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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;stevereecy, post: 842696, member: 19884&quot;]Lets agree to disagree then.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>I googled the CAC designation to learn what I was. I&#039;m getting back into buying slabbed stuff after a long stretch of buying raw. The CAC designation seems like something easily faked and I wouldn&#039;t place any value on it. I don&#039;t know how easy it is to scrape those stickers off or make a fake one, but I wouldn&#039;t spend extra money on something like that personally. I can tell you that I can set two MS66 slabbed coins side by side and my 8 year old can tell which coin is better. </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Buy 90% silver? I know this wasn&#039;t your comment but according to economic theory, the &quot;real&quot; value of commodities go down in value over time. I did a study on it where I discounted silver and gold over time with the inflation rate and it was a fairly flat line. Buying silver or gold is pure speculation in the short term value changes.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Regarding E-bay, I did qualify my statement by saying to first look up prices realized first. Re-read it. I think to have a dialogue about this, we should assume that an investor, even one uneducated about coins, should have some common sense about looking up comparables before writing a check.&nbsp;&nbsp; And for God&#039;s sake, when I talked about the underbidder stopping $1 short of my buy price, I wasn&#039;t literally talking about selling the coin to that same person.&nbsp; Do you really think people here are that dumb?</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>If someone was to do that on the auction I linked, they&#039;d have a fair shot at a coin that will increase in value nicely. Am I wrong?&nbsp; Can I guarantee that? No. Can you guarantee it won&#039;t? No. Can you guarantee that a stock purchase or a real estate investment will pan out over a set timeline? No...that is the nature of investing.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>By your own math, we have a Bull market every 15 years or so. You&#039;re saying that we were in a bear market for 15 years before the last bull, and now we&#039;re in a bear again. The protracted bear was an anomaly brought on by the grading services and making the purchase of coins sight unseen possible. The over-arching boom and bust cycle was unprecedented and is not a good example of how the coin market moves. Nobody can be sure of it, but it appears that on a larger scale, it appears that we are only now settling into what could be considered a &quot;normal&quot; market over the last decade or so, and even then, prices may not have fully bottomed, but underwent a &quot;relief rally&quot;. All that being said, you can&#039;t definitively say coins are a bad investment, any more than I can definitively say they are a good one. If either of us could, we&#039;d definitely both be rich. But fortune does belong to the prepared, and given that I&#039;ve been discussing a 20 year investment and bull markets pop up once every 15 years or so by your own definition, any reasonably intelligent investor could make use of that. But again, you almost have to throw out everything that happened between the birth of the grading services and for a 10 to 15 year period thereafter, it was a one-time anomaly in the value increase in coins, and this is something that I have to assume you know. You can&#039;t use an unprecedented boom and bust cycle brought on by new technology to draw conclusions about future potential of the hobby any more than I can.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Oh, and if we are in a bear market and bull markets come along every 15 years or so, then use dollar cost averaging. It can be a big help. I want to purchase in a bear market...I have a longer time horizon.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Lastly, you don&#039;t know me, or know what I know, so why do you keep trying to estimate my skill level? So quit slamming me and then saying &quot;no disrespect&quot;. It looked disrespectful to me. I don&#039;t even see how you could draw the conclusion that I&#039;m a noob, other than the fact that I disagree with you. I did ask which nickel series looks good right now. I did ask a question about copper coins because I don&#039;t collect them and saw an odd thing attributed to ANA grading standards that doesn&#039;t jibe with what I&#039;ve seen on slabs. You don&#039;t know what I&#039;ve collected, nor do you know how much formal education I have in investing, economics, etc. FYI, my focus has been on mint state Morgans (crack out games), BU type, and BU nickels. I dabbled for a while in ancients and foreign. I tend to buy the book and then the coin, and I have a masters in business but I&#039;m an engineer by profession. I&#039;ve also collected other things and I enjoy comparing and contrasting the differences in different collectibles. I&#039;m very interested in the general theory associated with collectibles. </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Steve[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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