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Message:: [QUOTE="Valentinian, post: 2757236, member: 44316"]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.[/QUOTE]

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