Hey all, at some point last week, I mentioned that I was certain I had read a story about at attempt to corner a market on a coin . . . but I couldn't remember the specifics. With the help of Mr. Google, I searched a bit today, and found this quote: www.numismaster.com/ta/Coins.admin?rnd=SESRGDCZ... Proof nickels were of course made for collectors. Several dealers attempted to corner the market on the Shield and Liberty Head nickels without the word CENTS ... Alas, the link no longer works. (If anybody knows how to find the original, let me know!) But, yes, I feel certain that was the story I had read, and tried to recall. Google also pointed me to a 1904 book called Dickerman's United States Treasury Counterfeit Detector, in which the author writes, about the 1883 no cents nickel: One man has even gone so far as to try to corner the market in these coins. He already has over a thousand of them, and still buys all he can. He argues that after he gets hold of a great number of these nickels people who are collecting will have to come to him for them, and he can charge what he pleases. This man will have his hands full before he does this, for there were 1,000,000 of them originally issued. There are many people who have from ten to a hundred of these coins, patiently waiting for a rise, but I'm afraid they'll be disappointed like those who bought up all the trade dollars they could get at eighty-five cents. There is one man out West who now has 3,000 of these dollars, and is still buying. The 1883 nickels now command no premium whatever, and yet it has been over twenty years since they first came out. In the case of trade dollars, they are worth even less then they were, and their price seems to be steadily decreasing, as they rarely fetch more than 55 cents and never more than 60... see https://books.google.com/books?id=w5cvAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA11-PA16 for more. (Yes, it is indeed painful to read of trade dollars going for 55 cents....)
This thread couples very nicely with the 'reducing the supply' thread. Greed again dictates the validity of this whole concept. Trade dollars scare me to this day.
Yeah -- I think that's where I first posted that I had read about a "corner the market" story but couldn't remember the details. And then, today, I couldn't remember where I had posted that -- thus the new thread. As for "no cents" -- my understanding is that so many people thought they'd be rare, they saved them. So much so that even though the "cents" variety had *three times* the coinage, the "no cents variety" is much more common, and the FMV is significantly lower, in all grades. (My mother gave me a trade dollar and a Morgan dollar when I was a teenager -- um, almost a half-century ago. She didn't collect, but had one of each that she had held onto. They were both 1870's or 1880's. The trade dollar was, at that time, the coin that had the highest value of my collection, by far. I can't seem to find it these days, although I feel fairly confident that it's in one of the many boxes in our garage that we never got around to unpacking . . . I wonder what it was and what it's worth today)
The 1883 No Cents Nickel can't be worth much as HSN was selling them at one time with the typical huckster's pitch. I have three of them (VG & G) with a total value of 10 bucks.
I really dislike the “cornering the market” thing. The person who does it almost always loses money because selling the commodity is like an elephant in a rowboat. You put too many on the market; the price drops. If people find you have done it, it becomes even harder to sell the item. In the end, many hoarders lose patience and dump the items at a loss. In the mean time, those who would like to own item are denied ownership. Over the years ago guy bought up most all of the 1909 VDB Matte Proof Cents. After he paid a high price for a very high grade example, he offered all of them for over $1 million on eBay. In the mean time collectors were denied the opportunity to add these coins to their sets. I’d like to have one to complete a set of 20th century Proof type coins. It’s never going to happen because one guy has decided that he wants to control market.
