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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Andrew McCabe, post: 3568091, member: 90666&quot;]As with Joe and Phil, I stick rigorously to my criteria, which differ from Phil&#039;s even though we both collect high-end Roman Republican because I place value on different things such as the coin&#039;s ownership history and the consequent positive &quot;votes&quot; past famous collectors have given to the coins in my collection. I also collect bronzes aes grave and gold which means different types of compromises. No matter what level one is collecting at, it always involves a lot of compromises.</p><p><br /></p><p>Though my current collection is what most people would think of a &quot;high quality&quot;, I put practically no money into coins except that which comes out of my existing collection through resale. I&#039;ve a modest pension and what money I can spare from that goes into travel for coin research and acquisition, not on the coins themselves. For instance travel costs to visit the ANS in New York or the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge to research provenances. And my monthly subscription to the London Library which has an extensive ancient history and numismatics section. I put a massive amount of time and effort into fundamental research (additional to provenance research) on the coins I own. For example I&#039;ve discovered and published many new overstrike bronze types in my collection; then when I sell such a coin it helps to buy a fraction of a nice Julius Caesar denarius (which I can buy cheaper because of good research). And I notice and research like crazy any slight variation in a coin design that does not match the standard catalogue descriptions. And then I sell it and it helps to buy a Cassius denarius. When a collector has better condition coins with wonderful provenances, don&#039;t think &quot;daddy&#039;s trust fund&quot; … really wonderful collections are formed through WORK WORK WORK WORK WORK.</p><p><br /></p><p>To cite a specific example rather than a model, I recently sold the top two extremely rare coins, with appropriate research and commentary:</p><p>[ATTACH=full]949612[/ATTACH]</p><p>And the proceeds fully covered the cost of buying this relatively common coin in one of last months auctions, but that has a Caesar portrait quality that is really exceptional for the type (thus rare as such):</p><p>[ATTACH=full]949613[/ATTACH]</p><p>This is why one rarely sees me on this forum merely chatting. I could chat and add &quot;nice coin&quot; comments or I could spend the same hours scrutinising an overstrike and pulling every possible SNG volume I have access to in order to find a match for the undertype. Over the course of a life career of course I&#039;ve put some savings from my job as an engineer into coins, but it was the hopefully wise selections of what to buy ten or twenty or thirty years ago, combined with deep research, that has allowed me to convert a very large study-collection of averagely worn coins into a smaller quality collection of superb coins at almost no cost. WORK adds the pixie-dust of quality to your collection. At the outset that means thousands of hours of research to make sure one buys the right coins at the right price to start with. I almost never buy a coin &quot;with&quot; a good provenance because that means I&#039;d be paying for already-known information. I buy coins &quot;likely to have&quot; a good provenance, which I can tell from the nature of the coin itself. And that requires endless research so one can recognise that &quot;Quadras y Ramon&quot; look. And here&#039;s a picture of Alexey Stakhanov drilling coal, to further drill home my message. Be like him.</p><p>[ATTACH=full]949620[/ATTACH]</p><p>So there are a range of different collecting philosophies, but they are not all equivalent in my eyes. Collectors who collect widely but not deeply will enjoy their collections immensely but collectors who put in the hard work and research and that have a good eye (due to ten thousand hours of more of research) are very likely to form much better collections at much lower cost. There is real merit in building deep expertise, in sweating your collection. Skip the Netflix, log-off Coin Talk and get the books out.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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