Nah, right after this painting was made, I entered from behind that one column, kicked this dude's backside and took his stash. Try to keep up.
I still have that 1963 proof set and the 1964 Red Book too. The set is still pristine; the Red Book is a bit worse for wear.
I was wondering if the decline in prices has affected the collecting of Ancient coins, my major interest. I really don't pay all that much attention to pricing trends, so although I have been collecting these coins on and off since the late 1950's, it seems that ancients have retained their value, but I just may not be paying that much attention.
It really is simple. It's not complicated at all. Are prices generally rising? If yes, that market segment is growing. If no, that market segment is shrinking. Period. No lame excuses about overvaluing in the past, no smoke and mirrors, no mumbo-jumbo. It's a binary choice, period.
This is not true. Fish food at my local pet store is $27.00. I skip that noise and buy it on Amazon for $10.00 delivered. The demand is the same but the competition drove the price down. To leave the impact of the internet out of this equation is silly. Again, you could be right but it seems to me the decrease in prices meshes perfectly with the higher availability of coins thanks to the internet. To confuse lack of demand with 'my stuff is overpriced, available only in a small geographic area, and inconvenient to acquire' is how people go out of business.
I can see where someone with an Internet-centric life might perceive that to be the case. I'm not buying it. Prices, and participation, were falling well before eBay came along. I buy coins (and a good many other things) where and how I do because I can get them for LOWER prices than I can find online. I have an Amazon account and have for years; I just don't get to use it very often. I bid on coins on eBay a fair bit, but I usually lose because I won't go high enough.
You may be right about this; however, eBay has been around for 20 years. I think a very large portion of your market sense has been impacted by the internet.
I just looked it up. I have been on eBay (my account) since December 12, 1998. In that time, I have SOLD exactly NO items and bought 110 items, or an average of 5.84 per year. This last year, I've been unusually active on eBay. 9 items bought. Before that I also bought some coins from an old site called numismatists.com, which hosted private coin auctions for dealers and others.
Hmmm. I don't understand how this works. You never use the internet. But you bid on eBay quite a bit.
A single local market on its own is irrelevant to the market as a whole. The coin market is no different then any other market. Some will be cheaper local, some cheaper online, in both cases the buyer is at the mercy of the supply available for each source. If we just looked at a single local market we could come to countless different conclusions which would vary greatly depending which one we look at. I have no doubt that on you can get most things significantly cheaper than someone in LA, NYC, Boston ect which would each be a bigger slice of the market as a whole.
I have NEVER EVEN ONCE used an eBay BIN listing. Not ever. I bid on pure auctions, ... ONLY! I've never seen a "Buy It Now" listing that I didn't feel was overpriced.
I wish there was a downtrend in the coins I collect, pre-1860 Italian and Sicilian coins. With these I'm losing auctions all the time and BIN prices are extremely high. In the last 5 years I've seen prices climb both here on American eBay and Italian eBay. People are paying more for lesser grades