I was recently offered some 2016 Gold Peter Rabbit coin commemorating 150 years of Beatrix Potter. The coins are very high grades and the mintage is very low. However, for me low mintage alone is not a reason to buy a rather expensive coin costing many $$$$. Are these considered a serious collectible series or just cute and fancy trinkets?? Does anyone here collect these coins and if so, can a price of approximately $5,000 be justified for something that does not appear to be an aesthetically beautiful coin or technically, a difficult and intricate design?! Sellers pic
I am in the UK and can give you a bit more background. The 2016 Beatrix Potter series of Fifty Pence coins has proved quite collectable among the younger generation. The Royal Mint has been very canny in their introduction - announcing them, then releasing them as packaged individual coins over a period of months. Then they release them into general circulation but in unpredictable numbers. In 2016 there were five coins: Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddleduck, Mrs Tiggy Winkle, Squirrel Nutkin and one with the words Beatrix Potter across the middle. After a year only the Jemima Puddleduck one is still scarce in circulation. There is a similar set for 2017 and only the new Peter Rabbit has appeared in circulation to date. They SAY the others (Tom Kitten, Jeremy Fisher and Benjamin Bunny) are not going to be released into circulation, but we will wait and see. In parallel to the cupro-nickel circulation and Bright Uncirculated strikes, they have released Silver and gold versions in various packaging. Typically these are sold at about double bullion value or more to feed the "collectables" market. Time will tell, but I wouldn't want to pay more than bullion value for them - I suspect the young fans who are happy to collect from circulation, or maybe pay a few pounds for a scarce one, are unlikely to pay big bucks for these collectables. Which is all a long roundabout way of saying: If you can get them at Bullion or maybe a bit over, fine, but otherwise I would save my money for something better. (But I may be proved wrong!)
They don't seem to come up for sale often as I can't find comparisons for others but even if 5k was the going rate that I can't imagine that wouldn't be a difficult coin to get out of relatively unscathed if you decided to sell it. I would want to see a supported price history before putting that much into one.
Yes, not much history to go on yet. I can see some of the other designs have sold on Ebay in the UK recently, typically in the GBP800 to 900 mark, which I guess is about bullion. I am not sure how much the "ultra-cameo" and grading will have made, but I still can't see a 4times multiplier! Personally I have far more interesting coins to target.
Exactly, as popular as the 2016s are I wouldn't want to be the first one into the water with the gold ones. I do see that a raw gold one was auction on eBay Uk in October that sold for just under 1700 pounds. As a gold proof they'll all be ultra-cameo the question is just what the price difference would be for a 69 vs 70 grade. With the NGC population at the moment it looks like about 1/3rd of them are getting the 70 which is a low rate for modern gold so that would help the price if the demand was there. If the raw ones stayed around 1600/1700 I would be much more comfortable with the 70 in the 2200-2800 range. I could even believe a 3k price but have a hard time seeing anything that would suggest they'd be selling for 5k on a consistent basis short of strong demand. It just gets hard for a lot of people to justify that price given what else is available in that range. In this case I'd honestly let some more time play out on the 2016s. They seem to have a strong premium right now over the 2017s and would like to see that hold longer before paying for it
