US Coin Market Stagnant

eBay by default is a race to the bottom on prices for common things. You have to undercut others to get yours to sell when hundreds if not more are listed. Especially when they manipulate listing orders and search results. They don't show everything to everyone and then the whole promoted listing stuff.

That doesn't even get into the whole people that do 99 cent auctions on things they shouldn't especially if they're a small seller were then a steal happens and everyone wants it at that price from then on part.

There's a reason why many dealers source some of their inventory on eBay

 

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If this is true in the AGGREGATE, then that pricing pressure would extend to all prices including other online auctions like HA, right ? I don't see that in popular coins I track (Saints, Morgans) and Ebay sellers have other fees/costs that if anything ADDS up to 20% in costs so I'm not sure it's true they are price-cutting to the bottom.

I can see low prices at WalMart.com or Amazon but not at Ebay.

Most of the $0.99 auctions are set to get people to start the bidding....I've NEVER gotten something from one of those $0.99 auctions that ended up being like 20-30% below FMV. Price rises up slowly or quickly.

Same thing with auctions below FMV...the price eventually rises up. I'm bidding on some coins right now below melt value and there is NO WAY even one of them will sell without a premium to bullion value.

 

As an economist, I fully understand cause and effect. So debating which came first is probably beyond both of our pay grades. But I think SUPPLY from all the stuff coming out of the Mint has to affect demand at least with younger and less-wealthy buyers, right ?

How much stuff came out of the Mint annually, Doug, when you were collecting as a kid ? I'll bet a FRACTION of that comes out today. So whatever $$$ you and others had went into Barbers and Mercury's and Franklins and Morgans and Saints. Not today !!!

Agreed.....

Hmmm....go on....

I am writing this before reading the rest of your post but I am guessing you are going to talk about the transformtive effects of the Internet and Web and related dissemination of pricing which is revolutionary compared to the decades before.

Microeconomics 101 tells us that perfect markets require perfect information and granted we did not have that before 2000.

Anyway, I die grass....back to your stuff....

OK....sounds like you are saying price transparency has taken a quantum leap. Like we are all Scott Bakula's now......

OK, I am willing to buy PART of what you are saying in that in the aggregate we might not see huge increases in coinage, just like the supply of gold tends to increase only 2-3% a year. But I think mintage of new stuff from the U.S. Mint has to be calculated in here somehow, Doug. If you ask today's kids where their Coin $$$ are going vs. where 1965 Kids put their $$$, you get to the nux of the problem.

But you are saying that folks were UNAWARE of the huge increase in supply out there, sort of like the hidden hoards of Saints that could hit any particular year or mint mark. Call me skeptical here but not a naysayer.

You seem to be saying that The Coin Bubble of 1990 led to such a spike that it suckered in alot of people and killed a generation of coin buyers. In other words, the 1990 Coin Bubble was the 1929 Stock Market Crash (took a generation to forget), not the 1987 Crash (reversed in 2 years).

But dealers themselves have been saying how they have NOT been making a killing the last few years or decades...many have left the business...Central States Coin Show down 40% in dealer tables etc.....so are they REALLY setting the market or is Ebay, HA, Stacks, etc.?

Dealers set the market years ago when there was NOT price transparency, you think they are the ones setting it today ? If dealers are setting any markets 25% below Ebay or HA or Stacks or GC, then it's going to show up there quickly if not instantaneously.

How long can dealers misprice ? A few days...weeks....as we saw with the 1903-O Morgan in 1962 ?

I think you are saying here that prices across the board went too high because the TPGs graded too loosely...a new generation came in and said they would only pay MS63 prices for MS65's. I don't think that's the case in the aggregate, I think it's an observation (a correct one, granted) by very astute and expert numismatists like yourself, Doug. But I don't think 99.9% of the coin-collecting public is playing that game.

IOTW....I think most people assume the TPG grades are the official umpire calls and only in exceptional circumstances can you disagree.

Or maybe many people finally threw in the towel from The 1990 Coin Bubble and the early-2000's Mini Bubble where premiums to bullion for quasi-bullion coins went parabolic. It takes YEARS to burn off those excesses and it snowballed right around the 2008 Financial Crisis, which accentuated the price drops to the downside.

Well, I think I learned alot from you and others here at CT but I still think that supply and demand rule. And I think that 2 or 3 new supply forces are present that weren't there 20 or 50 years ago....and demand has other forces looking for wallet share (including the ease of stock trading today vs. pre-2000 or even pre-1975).

 

Nice discussion going on.

 

Not at all. HA/Legend/Stacks are night and day from eBay. They do live viewings, send out marketing, alert potential buyers etc, eBay is a do it yourself online venue. What a medium to small dealer or random person can get on eBay is much different than what one of those places could get for it. They also generally deal in different higher end material. eBay the majority of stuff is 5k or under with most of it being under 1k, those houses are the opposite with most of their stuff being over 1k and get many things in the 5 figure and up range which rarely get put on eBay unless it's just as advertising.

Common morgans absolutely had it happen to them. A lot of Saints are basically bullion, the fact that you can get common date 63/64s for basically bullion value shows what has happened as obviously they aren't going to go under bullion value. Obviously the better ones and best ones are fairly immune to this

I have plenty of times and ones well below even that range before. Some of it depends what you're looking at. If your focus is higher end quality material it'll happen less if at all as say if you were looking for 50-100 dollar coins

 

OK, take a 1923-D Saint which is a coin I am lookking at. Nicer quality over at HA & Stacks, but for a similar graded coin I'm not going to get one on Ebay at 20% cheaper. At least I haven't seen one.

