Featured Is the Coin Market Softening??!!

I have one I paid around $450 for from Karl Stephens of CA. This one's a full guinea tho. Way before slabbing or numerical grading of foreign was even thought of tho.

 

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Which is what has happened to a large extent of really having two very different markets. Some unpopular series have gone done, common stuff has gone down, and lower quality stuff has gone done. The high quality stuff not so much, and a lot of the best stuff aside from the investment level coins are being bought and don't reappear for long periods. There's a lot of area's where you will have to pay up for the best pieces, but by far the main drops are largely in the common date/grade/quality things where there is always a glut of them available.

 

I mirror Zohar's sentiment. I'm placing what I feel are extremely strong bids for top end material in European auctions and I'm still getting completely destroyed, to the point where I'm now sending some of my rarer material to Europe on consignment to take advantage of the market. Having said that, top end world material is still selling in the US market, and at bargain prices, but the offerings are disorganized. I suspect import taxes and regulations and differences in preferred payment schemes are strongly deterring European bidders from competing for world material in the US market.

 

PCGS begs to differ. (The PCGS3000 isn't exclusively "better coins", a term that begs the question anyhow, but it's weighted toward them.)



One can always find coins that have gone up over any given period, but the overall trend seems to be sideways since the big coins-in-IRAs run-up and crash.

 

Ok but, take the Key Dates and Rarities Index since 1970.

The trend is very clear over the long run. Key dates and rarities are strong performers with consistent growth versus the general coins index.

 

...except over the last ten years.

Somehow I'd never looked at this particular graph. I'm surprised that the 1989 run-up is so much smaller in this segment. I guess I shouldn't be; thundering herds usually don't have discriminating tastes.

 

I'm not to be honest. Think about what a lot of that run up was, Morgans/Commems ect. Most of it was the exact same things that dragged the overall graph back down. People should look up what's actually in the graph and its easy to see why

 

I've been trying to find exactly what's on that "key dates and rarities" index; PCGS publishes the PCGS3000 list (although they make you suffer to get to the end of it), but they don't seem to publish the individual lists. I found a thread on another forum that links to a copy on archive.org from 2005; I'll guess it hasn't changed that much since. 1856 FE cent, various grades; 1877 IHC, various grades; 1909-S VDB, 1914-D, 1955 DDO Lincoln; 1916-D and 1942/1 Merc; 1896-S, 1901-S and 1913-S Barber quarters; and so on.

Actually, I'll take back the "and so on" -- it includes the 1932-D and S quarters in low grade, which are solid two-figure coins, and the 1921-S Walker, but not the rarer 1921-P or D. And it does not include the $50 Pan-Pac pieces that appear on the full PCGS3000. Seems downright scrambled. Maybe they're trying to select pieces to tell the price-trend story they want...?

 

Which is exactly the issue with all of them. Solid ideas but once you dig into what's there there's a lot of head scratchers. I can't imagine they put much time into it anymore.

 

Are you sure about that? I sort of expected that they would run it like the stock indexes, which make no bones about adding and removing companies as their fortunes wax and wane.

If nothing else, a constant list means that it'll never include any coin minted after 1989 (or whenever they first started reporting the index). I'm not a big modern fan, but I'm not comfortable saying that there'll never be another rarity worthy of the list.

 

Not always. The discovery of a hoard with a lot of a key date coin can dramatically lower the value of the previously known examples, as has happened many times. At that point, leaving the coin in would hurt the integrity of the index, since it becomes an anomaly.

 

I've found no problem in buying crowns of selected countries; though recently, I've gotten them from US auctions: not European ones. Also your terms are very vague. Are you talking about 1965 Churchill Crowns of the UK or Brazilian 960 reis of 1816 in VF?

Admittedly some would not classify a circ Cu/Ni 1965 5 shillings as top end material but it's often in a dealer's interest to try and stir up a panic without mentioning specifics.

 

Now, why would I want to do that -- and short-circuit a perfectly good speculation thread?

 

Well you can just click on the link above and see the whole list. Scanning quickly I can say that the list seems to weight heavily in dated 20th century in MS grades 63-65 as well as Morgans and commem halves. I didn't see any Colonials nor any Territorial gold, the latter of which seems to have done extremely well over the past 20 years. I'm wondering if price drops in 6 figure Morgans can highly affect the Index.

 

I thought I did see some California gold on the full list.

Seeing the current full list is no problem (well, a bit of a problem, but that's a Web-design quibble). Seeing past versions of the list is a bit trickier, and as far as I can tell they no longer publish the content of the sub-indexes (rare/key date, mint gold, proof gold, 20th-century, etc).

 

Though in some instances I'm certainly bidding on crowns, I meant more that I mirror Zohar in trying to acquire the finest examples of rare pieces on the European market (as I am familiar with his collection). As I said in my post, this is not the case with this material in the US. If you haven't been bidding on auctions in Europe in the last six months I wouldn't expect you'd have seen what I'm talking about.

 

Love the charts, they're so personal....I printed them out so that I can have them handy anytime I want to fondle them & wonder (reminisce?) about their travels, who handled them, & how they affected (effected) commerce & humanity........

Oh wait a minute, no, no, no, I didn't do that (did I?).