Got skunked Triton XXII!

I bid on one that went for 4x what I was willing to pay.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

You are right about crazy prices! I thought I was an idiot for going 2600 Sfrcs on a MS EL Hemihekte (Boar on tunny) from Leu. That probably would have gone 5 figures in Triton. If these trends keep on, we (average collectors) will be shut out with insane prices....but will have collections worth millions. I personally wish that prices would drop by 50 percent....so me and you can keep on collecting

 

Several years ago I was at the CICF in Chicago. We were discussing
coins in general and one of the dealers in the group said that one should
buy from their coins from whomever they feel comfortable with but when
it comes time to sell the smart choice is with either CNG or Keunker.
These two have bidders/customers that have very, very deep pockets.
Their customers also are well versed with the items they buy. With
CNG and Keunker I am only lucky 30% of the time and with Keunker
it is on VF or lesser quality. Most of the times my bid sheets are folded
up and used for taking the wobble out of the table they are using.
Rant over.

 

I have gotten 30 coins from Kunker/ most where MS/ Prachtexamplers. Prices where high....but the quality of a Kunker "fast stemplelglanz" =MS-65/66
while in hammered coinage their Vorz=MS-63/64
Same deal with CNG/ they hardly ever have MS/FDC coins. Yet in future events these coins now TPG are MS-65/66/67s=higher auction prices. People go gaga over MS-65+ coins. Coin collecting is a very elite hobby.

 

I am enjoying this thread very much, even though I have nothing of substance to add.

Thanks, guys!

 

I got three coins. Prices were very strong and their were whole groups that all I did was make them pay. But I cannot say that any of these were bargains Syracuse tetradrachm Larissa Stater The third coin a denarius of S Severus I cannot locate

 

The explosion of ancient coin prices is not surprising really. The Federal Reserve and other central banks world wide have pumped vast amounts of new money into the economy in the past 10 years. Last year, the Fed and the ECB resumed the money pumping. This is driving up all asset prices (S&P500 rose 30% in 2019, gold was up some 20%). So again, no surprise that coin prices are going through the roof too.

I remember sitting next to an elderly gentleman at a top coin auction in Zurich, Switzerland. He told me that if he hadn't sold his collection of Roman sesterti in the 1990s, he would have been really rich now.

 

I hate to play the "Debbie Downer" but there is no such explosion. Ancient coin prices are stable and have been stable for decades. And that's without taking the erosive effect of inflation into consideration. There is hard data to back this up.

We all read into hunches and anecdotes the trends we'd like to see. Happens to me too of course.

Rasiel

 

I guess we have to differentiate: Price is a function of supply and demand. The vast injection of new money has increased all asset prices (house prices +60% in 5 years; stock price +110% in 5 years; prices for art +X% and of course prices for ancient coins). However, with the opening up of eastern Europe, the deployment of metal detectors and so on also the supply of coins has increased, at least in some areas.

Where it has, the demand effect may have been partially or fully offset by the new supply. Where it has not, the demand effect has lifted Prices - it simply had to. The latter is in particular the case for high quality, high end coins as the ones which registered once again record prices in the last Triton Auction.

Prices for such coins have in many cases multiplied in recent years, which partly explains such discrepancies between auction estimates and hammer prices as demonstrated above by the hemistater, which was estimated at USD 15000,- and sold for USD 84000,-.

As for hard data, this very hemistater, i.e. exactly the same piece that was sold for USD 84000,- in the last Triton sale, sold for a mere USD 8500,- in 2005, which was the normal price back then.

https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=241722

I call a 10-fold increase over 15 years a price explosion, which affects all ancient coins that have not seen an increase in supply. But, granted where coin hoards or other finds have raised supply, prices may have been stable or even fallen. In my view this is particularly the case for low quality/low condition coins, which have been dug up in larger quantities by metal detectorists in recent years.​

 

Most of the greek coins auctioned in Triton went inexplicably high. A few went quite low e.g. the tets of akragas or those of Mende. Some of the punic ones also went low. My biggest surprise was that the group of hektes from Mytilene which were quite ugly in their majority or nothing special in the best case (and IMHO were the weakest coins in this session) went pretty high as well.

I also got zero, although with a different strategy I would have gotten one...
WATCH THE LANGUAGE..READ THE RULES!!

so I underbid and let it go so as to have more budget for a coin getting auctioned later. Which in the end hammered 6 times the estimate and 4 times its prior sale- and of course I failed.

I tend to believe that Triton is a war of bidder egos and so it is really a roulette if you get something you want or not.

The bidding live software of CNG is pure crap. You need to press twice to place a bid and by the time you do so, your bids are already surpassed by the floor. The auctioneer in the second session at some time got bored and was closing the lots without waiting for internet bids. I lost another possibility because of him.

In conclusion Triton= no thanks unless clio and his likes quit business.

 

The prices for items in auctions is a function of the pockets of the two bidders who want it. I have seen (and bought) coins for less than earlier hammer prices. Triton had a few bidders with deep pockets. They did not change the market unless they continue to bid in auctions where you bid.

