Silver Eagle Run

spock1k · Jun 3, 2013

GDJMSP;1720074 said:

and you are the best cherry picker out there so couldn't you have offset the losses from above with good cherry picks at the same time to offset your losses?.
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Cherry picks with guaranteed profits don't just come along with every coin you see, they are few and far between. But me being me, I never just bought any coin just because I managed to find one. I would spend weeks, months, sometimes years looking for specific coins. And when I found a coin I wanted, or just happened upon a coin that I liked, then I would buy it. But I wouldn't just pay crazy money for it either. If I thought the coin was way overpriced I'd just walk away. (which also just happens the same thing I told you to do - now didn't I ?) But if the price was within reason, then I would buy it.

Cherry-picks to me were rarely coins I wanted for my collection. For me cherry-picks only had 1 purpose, they were coins that I knew I could turn around and sell within the next few days for more than I paid for them. And then use that profit to further my collection.

i am thinking that the difference is selling coin one coin at a time from your collection versus selling the whole collection at one go. this has to be it. unless you can add one or two jewels from your wisdom
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Yes and this is a major difference. But what you are apparently missing, and that most people also miss, is that if it takes you years to buy your collection 1 coin at a time, then it will also take you years to sell your collection 1 coin at a time. And when you sell an entire collection worth many thousands of dollars you will never, ever, find another collector out there just waiting to buy it. And that is largely because there are no collectors out there with many thousands of dollars that they can afford to spend all at one time. The only people who can do that are coin dealers. And coin dealers will never pay retail for coins.

And you are also forgetting about the timing issue. As they say, timing is everything. But the thing about timing is this - you never, ever, know if you got it right until that particular time has already passed. In other words you never know it until after the fact, sometimes long after the fact.

For instance, I sold my last collection almost 7 years ago, and took approximately a 50% loss. But since that time has passed I can look back and know that if I had waited and sold 2 years later, then I would have just about doubled my money. Or, if I had waited and sold my collection 5 or 6 years later, then I would have quadrupled my money. And bobody knows what would have happened if I had waited and sold 12 or 15 years later. Who knows, I may have even taken a bigger loss than I did. We do not know and will never know what will happen in the future. We only know what has happened in the past.

This is what I meant with my earlier comments. You first have to find the coin. Just to do that much you have to know a lot, a whole lot. Then you have to buy the right coin, in the right grade, for the right price, at the right time. Then you have to sell that coin at the right price, to the right buyer, at the right time, and be lucky in all of them - to make money. That's a whole lot to know, a whole lot of things that you have to get just exactly right.

Miss just 1 of those things, get just 1 of those things wrong - and you will lose money.

Now I got most of it right. I predicted back in 2003 that the best direction for collectors to go was into world coins, in particular world gold. That's documented, it was even printed in the coin mags. So I followed my own advice. And I picked the right coins, in the right grades, at the right price, at the right time. But when I decided to sell I didn't care if I made or lost money because that was not my purpose. The money didn't matter, I didn't need the money. I just sold. And it was the wrong time.

I let friends, students, and other collectors pick and choose what they wanted from my collection, and I sold the rest to a dealer. He in turn sold most of it to another dealer, which of course I knew he would, and some to other collectors. For dealers don't even buy coins unless they know they already have them sold. And he in turn sold to other dealers and other collectors. Many of the coins I sold ended being sold for 5 times what I sold them for. But it was sometimes years down the road. I still see coins from collection being bought and sold now and then.

So I ask you spock. You seem to think that I know a lot about coins, and a lot about the coin market. Well, maybe I do. (But what I know is that there is a whole lot more that I don't know.) But back to the question, given your opinion of me, if I can't make money in coins - then what chance does anybody else have ?

History bears me out spock. It is a fact, not an opinion, that most collectors lose money when their collections are sold. So collectors need to know that, understand it, and accept it as being true because it is true. They should never assemble a collection with the intention of making money down the road, because they won't.
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Silver Eagle Run

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