Zohar sent me another round of beautiful coins to photograph. I also tried my hand at a bit of "ancient" coin work, so check out that thread also for some eye candy. Cheers, and happy holidays, Brandon and my favorite of the bunch...
Seems like there are a lot of Austrian States coins for sale at the moment from the 16th thru 18th century. A ton on eBay, and both Stack's-Bowers Galleries and Heritage have a quite a few coming to auction at the NYINC. Most of them are real nice looking coins too.
princeofwaldo - there are a few superb pieces on Stacks this time around from an old collection, for those who can live with heavy dark toning. Not as many unique pieces on Heritage unless I missed them. Many of these coin types are very common, yet conditionally scarce.
Agree, the selection Stack's-Bowers & Ponterio has up for bid are far more compelling. Did you check-out eBay? Go to Austria and search on "NGC" and you'll get a boatload of them. As for Heritage, the latest catalogs arrived the other day. Was looking through the thickest of the three catalogs and discovered a whole bunch of lots listed twice, -same photo, lot number, write-up. I wonder if they will auction the coins off twice too. But seriously, the entire German States section and part of Great Britain are all listed twice. Pretty sloppy.
Indeed sloppy I noted that. Regarding Ebay - very thin on the material I am looking for at this stage in my set. Many coins in the AU range some that shouldn't have made their way into a slab. Higher mint state level generally migrates into the auction house catalogs. My experience in the past few years on ebay as buyer and seller has been very disappointing - very cheap buyers making it a flea market type of dialog forcing sellers to put very high "Ask" numbers to have room to come down. Buyers end up not paying, quite a few fakes for sale etc. Not the same vibrant marketplace as Ebay doesn't really enforce better practices. My duplicate mint state Talers had been sitting on Ebay at prices much much lower than any auction houses without any traction and I can only seldom find anything to buy as sellers have been driven away. I will likely take my duplicate lot (mostly MS graded) the auction house route as the easier path if I do not end up selling it at the NYINC show coming up. Issue there is catalog placement and time to get paid, yet like most things, there are tradeoffs in every decisions. Will see.
Yes, quite sad on the eBay situation. It used to be such a wide-open seller friendly place to unload duplicates (etc) and now it's pretty much a waste of time. I have sold a few things there over the past year, but only items that I had purchased at significant discounts to market price. The trick is to try and sell something already listed on eBay, with the existing listing way-way above market price but still getting best offers that are being turned away. For instance, a coin with a BIN price of $600 that is really only worth at best $200, but which is getting lots of offers. List yours at $550 with the automatic accept best-offer set to $350 and there's a good chance you'll snag a best-offer from someone. Of course, upon learning they won, the first question that goes through there mind is "I wonder if I paid too much". And with all the other changes to eBay, that means some chance of it getting returned and all the headaches that go with that. Going conventional auction probably is the best bet, especially if you have a nice group of coins. And I guess it depends on the material you have to sell as to where you would want it listed. Did you watch the Stack's-Bower & Ponterio auction in Macau a couple weeks ago? The prices realized where mind-boggling on much of the material. If I had to wait 60 days for settlement to get twice the money for the coins, I could probably live with that.
Prince - fully agree with you, and have tried this approach with Make an Offer. No viewers, no bids, and I am talking MS Talers. Same coin goes for 50% over my ASK in auctions. To me it reads that serious buyers don't look on ebay anymore and like the "cleaner" environment in auctions. In prior years I simply took the duplicates to the NYINC or ANA and sold them in person there. If you have other suggestions, I am interested in hearing as definitely something has changed. As a buyer, I keep an eye and 1-2 times a year I find a super coin. Here are a few "finds" from prior years.
WoW(!) Those are sensational. Especially the Vienna-Trieste Railway issue. Most of my Austrian coins are 20th century, but some real killer coins none the less. Lady In The Clouds in MS60, along with a nice run of gold coins from the 20s and 30s. The best crown is an 1908, a very common coin in AU but elusive in true BU, mine is an MS63+ (PCGS) white and without crud. I think you are probably right about eBay and serious collectors. For someone with the resources to buy really choice material, their time is far more valuable to them than their money, and with all the other crap on eBay now days that amounts to little more than noise, -sorting through it all has made the site impractical for many seasoned collectors. That they have run off so many sellers with all their nit-picking rules was bad enough, but now that the serious buyers are headed for the exits as well, really bodes badly for eBay. I'm pretty much strictly a world coin guy, so not all of my observations necessarily apply to US coinage. But I have noticed that many of the highest prices realized on eBay the past year or two have been on modern issues. Much like you observed, on some of the better pieces, the prices realized are half what they should be, and then there is 13% that has to be forfeited to eBay and PayPal to add insult to injury. Here's a great example: http://www.ebay.com/itm/1908-China-Empire-Silver-Dollar-Dragon-Coin-NGC-Y-14-AU-58-/361098880770 http://www.stacksbowers.com/BrowseA.../832182/AuctionID/6048/Lot/32025/Default.aspx Granted they aren't the same grade, but if anything, you would think the problem-free coin in AU58 would out-perform the details graded UNC, yet quite the opposite occurred.
