Prices can go down

How would you say prices have shifted generally over the past forty years or so? I'm interested in how much is down to changing taste and how much changing supply. A really large proportion of British Celtic coins, for example, seem to have been discovered in the past few decades as metal detectors have improved. You can pay a lot of money for a really rare coin only to see it become cheap when a big hoard turns up. For Greek and Roman coins that's mitigated a bit by cultural patrimony laws, but I'm interested in how it plays out overall. I'm very new to this, so interested in your experiences.

 

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I'm not seeing any cause for concern here. The style and fabric look fine, and of the 4 coins you show, while they all seem to share the same obverse die, I see 3 different reverse dies used.

Crawford records 121 obverse and 151 reverse dies. So, not rare, but still far from even the moderately common issues which may have had 300-400 die sets.

 

Well I suppose it all has to do with several factors like the auction house/site, description, venue and other factors like buyers egos and rivalry etc. Sometimes the 'right' type of buyers notice/track the coin and bidding is strong....other times it flops.

I've seen numerous cases where very similar coins are sold by the same auction house for huge price differences in less than 6 months.

Political or financial uncertainty at the time of the auction also plays a huge part. Few months ago prices were softer but now they are beginning to come back. I personally bought this coin on eBay for approx $667 in September 2016. The seller had purchased the exact same coin (NGC Certificate number) for $940 in April 2016 from a reputable auction house. That's a 30% drop on his buying price, almost 50% on selling price in just 6 months.

In April 2017 a coin in similar condition albeit, better centered, sold for $2,200+. I guess the right buyers came together for the 2017 auction. But even so, that is a huge fluctuation!!!

Incidentally, these huge fluctuations seem more prevalent in Ancient coins rather than modern ones. Does this mean modern coins have more defined prices and a more devoted customer base?? An upsetting thought!!!

 

Nice coin. My hypothesis is that modern coins are more homogeneous so pricing is more standardised. With ancients there's variety of die, flan, strike and tone. Tastes can differ. Some people like irridescent patina, others clean metal. Because modern prices are standardised, sellers will demand their 'anchor' price rather than see it sell for less.

 

I am feeling the opposite trend. Ancient Chinese coins are actually going up in value, particularly those with a good provenance. Prices have doubled (and in some cases, rose 10 fold) over the past 10 years. They are becoming very popular.

RIP my coin budget.

 

See Valentinian's post in a concurrent related thread

Talking up the merits of various specific coins and types of coins on forums such as this leads to increased desire which leads to increased competition and increased prices.

This is the downside of the internet age of coin collecting.

 

I agree with this and your previous comment. I have personally gone over (my limit) on a coin because one other person in the room wanted it also. Had they not been in the room, I would have paid 35% less. But even at my purchase price, it was a price that will likely hold.

I have bought a coin for half the previous price because it was listed near the end of an auction. After a day of bidding, most people already had the coins they wanted or had already blown the budget.

I was told once, early on, to never buy a coin based purely on its rarity. One new discovery can erase a high cost coin. Plus......dealers hold back stock, to control the supply side of the curve. What is rare today, could be common tomorrow.

I don't buy any collectible as an investment. There are far better ways to invest money and get a better chance at a better return. I buy them for pleasure, knowing that I can gain or lose 20% over the course of the ownership.

Having said that, I usually buy through auctions. When I have sold, it has been to or through a dealer. This way I minimize my cost and have some say in it's selling price. So far, I have come out ahead on all my sales. In some cases with a better return than any other investment. But that is atypical.

If you can live with a limit on liquidity and are selective, you can still collect and not lose money (if you disregard opportunity costs).

 

I have done this also, but the auction house helped by placing the lot in a strange position that was a couple hundred lots away from similar coins. I wound up getting it for extemely cheap compared to what the coins normally bring.

 

It most always seems to me that there are two coins at auction I want, and the second coin is the one I would pick over the first. Living within a budget, I can't afford both, but if I bid on the first and win, I won't be able to bid on the second. If I wait to bid on the second and get outbid, I also lose the first. Dilemmas like this seem to dog me at each auction.

 

@Bing Well when I'm in a situation like that and I KNOW the second coin will be wayyyyy too expensive for my pocket, I just make sure I secure the first coin. At least that way I get something I like.....bird in hand. Then live to fight for another coin another day

 

But, if you have no indication the second coin will sell higher than your budget, upon which to you place your bid? Trust me. I have taken the bird in the hand, and many times found that the coin I really wanted sold for no more than I was willing to bid (but now I don't have enough money since I spent it on the first that came up.

 

First of all, I want to remind the reader that there are exceptions to generalizations, and this post is full of generalizations. (And, it is long.)

Reports on coin prices usually single out coins that have gone up. Why would a dealer or coin newspaper emphasize coins that have gone down? Any report you see about coin prices in a source like the Wall Street Journal is usually badly wrong for reasons that I can explain.

Suppose you hear that some investment firm has ten mutual funds and their average performance over the last ten years has been up 8% per year, which is far better than average. Are you impressed? Do you know how most investment firms have most funds above average over the last ten years?

Easy. The numbers are calculated using the funds they still have, not the ones they had ten years ago that you might have invested in. Create many mutual funds and some will not do well. Fold up and close the poor-performing ones, so they are not in count of the ones they still have. If you could find out what they had ten years ago and were pushing, you would find out the returns are much less--pretty close to average (or worse).

