Why are many of the modern commemorative gold coins from the US Mint selling for less than regular bullion coins on a per ounce basis? This seems to be particularly true of the early years. Are they popular? Are they even considered worth collecting?
That's because such coins were minted excessively. I doubt the gold refineness is anywhere near 999, probably 925 at best.
Those $5 gold commems are a great buy considering the mintages (at least the unc ones). I can't wait for the 1st lady coins to come out. The mint is referring to the 1st lady coins as bullion not commems (pretty wierd huh)
gxseries, some of the gold commemoratives were made in pretty large numbers, but there are more AGEs than commems, yet they command a higher premium. The commems are 90% gold. The AGEs are 91.67% gold with just enough silver to make you wonder why they bothered. Danr, I tend to agree with you. I like the gold commemoratives better than the bullion coins because of the design variety, and they are less expensive per ounce of gold. The silver commemoratives seem to be more popular, but the gold seems like a better buy. Some of the silver commemorative coins actually sell for more money than some of the gold commemoratives with lower mintages! Go figure. I don't understand what the Mint is doing with the 1st lady coins. Being a natural contrarian at heart, and being about 75% investor and 25% collector, I have to be impressed by the lack of response to this thread, and the lack of threads about gold commemorative coins on the site. To me, this makes the gold commemorative coins possibly one of the bargains of the numismatic world. Many times it is the item that is overlooked and not collected that eventually turns out to be the greatest value. So for me, the silence is a very loud statement.
And remember that the numbers are a bit tricky. With a $10 gold commemorative (being 90% gold) you sre getting less than a half ounce of gold -- about 0.48375 ounces. With a 1 oz. gold eagle (which weighs more than an ounce), even though it is 91.67% gold you are still getting a full ounce of gold.
The Salt Lake City unc gold $5 has a very low mintage for the price. Coins like the unc Washington and FDR are nice looking coins with low mintages. Then we have the Jack Robinson and Capital Visitor Center with very low mintages and big price tags. There are also some other olympic $5 coins with low mintages but the prices get a bit high on some of those. Many pretty coins in that series. Do you like certified on these or original packaging?
Danr, I'm not sure if I prefer the TPG coins or the original packaging. I have some of both. The TPG coins are certainly easier to store and display, and in somewhat better condition since many are MS/PF69. But as more coins are graded, the original packaging might become scarce and add to the collector value. Spider, value hunting is so deeply ingrained in my nature that it is impossible to overcome. When I see an MS65 $20 St Gaudens, the first thing that comes to mind is that I'd rather have two MS62's instead.
Cloud - If you went back a couple of years, I'll just bet you could find some very similar threads to this one. Many of the gold commems with higher mintages have been selling for less than their melt value for almost 4 yrs now.
Thanks, I'll look. I've noticed that about the gold commem pricing. I've purchased a number of them below melt value and I can't figure out what I'm missing. They apparently have no numismatic value at all right now, which seems slightly strange to me since the silver commems sell at fairly large premiums over melt.
