Heritage Auction of the Morris Collection

Last night I did three fingers of a single malt scotch (Loch Lomond, aged 12 years) while watching the Heritage auction of Roman coins from the Morris collection . Over 500 coins sold lasting past 12:00 am my time. Many of the coins were slabbed but most were "raw". The collection was rich in sestertii, however, many were in rough shape & many had been "smoothed". The coins brought surprisingly high prices & I can assure everyone the Roman coin market is alive & well . I bid on 3 sestertii & 4 Byzantine coins & was steamrolled for my effort . One coin in particular caught my eye, pictured below, because I have a similar coin issued from a different emperor from the same period. The Morris coin is a very rare follis struck at the London Mint, depicting Constantius I as Nob. Caesar with helmet, spear, & shield facing left. The ignorant cataloger placed an estimate of $200.00-300.00 on the coin , it sold for $1,920.00 with buyers premium . Pictured below the Morris coin is a very rare follis of Diocletian in a similar pose struck at the Trier Mint, circa AD 303-305, 10,61 gm, that I bought at auction 12 years ago for $460.00.

 

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I noticed the coins on my watchlist had low estimates too. Perhaps this is strategic to get more bidders involved?
I've always thought HA had very good estimates as they list recently sold comparables right there on the page and presumably take an average. The more common the coin, the better this will work..

 

Nvb, You're right-on with your comment "this is strategic to get more bidders involved". Many auction houses do this including CNG. The problem with Heritage using & illustrating coins that are similar, as in this Morris follis, is all the coins they used for comparison had the most common obverse type .

 

Too bad you didn't win any coins in the auction!

I got an 'market update of CNG' in my email the other day. (I can't be the only one getting that.) It too says that the ancient coin market is alive and kicking with Roman silver hitting records, although gold and bronze are a bit slower. Im not able to compare prices over the years well but when looking at auctions now i get the idea that the prices are getting higher and higher every time. I don't think it effects the high end coins only, but as prices rise, more people enter the market and prices overall get higher. Which means less coins for people like me with a modest budget affordable...

 

Is it unreasonable to suspect that a Heritage sale including raw coins did not convey NGC papers that explained why those coins were not slabbed? Do people save rejection tags and offer them with the coins or did they leave the "smoothed" diagnosis to you?

 

I wondered the same. NGC will slab coins that have been smoothed-- they indicate so on the label-- but they won't slab tooled coins. Given the overwhelming percentage of slabbed offerings from Heritage, the higher number of unslabbed coins in that auction does give me pause although I didn't browse the auction carefully. Were there a lot of lower grade coins? Maybe Heritage doesn't bother to slab coins that won't hit a certain grade?

 

Some time ago I created a thread and posed the question - are ancient coin prices spiking/ in a bubble?
The general consensus was no, prices are relatively steady or increasing at the rate of inflation. My gut feeling was and is that they are going up at a faster clip (increasing at inflation would have seen prices double over the past 25-30 years) but one would have to collect a lot of data to be sure..

 

I thought Heritage was very studious in describing "raw" coins that had been smoothed & didn't notice any that should have been labeled tooled. Morris was obviously not a very picky collector since most of the large bronze coins had poor surfaces in my opinion. Most of the silver denarii brought high prices, "slabbed" & "raw", including very common coins. I don't know anything about Morris as a collector but it seems many people were buying these coins because of the Morris provenance.

 

One thing I have noticed over the past 12 years or so is that the prices of Roman provincials have gone through the roof. They used to be the ugly stepsister of the ancient coin collecting hobby and were largely ignored by condition cranks and those put off by their (often) naive artwork. Not anymore. At the mid-level European auction houses, such as Naumann, Auctiones GmbH, Leu, and such, they bring strong competition, with hammer prices bringing triple what they would have ten years ago.

For F-VF Roman imperial silver, I haven't seen prices change much, actually, with many common denarii from the Flavian - Severan period going for $60-100 in VF. Similarly, debased antoniniani from the mid-third-century often go for even lower than this. You could amass a rather extensive Philip, Decius, Gallus or Volusian collection for less than $60 a coin and be proud of any of them.

The supply of high-grade LRB bronze material remains high and there has been an influx of previously "scarce" coins (Vetranio, for example) and some coins have come down in price while others seem to be keeping level with inflation. If you bought Constantinian-era coins in the 1990s and want to sell today, you'll be disappointed.

The Gallic and British usurpers still have strong interest from specialist collectors, but the hammer prices of common Postumous, Tetricus I & II, and Victorinus coins aren't shocking and most can be had for less than $75, mostly because they aren't "slab material."

Roman middle bronzes, particularly of the Flavian - Antonine period, are very stagnant and in low demand, particularly if the coins have circulation wear, rough surfaces, are off-center, or weakly struck in spots. Antonine sestertii circulated for decades and are rare in high grades -- these bring astonishingly high prices at auction and F-VF examples bring astonishing low prices. This has led to an unfortunate epidemic of tooling, smoothing and repatination, even of common varieties.

That's my take on the Roman coin market.

 

I saved my bs "undecided" ngc tag

 

Morris (not his real name) has already sold the highlights of his collection including his high quality bronzes and gold coins (an Aureus of Probus went for $ 156.000 and one of Victorinus from the Hunt collection fetched $ 144.000) via Heritage in January, so last week´s auction only included his "lesser" items.

