In the US, do you feel world coins are a good buy?

Yeah I haven't had much luck on there. I sold some stuff tho that was pretty good for me

 

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The beauty of world coins is that you can get them cheap.

The trick is to buy the cheap ones that will be worth more in the future.

If you're paying retail prices for foreign you can get badly burned because there is a huge wholesale/ resale spred in foreign coins. Part of what you need to combat this spread is to know who the buyers are for foreign. There are buyers for most of these coins if you can find them but most dealers want to pay close to nothing.

 

Hiddendragon has the best idea: Buy low-price-per-coin bulk. Resell individually at 5-10X what you paid. Notice that he does this with mostly low-value coins.

I have bought some key-date world coins for $5 to $25 at coin shows that take place in the basement of some VFW, Lutheran church, or some ghetto ballroom, and have turned them around at ebay for $100 to $180 before. I've done that on at least seven occasions in the past five years.

But what does that require? It requires knowledge of your coins (in my case specializing in one country), nobody else nosing through the same shows looking for those same zingers(!), and sellers who have (usually decades-old) inventory, but who don't know world coins, don't care to go through the trouble to find out actual values, and have little regard for those coins that don't quicken their own little hearts. It requires profoundly inaccurate Krause catalog price listings for those coins. I also found it ESSENTIAL to have buyers in the country you specialize in (or people here from that ethnic community) who are willing to bid your listings up because the same coins are either non-existent or impossible to find in that grade where they live.

Oh, and you need luck. I think that basically explains 99% of my success in buying way low and selling way high.

 

I love world coins. They're more interesting and because many in the u.s. don't value them, I'm able to acquire them cheaply. Whether it's an aluminum coin from Biafra or silver 5 cent pieces from Canada, I'll happily pay 5 cents for $50 coins all day long and worry about selling later.

 

This is a good point too. If you watch a lot of eBay auctions you can learn which coins don't match up well at all with their book price and you can make a killing on those. A good example is British Honduras. Coins from there even into the 1970s can bring good money on eBay, but the book value is very low. You'll only know this though if you happen to see the auction results. I also buy most African coins I find because they are popular.

 

if you buy in bulk be prepared to get thousands of very common duplicates. I never go that route.

 

You don't always have to buy a blind lot of thousand of coins. eBay has plenty of opportunities to pick up lots of, say, 40-50 coins where you can see and identify most of them. Can get such lots at around a dollar per coin, usually half the coins will be $1-$2 coins, but the other half often you get plenty of $3-$5 coins and even a few $5-$10 coins. I see lots like this almost everyday. Heck, I've sold such lots myself because as a low volume seller I don't have the patience to list individual coins that I expect to sell for less than $10. Plenty of dealers do the same.

 

Agreed. I haven't bought bulk since I was first getting started and had no idea what was out there. I cherry pick from local dealers' junk bins. There are a lot of nice coins in there, and the dealers don't care because they purchased them for practically nothing. If it's not silver they don't really want it, and they don't want to spend the time looking up the values of each coin.

 

Yep. That's my experience, too.

Serious dealers want quick turn around, no hassle. Time is money. The best way for them to make $$ on World Coins is just to know what's silver, yank that out, and dump the rest in a bin. If your LCS or dealer isn't a dork, he'll be happy that you got something nice for yourself in his "junk" World bin.

Now, us little guys can swoop in and cherrypick: But we still need to know the MARKET for the coins that we want to specialize in. This doesn't mean knowing Krause prices, but Krause prices that are in radical juxtaposition to actual sales prices (a pattern of sales prices, some recent, and not just one sale). In other words, Krause lists it at $60, but you see realized auction prices or BINs for the same coin at around 2 times as much or MORE. That's your coin.

 

It often seems Krause gets less accurate every year instead of more accurate.

 

Good points. I think time is on our side if we just keep acquiring and not worry about selling. As for mlov's comment, i agree that there's a lot out there to profit from. The more time I spend with world coins, the more adept I'll become at spotting the deals. That's probably why and how world coin dealers do it. Even they buy low from us, but the probably do quite well

where do you get cheap Biafra coins? Those r scarce and expensive

 

What auction results r u talking about? Ebay? Heritage was confusing last time I tried looking on there. It's definitely not as easy as ebay. I would assume only graded coins would be on other auction sites, but I'm looking more for cheaper raw ones

 

Ebay is the one. But Stacks and Heritage have archived sales, too. If you don't know how to use them, ask them. I'm sure they have customer service help. The problem is, they really make most of their sales in World Coins with very rare, high-grade (usually precious-metal) coins, and of course, U.S. coins.

