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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;AncientJoe, post: 3326664, member: 44357&quot;]Great responses, everyone! It is incredible to see the diversity of approaches we take as a group.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Apologies for the delay - I should have asked fewer questions as it&#039;s taken me a while to answer them myself!</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><b>- What metrics do you choose to add coins?</b></p><p><br /></p><p>While I greatly admire those who can focus on a specific series or a single emperor, I am a generalist at heart and love a wide range of coins. My goal is to cover a particular cross-section of history and artistry and to tell the story in a concise and coherent manner. One obvious challenge is that there&#039;s a vast number of possible coins to acquire. Every new coin has to be weighed against other possible acquisitions, assessing opportunity cost and whether or not it &quot;fits&quot; or adds enough.</p><p><br /></p><p>There are some collections that, at first glance, appear to be rather impressive but after pulling back the covers a bit, are merely just expensive. It&#039;s easy to buy high grade aurei: there are always a bunch of them on the market waiting for people to pay the asking price. Finding coins of interesting types with truly great style in good condition is vastly more challenging than just looking for a shiny coin.</p><p><br /></p><p>I like to look at previously sold collections and understand the purpose of each piece within them, trying to appreciate the rationale of the collectors for adding that particular coin versus another. In my worldview, every coin should have a place and a reason for being there.</p><p><br /></p><p>On the buying side, when an auction has a significant quantity of coins I want, I have to be very deliberate about my strategy. I generally will focus on one or two &quot;big&quot; coins in a sale and try to pick up a few &quot;small&quot; coins along the way. </p><p><br /></p><p>Overall, I&#039;ve been prioritizing the difficult-to-find pieces over common types, knowing that those can be found fairly easily and the rare coins I&#039;m interested in might surface only once every few years. This has worked well in some cases and burned me in the past where a rare and expensive coin is coming up late in an auction so I avoid bidding on earlier pieces, only to be blown out of the water on the later coin. If only we could have &quot;re-dos&quot; after an auction!</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><b>- Do you have a rough size of a collection in mind (10, 100, 5000, 1000, 50,000 coins?)</b></p><p><br /></p><p>My collection size has changed drastically over time. At my peak, I had roughly 600 coins but I realized I didn&#039;t &quot;love&quot; each of them. I eventually decimated this down to a mere 15 coins, then have oscillated around, flexing up to 130, down to 80... up to 120... settling around 100 where I currently reside.</p><p><br /></p><p>To tell the story I want to tell, I anticipate needing roughly 140 coins, although I could potentially see this moving up to around 200 if the right coins came around. One of my concerns is that I don&#039;t want to &quot;dilute&quot; my collection too significantly and I don&#039;t want to end up with so many coins that I have to spread my focus too thin.</p><p><br /></p><p>As my collection has evolved, even if I somehow discovered an oil field and had truly unlimited funds, I still wouldn&#039;t want to be a &quot;one of everything&quot; collector. I&#039;d like to think that I would be working to build a fairly comparable collection to what I&#039;m doing now, albeit with a few extra prohibitively expensive pieces.</p><p><br /></p><p>Perhaps controversially, I sell off coins that are duplicates based on a very broad metric of what defines a duplicate. As an example, last year, I upgraded a Knossos drachm to a stater and sold off the drachm. While many people want to own one of everything, based on my collection size and goals, it doesn&#039;t make sense to have two coins with the same obverse/reverse and similar style, especially when the funds could be used to purchase a coin that adds more breadth. That said, I&#039;m willing to bend these rules for some types (what&#039;s one more quadriga among friends?)</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><b>- Do you work off of a &quot;wantlist&quot;? How has your wantlist changed over time? How rigid are you with following your wantlist and plans?</b></p><p><br /></p><p>I wrote my first wantlist in 2010 when I was becoming seriously interested in ancients after my US collecting started to dwindle. I&#039;ve saved almost all of my subsequent iterations and indeed, my wantlist has changed significantly over time: it&#039;s very interesting to watch your own tastes evolve.</p><p><br /></p><p>Up until about 15 years ago, I never thought I would spend more than $1,000 on any coin. After starting and selling a couple companies, I&#039;ve been fortunate enough to be able to afford the coins I buy now.</p><p><br /></p><p>That said, there are always targets out of reach regardless of your budget. There have been times when a truly special coin has come up for sale and I&#039;ve needed to pass on it because I&#039;ve bought other significant coins recently. For this reason, I have been very deliberate about the coins I&#039;ve been adding in the last several years, ensuring I have funds available should something important surface out of the blue. It means I&#039;ve let some coins go but my collection has had a net-benefit from this strategy.</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;ll probably be switching tactics soon and starting to cross off some of the more available types as nice examples appear. Personally, I would lose interest if I could only buy one coin a year and, based on the remaining &quot;high priority&quot; coins in my wantlist, I may be waiting that long for suitable examples to come to market.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><b>- What&#039;s the longest you&#039;ve waited to find a coin you&#039;ve wanted? How long have you been waiting for your current target?</b></p><p><br /></p><p>There are still several coins from my original 2010 wantlist that I haven&#039;t owned. I&#039;ve had opportunities to buy some of them but ultimately passed either because the quality wasn&#039;t all there or I had other higher priority targets (or they were overpriced).</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;ve been fairly diligent about keeping records of the coins I&#039;ve tried to buy and there are times I look back and thank the stars that I didn&#039;t win the lots, saying to myself &quot;what was I thinking?!&quot; and other times where I kick myself for not bidding more, recognizing just how truly difficult it will be to find a comparable example.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>- What portion of purchases do you make privately vs from auctions?</b></p><p><br /></p><p>I used to buy almost exclusively from auctions but recently, this ratio has skewed significantly in favor of private purchases (roughly 60/40 private now). I was hesitant to send around wantlists to dealers in the interest of avoiding competition with myself but this has proved to be a major benefit to my collection.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>- How often do you handle your coins or look at your pictures?</b></p><p><br /></p><p>My primary collection is stored in the bank but I have a side collection which I handle regularly. I must have taken a grade or two off of a few sestertii at this point; they make great pocketpieces.</p><p><br /></p><p>While I can&#039;t physically see my coins as often as I&#039;d like, I constantly look at their pictures. The desktop background on my computers and phone are coins, as are my login images for various services. The benefit of smartphones is that I can always carry my collection with me.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>- How much time do you spend searching for lost pedigrees?</b></p><p><br /></p><p>Roughly a few hours a day. I have had long spurts with no success followed by a string of new finds. Yesterday, I located a 1934 pedigree only days after I found a 1964 pedigree for the same coin. </p><p><br /></p><p>One of my pastimes is to proactively read catalogs even when I&#039;m not expecting to find a coin. This is invaluable and the only way to try to reduce the asymmetric level of information in an industry with many players that have been in the business for 40+ years. It allows you to develop a feel for overall populations, the histogram of quality, how hoards are distributed over time, and price progression. </p><p><br /></p><p>Many times, I&#039;ve also recognized coins coming up for sale that I had previously seen in catalogs where the pedigree was lost in the intervening years, allowing me to buy the coin at a discount to if it had the pedigree intact.</p><p><br /></p><p>At a show like NYINC, it is necessary to make quick decisions to buy a coin on the spot and diligently reading old catalogs is the only way to spot missed pedigrees.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>- How many books/catalogs do you own or have easy access to?</b></p><p><b><br /></b></p><p>I have a few thousand books and catalogs although most are currently in boxes after a couple recent moves. Happily, there are an increasing number of books available online, especially with the new Newman Numismatic Portal.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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