How is it a loss if you bought at $25 and sold at $50? You just had a lousy return on investment. And that is exactly why I do not consider my coins an investment - they are just for fun and bought with throw away or disposable income(money used for things not really needed - like a night at the movies). So if I sold the coin at $50 I would still have a profit with just a sucky return on investment. Kind of like some stock I bought several years ago.
I hope that the next generation of collectors can see the beauty in or coinage. I see a lot of coinage, being, that I only deal in cash. The coinage gets put away..
I'm just glad I collect world coins, to be sure prices are volatile no matter what you collect, but generally speaking it seems like world coins are a bit more stable in price. Of course there are exceptions, Russian coins in 2008, Chinese coins in 2011. But if you look at some of the US coins, --take an VF/XF Lafayette Dollar for instance-- it's hard to imagine them ever making a comeback to where they were trading 5 year ago in the typical lifetime.
If the return on your investment is negative then you lost money. The $25 spent in 1988 would be worth $51 today in buying power. If you had simply saved the $25 you could buy $51 in goods today. If you sell your 1988 $25 coin for $50 today you lost $1 in buying power.
How's that again? I came across a little piggy-bank (actually a plastic mouse) in my attic last month that was suspiciously heavy. I removed its plug, and found that it was stuffed with change -- twenty SBA dollars, and fifty 1972 dimes. This was surely a birthday gift from my grandparents, probably around 1980. How much is that $25.00 worth in 2015? $25.00 (unless I find a rare variety somewhere in there). If you can find a place where I can use it to buy $51 in goods, I'm all ears. (Although, to be honest, I'd rather use 2015 paper money; I'm sentimentally attached to that little mouse and its contents.) "Simply saving" money, as in "tucking it away", doesn't let it track inflation. You have to invest it, put it into something that earns interest or a return. The original scenario was buying a nickel for $25 in 1964, and finding it worth $51 today. If my calculator isn't lying to me, that works out to about a 1.45% compound rate of return. You're not taking a loss in nominal dollar terms, but you're underperforming most other investment classes.
