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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;SuperDave, post: 72674, member: 1892&quot;]&quot;Key dates&quot; are years of issue, for a given coin, where either due to low mintage or lack of availability, demand greatly exceeds supply and therefore the value of the coin is much greater than for other issue years. 1909- VDB penny, for instance. 1889-CC Morgan. 1895-O Barber dime. Things like that.</p><p><br /></p><p>&quot;ROI&quot; is a tough concept to nail down factually, and here&#039;s why:</p><p><br /></p><p>Every investment is a subjective thing, because &quot;value&quot; is subjective. Gold is only worth money because we think it is. Stock prices only go up because investors are willing to pay more money for the stock. In many areas of investing, there are sufficient numbers of investors involved so that trends based on standardized human behavior can begin to apply - for most people, strong financial performance equates to &quot;quality&quot; in a company, so they tend to be willing to pay increased prices for stock.</p><p><br /></p><p>Such is not the case with coins, yet. Although there are specific areas of confidence in the increased value (see &quot;Key Dates&quot; above), other areas are, IMO, bubbles which are guaranteed to pop as soon as the current frenzy dies down (see &quot;State Quarters&quot;). That&#039;s because many involved in coin collecting are doing it purely for investment value, without much knowledge of what makes a given coin intrinsically valuable. They&#039;re playing the demand game, and as we know, all waves eventually break on the shore.</p><p><br /></p><p>On the other side of coin collecting are the die-hard collectors (term used in a complimentary fashion here), people who collect based on a love of collecting. These folks are generally well-informed, (rightly) confident of their knowledge of their specialty, and in many cases maybe willing to pay a little more for a coin they really want for their collection. They are also a little resentful of the &quot;investment&quot; types, who tend to introduce chaos and uncertainty into pricing and drive prices up, making it harder to complete a collection.</p><p><br /></p><p>As if this conflict weren&#039;t bad enough, now we have Ebay, the Great Equalizer of Inflated Expectations and Reduced Intellectual Investment. As of this writing, there are over 108,000 current auctions of US coinage only on Ebay. In my area of specialization, Morgan Dollars, there are almost 15,000 current auctions. On the one hand, this is a great thing. There are far more coins available for same for me to pick and choose from than ever before.</p><p><br /></p><p>However.....</p><p><br /></p><p>You don&#039;t need to know squat about coins to buy or sell on Ebay, and that concept is proven daily by the links we post and laugh at here. It enables the &quot;investment&quot; types to &quot;invest&quot; more easily without actually knowing what they&#039;re doing due to sheer availability. It&#039;s an anonymous interaction, allowing people to morally justify acting in a much less moral fashion than they ever would in a face-to-face relationship. </p><p><br /></p><p>This sheer quantity of availability, the ever-increasing numbers of people who are getting into the coin trade, and the gradual dilution of the average knowledge level of the participants, makes me unwilling to offer anything but cautionary advice concerning coins as an investment.</p><p><br /></p><p>There&#039;s no way, to my mind, to accurately estimate what&#039;s going to happen to coin prices in the future. I am generally optimistic that, in a broad fashion, prices will continue to increase at a favorable rate if only because of all the &quot;investment&quot; types increasing demand, and their numbers are increasing daily. However, these people <b>don&#039;t know what they&#039;re doing</b>, and as a result there will be spikes in places you&#039;d never expect spikes, and this weill be happening on a scale that dwarfs anything the more experienced collectors among us have seen. It&#039;s a volatile environment, and the only guarantee is that <i>something</i> will be happening. Too many uncertain factors are involved to make any broad generalizations at all.</p><p><br /></p><p>My advice, if you&#039;re interested purely in investment value: stick to key dates, long-established rarities, and gold. </p><p><br /></p><p>It&#039;s unlikely that you&#039;ll be able to keep an objective outlook for long, though. One of these days, you&#039;ll hold a Morgan with a perfect cheek, or a St. Gaudens, or a Liberty half, and you will be assimilated. <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie1" alt=":)" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" />[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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