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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Roman Collector, post: 7968515, member: 75937&quot;]There are various approaches to collecting.</p><p><br /></p><p>One is to &quot;invest,&quot; with your goal being to make money, not for completeness or other traditional numismatic aim. To be successful in this endeavor, you need to know what you are doing. This involves having a lot of disposable income, a lot of patience, and a very good understanding of the coins you&#039;re buying and the market and more than a little luck. The smart investor can recognize when a coin is truly exceptional -- not simply in high grade and in a slab -- and when it is undervalued. I can&#039;t say that would have been the case for most of the material for sale at Leu. I predict that whoever paid 460 CHF (well over $500 after buyer&#039;s fees, currency exchange fees and shipping) for that Herennia Etruscilla will be sorry when he tries to sell it.</p><p><br /></p><p>Another way is the broad but shallow approach. There aim of this approach is to collect a wide array of coins without delving into a particular area. There are a couple strategies for the broad-but-shallow collector. One is to buy high-end coins infrequently, such as aiming to acquire a silver coin from each of the city states of Magna Graecia, or a denarius of each of the Twelve Caesars, or other similar assemblage. This is a popular way to collect and such collections often make a profit decades later when they are sold. Type collections such as this seem to be the modern trend, whether in ancient or modern numismatics. The advantage of this type of collecting is that one need not be concerned about completeness in terms of reverse types and can simply pick nice examples of each, the degree of &quot;niceness&quot; depending on one&#039;s budget. The disadvantage is that the budget-minded collector must wait long periods of time (months in some cases) between coin purchases while saving up for that coveted Caligula denarius. The other type of broad but shallow collector -- what I call &quot;the magpie collector&quot; -- likes frequenting low-end auctions and buying whatever strikes their fancy and then learning all about their new acquisitions. This is a very educational and entertaining way to collect, and such collectors often end up with an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient history, mythology, and art after only a few years of collecting. The disadvantage to this approach is that the coins have little resale value. The collectors I know don&#039;t care about this -- they&#039;re in it for the entertainment and figure it costs less than a night at the cinema watching the latest James Bond movie with a bucket of popcorn and a Coke in hand.</p><p><br /></p><p>A third way is the narrow but deep approach. The aim of this approach is to focus on something narrow, such as the coinage of a particular mint, such as Alexandria Troas or Viminacium, or a theme, such as astronomy/astrology or big cats, or a historical dynasty, such as the Flavians, or even a single historical personage, such as &quot;Faustina II.&quot; For such collectors, completeness is the goal, with state of preservation a secondary concern. This approach was popular up until the mid 20th century, but less common nowadays, particularly with the modern demand for high-grade, slabbed material. The advantage of this type of collecting is that hundreds -- if not thousands -- of coins are available to the narrow but deep collector and such a collector can buy coins as often as the budget allows. Moreover, there truly are a number of very rare coins that one can buy for a low price if you know what to look for. There&#039;s a lot of pride of ownership when one comes across such a rarity -- that &quot;Wow, I can&#039;t believe there are only four other known examples of this coin&quot; or &quot;this coin has never been reported in the numismatic literature&quot; feeling. The problem with this approach is that the old saying &quot;there is nothing more common in ancient numismatics than a rare coin&quot; is true. You may have only the fourth known example of &quot;this reverse type of emperor so-and-so with a draped and cuirassed bust seen from behind&quot; variety, but the other two people in the world who care already have an example. Such coins can be hard to sell because collectors who will pay a premium for a flyspeck are few indeed, because nobody else shares your passion for them and your rare variety doesn&#039;t have the eye-appeal of a shiny, slabbed, common alternative. When it comes time to sell, the collector must have a collaborative relationship with a knowledgeable dealer who can market them, emphasizing their rarity and such to the proper customer base who might appreciate them.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now, there&#039;s some overlap in these approaches, and each of us probably have a mixture of all three approaches, but the mixture is unique to each collector and can change over time as the collector&#039;s interests evolve. At present, I&#039;d say I&#039;m 1/3 magpie collector and 2/3 specialized collector.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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