lookslike the baseball market before the fall

all these new coins from the mint from 4 new pennies, state and park quarters,president dollars etc. more commeratives,fractional bullion coins, reminds me of the baseball card market in the mid 1970's when they started to produce hundreds of new sets by different companies, nolonger just topps with the 600 card yearly set but now donruss, fleer, etc. etc. , now any baseball card after 1974 is just junk, looks like alot of these coins won't be worth much over face if that and of course with the dollar going lower you'll lose there too!!

 

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Kind of like stamps, too.

I have made the same parallel, and am generally scoffed at.

Time will tell....

 

Demand is the key, my man!

Back in 2000 and 2001, I actually (YES, I hate to admit it) invested over $2000 in unopened boxes and packs of POKEMON cards. Yes! So far, I have sold about 1/3 of them and I have got all my money back.

Demand. That's the key. I think anyone who doesn't wear a triangular looking cap can figure out that any US coin with a mintage above 10,000 or so is going to fluctuate between face value and whatever the market supports.

 

The game of Baseball, The Players Association, The Major League and Owners are the biggest reasons for the decline in the baseball card market.

 

I think the biggest rezone is there so many set & strike all the money now that card folks like Upper Deck Fleer and Topps have to pay.but a large part of that money go to retired player too who were not the Arod's.
I still have a few from the 50,60,70 and 1980-2003 when there were too many sets to try to complete.and Santa still get me a box set of topps each yr

 

I guess it all depends on how many coins the Mint generates much like the number of cards that were made in the 80s and 90s. It does seem that not only are they coming up with new products but different ways to package those same products into "different products". I thought I was done with my Lincoln love affair after buying two commemerative silver dollars and the four pennies that were sold in so many different types of sets but now I have a chronicles package and am anxiously awaiting the next chapter in the "How To Sell A Lincoln" soap opera.

By the way they even tried to double up on the Braille with an educational whatever. That I passed on. As a result I can very much see a baseball card like decline in the future of these coins due to over production.

 

love that stan the man card!! classic cards like that will always hold their value!! You would think I would have learned my lesson after buying the statue of liberty 3 coin set unc. and watching it double in value in less then 1 year and now it sells for melt value, lucky for me the gold coin will help me get some money back

 

Interesting topic and intersting responses so here's mine.

Stamps have been hit beyond hard. I see it at work everyday as we still buy and sell them. We sell real cheap. We buy even cheaper.
For the most part stamp collectors are literally dying off. It's a shame and the deluge of stamps offered in any given year is part of the problem.
YES, I see the similarities with the junk the mint puts out every year.

Baseball cards? Never got into them but my cousin has one heck of a business going buying and selling. Course he only deals in the "old" stuff. Probably 60s at the latest. So YES the stuff from the 70s on he's not even interested in unless he HAS to buy it to get the good stuff.

How does this parallel coins? You can buy everything the mint has to offer in any given year. Most of the time you'll lose unless you dump it fast and even then you really have to pick and choose.

Seriously how "hot" is a Louis Braille coin going to be? A Girl Scouts coin? Sure, great for gifts but we'll end up buying them at work at a fraction of cost. THEN they'll gather dust on our shelves. Every time I see a new mint coin I look at it this way. How long before people are selling them to us at the coin shop and do we even want them? Usually it's no but I don't own the shop.

NOW, walk in the door with a "real and proven coin" it's a different story. An 1877 Indian Cent? We want it. An 1893-S Morgan dollar? We want it. An 1872 Two Cent Piece? (had to toss that in). We want it.

Hey, we all have our own tastes. So get what you want. Coin collecting has been around for a long time and will continue to thrive in one fashion or another.
Honestly though the mint is pushing it too far.
The state quarters got a lot of people into the hobby. Now the overload of coins is driving many of these same people out. Too much stuff and a LOT of the collectors are elderly and saved them for grandchildren.
Give an 83 year old woman the news that the program will go on for another 11 years or so and guess what the answer is? Believe me I've seen it.

