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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Valentinian, post: 8177299, member: 44316&quot;]I stipulate that since covid the market has been hot and in many cases ridiculously hot. However, until 2020 the market was not &quot;hot.&quot; The evidence cited that the market was hot was simply the inevitable outliers in any large market. Coin magazines have incentives to tell their readers that the market is going up (and they should contact their advertisers right away!). With many auctions and thousands of transactions it is always possible to find something that can be hyped as hot. </p><p><br /></p><p>(On the other hand, if I wanted to show the market has crashed, I could show you the prices realized at the 2012 &quot;Prospero&quot; auction of Greek coins. They were ridiculously high. There is a reason for that and if you don&#039;t know it, that might seem like good evidence for prices going down.)</p><p><br /></p><p>It is prices realized across the board that are a better indicator of the market. I have 80 linear feet of old ancient-coin auction sale catalogs that I peruse occasionally. There are many good coins offered in the 1980s and 1990s that did not cost more (in nominal dollars, not counting inflation) in 2010-2018. I have many Swiss catalogs (Switzerland is home to major firms) in which buying in Swiss Francs in the 1980s or 1990s or 2000s would have caused you to lose money in dollars because the Swiss Franc has gone up more than the coins. </p><p><br /></p><p>Before covid I wrote a page on &quot;Coins as an investment&quot;</p><p><a href="http://augustuscoins.com/ed/numis/investment.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://augustuscoins.com/ed/numis/investment.html" rel="nofollow">http://augustuscoins.com/ed/numis/investment.html</a></p><p>It explains how to make any type of investment is made to look better than it is. You might find it enlightening. </p><p><br /></p><p>Again, I admit the market is hot right now. A very sophisticated collecting friend who spends big money talks to me about coins he was bidding or wanted to bid on that went for &quot;stupid&quot; prices. What will happen to prices when (if) covid is over remains to be seen. But, markets can go down. The ancient coin market ran up in 1979 when the Hunt brothers tried to corner the silver market. I panicked and bought an expensive (for me) coin before it was out of reach. In 2018 it was selling for (in nominal dollars) just about, or maybe somewhat less than, I paid for it. That&#039;s a pretty big loss when inflation is factored in. </p><p><br /></p><p>If I didn&#039;t care about my coins I would sell them now. The ancient-coin market is hot. Maybe stupidly hot.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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