 

ZERO out of 5 greek coins interested in.

2 times the underbidder

 

Tejas, you can't extrapolate from the sale of a single piece to encompass the whole of the ancient coin trade and expect to get a realistic picture.

In a nutshell, the proper way of assessing this is you take all the auction sales for the type of coin you want to track and average the cost of those sales totals divvied up by year then note the trends. Yes, people go crazy in NY in January but the auction fever effect of those few days has only a small effect when spread out throughout the year. As far as I can tell the fabled "hoard find" effect has never registered a drop in prices regardless of the size of the hoard. Never. As it not once throughout recorded history. To prove me wrong all you'd need to do is show me how X sold consistently in a range A-B prior to some date and then in a higher range afterwards.

Rasiel

 

This is true, but I think only at the very top end. The one tenth of 1% are doing very well and they want the best--which they find at Triton and the NYI--and drive those prices up. However, there are auctions almost every day of material that is, to me, very nice, that has not gone up at all in decades.

@Suarez assembles data for his ERIC books and must know prices for regular ancient coins as well as any of us.

I agree.

I have an extensive library of ancient-coin auction-sale catalogs which I peruse during commercials while watching American football. Almost all those catalogs (NFA, pre-internet CNG, old M&M, Sternberg, Spink, Leu, etc.) have coins that were considered high or very high-quality at the time. Nevertheless, almost all the coins from the 1980s and 1990s could be bought at the same nominal prices today (Exception: Nominal prices for Roman Republican coins have doubled). Coins bought in Swiss Francs long ago have lost a lot of value because the Swiss Franc has gone up so much while the coins have not (old catalogs from Swiss firms like old Leu, Sternberg, and M&M prove this). Yes, I agree the top, say, 10% of auction coins have gone up, but most of the buyers were not buying those coins. Also, many have even gone down.

I expect that the coins wanted by the collectors reading this have gone up in price. There is an explanation for that. They already have some coins and the ones they want are more expensive than the ones they have, possibly because they are better condition, or rarer, or their pockets are now deeper, or they learned more and now appreciate the desirability of better types. So, the prices of coins they want has increased--but those are not the same coins--they want different coins now then they did then.

Look at your own collection and see how hard it would be to reproduce most of your coins bought long ago at auction. Don't just focus on the top pieces that are your favorites and you got a really good deal. Look at the rest of them, too, and you will find most that would go for about the same prices now at auction.

Don't think that comparing prices to estimates says much. Everyone knows CNG underestimates its coins. Often "four times estimate" is really "just about right."

Don't think that citing examples of coins that have gone up a lot disproves this. It doesn't. There are outliers and it is easy to focus attention on coins that have gone up because they are especially interesting. Also, I admit that the very top end has gone up.

What do I mean by "top end"? The dividing line might be about the line between CNG e-sale quality and the quality of coins in one of their paper sales. For example, CNG often sites a coin for sale as having been in a previous auction. I have all their old PRs (even pre-internet) and sometimes look them up. As often as not the new e-sale PR is less.

 

The prices of meat and potatoes ancient coins may not have changed much. Dramatic increases in the upper strata of the market are all too real and easily documented.

Phil Davis

 

Alright, show me the data. For this segment a good bellwether would be aurei.

Rasiel

 

Thanks but no thanks. I don't much care if you believe me or not. I'm in NY at the show. If I were to go up and down the bourse polling dealers as to the direction of the market (another task I'm not going to perform), a sizable majority would say the trend is unquestionably up year to year; in many areas, the rise is truly dramatic. Their perceptions carry weight, because a dealer who consistently misjudges this stuff won't stay in business.

I'm happy to stipulate that the price of--say--a "generic" VF-EF denarius hasn't changed much in ten or twenty years, but that isn't at all what dealers are thinking of when they talk about "the market."

Phil Davis

 

Here's what I have for aurei average prices:

1990-1994: $10,791.84 based on 409 sales
1995-2000: $16,893.79 (317)
2000-2005: $8,874.84 (2,892)
2005-2010: $14,343.21 (5,217)
2010-2015: $15,292.43 (7,208)
2015-2020: $13,418.44 (3,817)

Prices not adjusted for inflation. I'd have a hard time convincing anyone of a trend, much less a dramatic one. Maybe if we looked only at EF aurei we'd get a different picture but I doubt it (and it would take a lot more effort to sort it all out).

Rasiel

 

Don't be upset. You said it was "easily documented". Polling people isn't data, it's anecdotes.

Rasiel

 

This shows me a ridiculous increase in price. From the early 90's to 2015 is only an increase of $4500 but sales increased almost 20 fold. If $15k average for 2015 and only 500 sales, I would say prices are going down. The data is saying just the opposite. Could you imagine the price of an aureus if there were only 400 sales for the next 5 years? Each would be astronomical. This is showing me a huge demand.