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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;baseball21, post: 2508976, member: 76863&quot;]Everyone is certainly entitled to their opinion but I would take the merits of the SP coin any-day over the proof.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Ancient coins are really just an animal of their own right.&nbsp; They are by far the hardest for collectors to get into imo given the vast different series and designs and even the TPGs don&#039;t stand behind their authentication of them very much if at all which really gives collectors no safety net starting out.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>With world coins the &quot;affluent&quot; countries aren&#039;t exactly cheap to find nice ones and the nicer ones can often be pretty expensive.&nbsp; The poorer countries without the demand at home for them are certainly cheap by comparison which in my opinion is largely due to a weak to nonexistent home market for them.&nbsp; The stronger the home market the more expensive they generally are and a lot of the &quot;affluent&quot; countries aren&#039;t that far out of line with US pricing once you adjust for population differences.&nbsp; I certainly don&#039;t know pricing well enough to make any comparisons with Chinese or Russian coins (not even actually sure what the home demand for Russian coins is like in all honesty) but China may end up being the best comparison in a couple years.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>There certainly is some investment buying at the upper end of the US scale, but 99 percent of collectors will never play at that level and I have never seen a 100 dollar coin become a 200 dollar one because the 5 mil top pop just sold for 6 mil.&nbsp; Only a small segment of the US market is really impacted by investment buying, the majority of coins at their prices today just aren&#039;t worth the time of day for big money to &quot;invest&quot; in and hope they make a 100 bucks off it in 5 years or so.&nbsp; If anything US dealers are just more aggressive and better at marketing but with the TPGs having been established here for quite a while it has also given people a lot more options when it comes time to sell which ultimately gives buyers more confidence which can lead to price increases.&nbsp; But again you still have to account for population differences when making comparisons as the home market is the real driver of what a coins perceived value should be. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I would disagree here, I assume you are largely referring to Morgans where from a rarity standpoint most of their prices are completely out of wack yet I don&#039;t think any buyers of those (monster toners excluded) would consider them an investment.&nbsp; Their prices on a lot of them have actually come down since the craze in the 80s where there was actually that investment kick, but now there are just enough people willing to pay the prices that they stay there.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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