This is also how coin-value reporting works. If you looked at what was recommended ten years ago and checked out the change in value, you would get a much different picture than if you look at what is desirable now and has gone up in the last ten years and and checked out the change in value of that subset that has gone up (I hope that is obvious.) But, that is what reports on coin-prices do. My local coin dealer has twice mentioned to me how 1909-SVDB cents used to be in demand and he could sell them as soon as he got them, but now "every dealer has a dozen" and they are not in much demand. Do you expect Coin World to write an article to that effect? But every issue of Coin World finds some record-high prices to report. (But, not of coins you would have bought ten years ago.)

Lots of coin prices have gone down. They are just not the ones you read about.

Now, I turn to ancient coins.

In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s many of us bought coins from paper fixed price lists that came in the mail, or if we bought more-expensive coins, from paper catalogs in auctions. Some of us live near cities with coin shows. I can remember thinking shows were the way to buy because I liked inexpensive late Roman AE for which the overhead of catalogs made them much less expensive at shows. But, I lived in Montana and going to a show meant a major trip with its own large expenses.

I still have many paper fixed-price and auction catalogs, and I look at them with the intent of learning about coins, availability, quality, and especially prices. I won't write about coins over $1000 which I do not follow. At the low end, all coins not EF and under, say, $40 are as cheap or cheaper in (nominal) dollars than they were in the 1980s or 1990s. (For those coins, only the very highest quality coins have gone up. A $20 EF+ Aurelian from the 1980s might be much more today). Not only have those cheap coins not gone up relative to inflation, they have not gone up at all. You can buy a VF+ Probus, or EF Constantine, or a nice EF- Septimius Severus for no more than what they cost 20-30 years ago.

Some series have gone up, but not as much as inflation. Common Republican denarii were half today's price decades ago. I recently bought some nice, attractive, VF, Greek silver from an old collector and looked through old catalogs for similar coins. (Some I knew the 1992 provenance and had the catalog.) On average I'd say you could buy coins like them today for about the same number of dollars they brought in the 1980s and 1990s. It is the EF coins that have gone up. (Well to do people are doing well and, if they collect, can drive those prices up. The middle class, collecting middle coins, is not doing so well.)

I remember thinking decades ago that EF coins cost a lot more than VF coins which had most of the details, so why not buy three VF instead of one EF? Well, I still support that reasoning because I am in it for the love of history and knowledge, but financially it was incorrect. Most of the VF coins cost the same in dollars and the EF has gone up.

Of course, there are some coin types that have done very well. A Cleopatra portrait piece from Alexandria, even in just F, is one. You probably have some in mind. You may have recently bought some coin you know has gone up a lot since you started collecting. But don't think that the ones that have gone up well-represent the whole market since in the 1980s and 1990s. They don't.

 

Thank

Thank you. That's very interesting. And much as I'd have expected from other markets. There are a lot of people in the world for whom $10k or even $100k for a coin is nothing. A handful of those collectors in the same area can really shift prices. Further down the scale, collecting is just less popular. Mid-range art and antiques are now very cheap. I'm interested in rarity effects, too. In the art market rarity generally conveys a premium. But too much rarity and there's nothing to collect. The last great collection of medieval enamels was sold a decade or so ago, and it bombed. Theory is that no one could hope to build a collection today, because they're all in museums now. Will be interesting to see the longer term effects of cultural patrimony laws and increasingly stringent export controls, splitting markets into separate units.

 

While I agree with most of Valentinian's comments, there are a few other things that have changed. Today, it is much easier to find really low end, ordinary coins than it was when I started. Even at a show, there are coins that my younger self would not have been offered because there were plenty of better ones available to fill demand from beginners like me. Then, you might have found a bulk lot of junk but not as many individual coins with no mintmarks or otherwise undesirable. I bought fine denarii for a few dollars but they were legible and better looking than some of the things being sold online for several times the price. I believe part of this is from a change in finds from metal detectors which are generally not as protected as things found in pots but much of it is the exposure of so many more people to the hobby and many of them believing that a 2000 year old coin should look that way.

Yes, the value of 'collector grade' coins may not have increased as much as inflation but it seems there are many more low end coins being offered now than we saw back in 'the day'. They are not being offered at cheap prices necessarily. Will they be worth anything at all in another generation? I'm not talking about the difference between fine and very fine but the difference between barely identifiable and somewhat attractive. The price to buy has gone up but that does not mean that the buy-back value has.

 

UPDATE: After research and reaching out to others (including dealers), I now believe my M. Junius Silanus denarius is quite real. The three obverse die matches to mine (within a bunch of them sold on CNG in a 12 year period) is not unusual given the limited number of known obverse dies for this particular denarius. I overreacted.

She is good!

 

True. My opinion of the volume of extant ancient coinage and its typical condition changed dramatically when I spent a few months in England with lots of time to go coin shopping in stores and at shows. There are huge numbers of lower quality coins that did not cross that Atlantic. I remember seeing a cigar box full of sestertii, all of which were lower condition than any US dealer would bother to photograph and offer in the days of paper catalogs. Even now, they are not often offered. Who wants a sestertius that is nearly flat? However, many exist.

A major factor in supply is that coins can now be offered on-line with much less expense for photography and marketing, making if far cheaper to offer coins, making it easier to offer cheap coins that exit in multitudes.

If I post coins for sale on CoinTalk
https://www.cointalk.com/forums/for-sale/
I can describe them in a tag line and get 100 hits for $0 out-of-pocket cost. Photographs are essentially free. There is no cost for printing catalogs. Postage for mailing catalogs is $0. The internet has changed the game.