As he acquired most of his coins in the 1950s and 60s, they have not been on the market for decades (or published online) which alone makes his collection interesting, I guess.

 

Thanks for the info ! If you or anyone else knows the real identity of Morris please share it. Is Morris still alive or was this collection liquidated by his heirs? The sheer mass of his collection probably indicates he was a 20th century pioneer collector of ancient coins...

 

Don't believe the hype about coin prices going up, up, up. This is just marketing to breathe a little life into a hobby that's on life support.

Unlike gut feelings and marketing hoopla, here's actual data. These are the average lot ending prices (minus hammer fees) for all lots sold across some 30+ auctioneers.

2010 $1,405
2011 $1,837
2012 $1,798
2013 $1,660
2014 $1,496
2015 $1,237
2016 $1,309
2017 $1,126

It's probably not wise to extrapolate from such a short data set but the trend in collecting, overall, is headed south and dragging prices with it.

Auctioneers and coin dealers in general don't want you to hear doom and gloom. Why would they?

Rasiel

 

I agree .

There could be many interpretations for that data set, and any interpretation is going to require a bunch of assumptions. Perhaps over the time shown that was more lower quality material available, or conversely, a lack of higher quality material. It might be useful to correlate those numbers with the volume of coins for those same years.

A positive spin might be that there are so many more new ancient coin collectors (thanks to the internet and online auctions!) that auction houses are having to add lower quality and therefore lower priced lots to satisfy this new segment of the market.

Actually, I'm not sure that is a positive spin for me personally because it would just mean more competition, and already in my short collecting span I've observed the price of provincials increasing, or so it seems. Maybe provincials are just trendy right now. Maybe @Jochen1, @Roman Collector, myself, and others should stop showing everyone how interesting they are .

 

I agree and wonder if those of us with websites promoting the hobby would be well advised to take them down as well. Would anyone notice? We could swear an oath not to teach what we know to those outside the clique and return to the old system of buying and selling entire collections for melt value. Books would have to be burned. As it is, 99% of the people on earth can not understand why we do what we do so it might not be hard to go for that remaining 1%.

 

@Suarez , I l know you are a data guy. But geez. Even your data is supremely flawed. Precisely where do the numbers come from? Average 'ending prices' of what? Where? Who? These are all things that affect your numbers but I bet you havent taken into account the market in 'general', which has prices much lower than you indicate. Numbers are the politicians best friend as one can make them say anything one wants.

I direct readers to this thread, which may not be scientific, but likely has a better read on the market in general:

https://www.cointalk.com/threads/state-of-the-market.339732/#post-3542860


No offense of course, I just think one can get a different outlook on the market.

 

Take this for what it's worth, a very small unrepresentative sample size, but I've adjusted the price for inflation for some denarii from the Republican era through 2nd century CE that I've picked up over the years with old tags and prices from the 60's through 80's, and overall most coins have slightly underperformed inflation or just about kept up pace...but I don't have anything particularly rare or fancy (ie. no tribute penny or Julius Caesar, etc) with old tags).

I've also adjusted catalog prices from old catalogs from the 60s through 80's for some of my coins (using prices listed in Roman Silver Coins and a few old catalog/reference books) and I find the same results. Again though, that's also an unscientific and relatively small sample size...so I don't claim the same is true for the entire market. I'm sure rarer, gold coins, and some provincials have actually gone up above inflation rate. I don't have anything particularly premium or super rare and in high demand, so I haven't adjusted prices for that category of coins.

 

Which is worst, 100 coins that sell for $500 each or 500 coins that sell for $250 each? It would be helpful to know the total sales in each auction.

 

TIF, dougsmit, Jochen1, Roman Collector, & others, Roman provincial coins long considered the "black sheep" of ancient coin collecting are seriously getting new life! New books by authors like Richard McAlee, Michel & Karin Prieur, Wane Sayles, & reprints like Kenneth Harl's classic Coinage in the Roman Economy, 300 B.C. to A.D. 700, have been the impetus for the growth in Roman provincial coins. All this literature has certainly swayed me to this side of the hobby. Taking the Fahrenheit 451 approach to this phenomenon, as dougsmit humorously suggests, won't impede the growth of this facet of the hobby. Provincials are more than "trendy", they are a "hot spot" in the hobby.

 

My take on your data @Suarez would involve a sea change in the hobby the last 10 years and wonder if this accounts for your data. Every serious collector I know tells me buying good material at shows is becoming nearly impossible. They say NYINC has fewer and fewer coins every year because everything is going on the auctions nowadays. Numerically, one would believe that the best coins were always there, so this would suppose much more middle range material is moving onto the auctions versus bourse, deflating overall hammer averages.

All I know is an average RR silver used to be $50-75 and today is $125-150. I think picking 10 coins in a certain grade and using them as benchmarks would be more telling than large averages, something like if Justinian solidi, VF Caesar elephant, etc to represent middle market pricing. I know I wish I could go back 10 years and buy at those prices, and could pick out a TON of coin price increases to back up my assertion it is not going down.

Btw, anyone accidentally get too old in CNG archives and drool over what you could have bought stuff for back then? I have.