Also always helpful is looking around at World Coin prices at
vcoins
ma-shops
world coin price guide

***But here is what I learned:
In my own speciality, South Korea, I found the online stores and auction sites that Korean people use. In Korea. If you really want to get into a specific country, you might very well have to get knowledgable about a foreign language to be able to search for your target countries' coins. For me, that meant literacy in a non-roman alphabet language, asking internet-savvy Korean friends (non-coin collectors) to help me out, and just plain old "time on task" by finding books and catalogues on Korean coins, written in the Korean language, for the Korean market. Again, who wants to go through all that time and trouble? Answer: NOBODY... except me. Knowledge is power, and I used that to my advantage on those occasions.

That's where I noticed one of those crazy mismatches between Krause prices, coin-show prices (in the USA), and what Koreans in Korea would pay.

 

Heritage is for higher end coins, not really going to find coins under $50 in those archives. eBay completed items is the best free resource there is for real prices. Of course one must also consider other factors, such as quality of the photos and seller reputation. That is why multiple results for the same coin/condition are much better.

 

Wow. You've done a lot of research! But it's a labor of love I'm sure. I've done a lot of investigation on world coins in general and have a hard time focusing on specific countries. I like so many of them, and whatever catches my eye when I'm searching and learning. So, if you don't mind, what got you into South Korea coins? I've got some mint small denominations from there that have 30+ dollars in value, at least according to Krause. I never understood how some of these coins made in the past few decades could have such values. I think I also noticed prices jump from xf or au to unc, like from 1 dollar to 30 dollars, which is weird

 

Yep. It's an investment into something beyond coins. Look at the ancient collectors here at CT. A lot of them, from what I gather, are serious into the history of their coins and the human cultures from which they derived, and are familiar with Greek, Latin, or Arabic script and can actually READ the legends on the coins. People who don't like to read in even in their native language are at a serious disadvantage with World Coins (and life in general), I think.

South Korea? Well, I worked there for a business in central Seoul 20 years ago, and that's where I first picked up some Korean coins. (If I had only known the prices of those dang mint sets from the 1990s, I'd have bought ten each!)

Yes, when you collect contemporary S. Korea, it's Mint State grades or nothing. Collectors, like me, will only go after MS grades (with no brown spots, a major bugaboo of S. Korean copper-based coins). Why? Because we can. Why buy a circulated example, when you can just wait a bit and find an uncirculated one for sale eventually? The problem is, Krause and others are getting wind of the change in prices. Again, I think I just got lucky, and took advantage of a window of opportunity, cherrypicking-wise. Really, I only got into this because I like the coins and wanted to make my own collection. Selling duplicates of my own MS examples was just something I fell into.

 

I think of the price jump as the "tyranny of numbers". Many times these mintages are simply astronomical but no one saved any. This means there are almost no Uncs at all but if you look through the millions in circulation it's not too hard to find AU's and XF's. Of course another reason is collectors tend to prefer moderns in Unc.

If demand ever picks up we'll probably discover some of these coins are tough even in lower grades and some of the South and Central American coins are tough in any grade. But for now most collectors are competing for the Uncs if they have any competition at all.

The biggest jumps might be Japan 10Y and Italy 100L where the XF goes for pennies and the Unc goes for up to $100. This is Krause pricing which needs to be taken with a shovelfull of salt.

 

I disagree with the premise not a lot of people in the USA are serious coin collectors if you are trying to equate colleting only US coins to mean that. Yes, the US has a disproportionate number of collectors who collect nothing but American issues, but that does not make them any less "serious". It makes US coins overstudied and overpriced if anything.

However, I absolutely LOVE buying world coins from US sellers, especially ones who only ship to the US. I get wonderful prices versus buying it from overseas. Do what I do, take advantage of the fact world coins are usually overlooked in the US to build a nice collection. Like Frank Robinson said in his book, "collect what you can when you can".

 

I actually thought of you the other day sir. I was able to buy up a collection of all BU world coins, about 1200. I bought them mainly due to you posting how truly BU modern world coins are scarcer than you think. I also bought it for something my kids to go through when they get a little older and help learn about geography.