Hopefully the grandkids will appreciate it but I've learned over the years one can not MAKE a coin collector. The hobby interests you or it doesn't.

 

All the modern junk is the same, all hype. State Quarters, slabbed bullion, come on, it's all for the new to collecting market, willing to pay crazy prices for modern coins that have been made by the Millions ! Then again buy old collectable coins and you have something, they might not go up in value due to dealer/sucker hype, but they will always be worth probably at least what you paid for them.

T

 

All really good posts here. None of the pie in the sky stuff that is usually associated with coin collecting. As a life-long collector, I have to admit that I am sick of the landslide of moderns out there. I don't collect most of it but I do continue to add to my older sets of Washingtons, Lincolns, Jeffersons, and such but I don't start new sets of whatever the heck the next dollar coin failure will be. Any moderns that the kids like I and they tend to collect for their interests but it is up to them to nag me to continue collecting them.

Overall, I think what you collecting is based on your expectations. I collect for fun and if I go out and buy a bunch of 20th anniversary ASE sets, I turn around and sell them so that I have more money to buy what I do collect. Cashing in on the hype is about as close to participating in it as I come. Remember though, today's fad collectors are likely tomorrow's serious coin collectors.

 

I think we have seen this before in coins. Look at the end of the commemorative half dollar program. The Mint made so many and so over-saturated the market that they killed the collector demand completely.

 

In my opinion the USPS killed stamp collecting, at least for me it did. I have a very extensive stamp collection, but the USPS was just putting out way too much product to keep up with. I couldn't invest the money or time into it with a young family. I stopped collecting stamps in the early 90s. I really miss it, but I just don't have the time or money for it!!!

 

I also think the MS-70 grade chasing and registry nonsense isn't helping much, mostly on the moderns and especially the proofs. I think the older stuff will probably hold fine.

 

Baseball Card's man I collected them as a kid in the 60's and 70's and then proceeded to lose them all in the 80's my family moved a lot. Started collecting them for my son in the late 80's ugh I have 4 boxes of hand selected junk.

 

what concerns me.....

alot of new collectors coming into the hobby with the new stuff the mints hypes , then several years down the road they relize they have been ripped off and they sell out the collection never to come back again! coin collectors of nice old stuff aren't getting younger so who is going to be buying the nice stuff when we die off??

 

I agree 1000%. Shifting demographics, shortening attention spans and probably less disposable incomes really worry me.

Do you see many threads about people (especially new collectors) slowly building a mercury collection in VF or a Barber Quarter set in F or.... or..... or....

The Internet is sucking away at the lifeblood as well. It's way, way easier nowadays to think you can flip something and make some bucks (whether it's true or not) than it was 30 years ago.

Oh well......

 

I collected stamps for all of about six months one time when I was a kid, I bought all those USPS sets, nowadays I think about harvesting the stamps out of them to use for postage. I don't even think the annual sets are worth anything. I am not aware of any stamp dealers around where I live, in fact I haven't even heard of any in the last 10+ years. Coin dealers come and go, but stamp dealers went and never came back. Stamps as a hobby pretty much croaked.

 

You're absolutely right on this. I actually inherited a large stamp collection and took it in one day for evaluation. I had perfect condition first day covers, sheets of 50 stamps that were 60 years old, and countless other stamps and the guy told me to just put them on envelopes and mail something. Of course at the stamp prices that used to exist, you'd have to cover the front and the back of anything you mailed. Point is, even stamps that are 60, 70 years old in perfect condition are only worth pennies over face value. I guess the trick is to really like stamp collecting.

 

I agree as well. Less disposable income is a major factor, as well as being in it for the dollar instead of the hobby.

This is actually why I like collecting modern commemoratives. Love the way they change every year, are cheap(ish), come in a good looking package, are generally MS and go for only a small premium over bullion (if you wait a year or three). :smile

 

I have used 60-70 year old stamps on envelopes, I used to like to pick up the fractional denominations like 1/2 cent stamps and use them. I have picked up older stamps like this at just under face value at coin shows and used them on mail.