commodity to offer <b>any</b> sort of &quot;expectation&quot; as to long-term viability; you don&#039;t even get to know how wise any given buyer was to offer the price they did, and that Ebay VF25 is proof that there are some real dunces throwing money at coins. </p><p><br /></p><p>Profit when reselling coins is predicated upon finding the buyer willing to pay you a profitable return. What if the economy is down when you choose to sell, and people are being cautious with their money? What if you choose the wrong venue, and nobody who wants that coin is looking that week? What if somebody perfects a material which duplicates the electrical advantages of gold for less money, and the (majority) of current gold demand (which is industrial) falls away with the subsequent (huge) drop in bullion value so that only numismatists are buying coins any longer?</p><p><br /></p><p>Profiting from coins is as much a matter of <b>luck</b> as anything else. Yes, a savvy investor can skew the chances of that luck in their favor, but all the same it&#039;s not a term which should appear in your retirement goals.</p><p><br /></p><p>The only reasonable expectation from coin &quot;investing&quot; is to have a decent place to &quot;park&quot; money, when you have enough of it that rate of return isn&#039;t a priority. Even then, you can only park that money in issues whose market demographic is recession-proof. Junk silver and Fine Barber Halves don&#039;t get you there. Neither does this $5; the demographic you need is buying them in Mint State. Of the 571 examples of 1909-S which PCGS has slabbed, 504 of them are graded higher than the coin you just purchased. <b>That&#039;s</b> why so few auction records exist.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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