Well, maybe I'm looking in the wrong area. If you guys can give me concrete examples of what coins traded at years ago and where they trade now on Ebay vs. HA, that would be helpful (I cite HA only because I consider it highe-end but I presume they have more registered users than Stacks, Legend, or GC).

I use MS-65 Saints as my standard (Gem Quality) in 1924, 1927, or even 1923-D (MS-66) dates to see if pricing is out-of-whack. Could probably use 1907 and 1908's, too.

 

Probably not in the areas you are looking at unless you factor in not having to pay for shipping and eBay bucks and/or a promotion.

It used to happen more, but a lot of smaller sellers have gotten away from cheap auction starts after eating it on a few of them. When you see your item sell cheap then sell two weeks later for the normal value because a dealer snagged your auction you give up on those pretty quickly

I'm not sure about Stacks, though I would venture to guess that they have more users than Legend or GC though Legend may have just as many of the whale type users as their small auctions are usually full of very high end things.

There you're talking about higher end coins where price undercutting is rare unless someone is desperate to sell.

 

I didn't, quite honestly.

Hey, even on HA I bid on a Saint and a gold Eagle and the bidding was like $200. Which is insane. You KNOW those aren't going for less than the price of 1 oz. of gold (and the Saint is probably going for 20-30% over spot).

I don't doubt it happens but for items like silver or gold I just have NEVER seen the price fall below melt. At worst, I see a rich premium drop down a bit.

I get "stink bids" executed on bills (where I'm paying 20-200x the denomination face value) but I am not buying even plain old silver or gold coins, let alone numismatics, for even 90% of melt. Maybe 100-105%.

You could be right BB21, I was just going by a friend who told me HA had a much wider following in TOTAL USERS than Legend or Stacks or GC.

He might be wrong or the pure COIN BIDDERS for the other 3 could be more than HA. Not sure if the sites release registered user numbers (but should be linked to frequency of auctions and number of items auctioned off, I would think).

Yeah, I usually look at MS-65's or MS-66 (if the price doesn't jump too much) for common or semi-commons.

 

I have picked off a lot of auctions then retailed them for more later 40-100 pct over cost. Not easy in this market either.

 

But WHAT kind of stuff ?

 

I can agree the market base has more knowledge than say 25 years ago but if I have a low pop PQ item I will get my price or just keep it. Sooner or later somebody for real will come along and pay the money.

 

This is the primary reason why I won’t get into coin dealing full-time. I went to NC shows very often, and I can’t tell you how often I saw the same material in the cases show after show. The vast majority of collectors in NC have no good budget to speak of and spend their time in junk bins. Quality stuff sits.

PCGS’s aim is to control the US coin market. Their market reporting in their CoinFacts ValueView shows this. They intentionally hide sales that show a declining market.

They could not care less about world coins except that it gives them an extra source of revenue to certify them.

 

I disagree. The overvaluation of US coins in the past 20 years has put off many people. Why buy only one nice US coin from the early 1800s when you can buy several nice contemporary coins from other countries that may be more interesting for one reason or another? Why pay thousands of dollars for a coin where the only thing special about it is a single letter or number when you can buy an ancient coin that is special in a myriad of ways?

That’s what happened to me. And many others.

 

This is completely false. You really have no clue what you are talking about if you honestly believe they couldn't care less about world coins or that they bury sales where the price went down.

 

Wouldn't bother me if the coin Market completely Tanked because then I might be able to afford that 1916 standing lib quarter as well as other key dates.

 

Actually, there is some truth to what Typecoin posted. I'm not sure what algorithm PCGS Coinfacts uses, but if you look up say, 1806 XF40 Draped Bust Half Dollar, pointed 6, no stems, you see this:



But when you go to Heritage (granted I didn't go to Stacks and Bowers or Legend), these are the most recent sales (leaving out a details coin and a few R.5s and even an R.6 that went for just $1600+ in Jan. 2019). I searched for Pointed 6, Stems on Heritage, and took out the ones without stems, because my wording added in some results that showed 1806's without stems varieties. All of the coins below are listed in CoinFacts, but there are some higher results from April 2018, further back than mine below, which sold in October 2018. Why? Because mine was a lowball for a PCGS certified example?



Here's my coin that I consigned to Heritage in October 2018, which still falls into the time frame of the PCGS Coinfacts listings, yet the low sales price isn't shown in the CoinFacts results. (Yes. I was bummed out as a seller. I got $945 from the sale, since I negotiated 105% of the hammer price, before their buyer fee). Why are there two April 2018 sales listed on CoinFacts for much higher than mine in 10/2018?


To be honest, I'm not sure if the CoinFacts algorithm is set up to intentionally hide many of the low sales prices, or if it's totally random and sometimes that's the way the cards fall. There's no way to know unless you created it or maintain it, I suppose. But one thing that is absolutely true, is that CoinFacts mobile only shows a tiny part of the picture. And when you broaden your view you see some results that paint a clearer picture of the market, it ain't always so pretty.

 

Coinfacts has never been the place to go for the big picture of prices. Auction prices realized is where you go for that which will show everything they capture. The eBay ones can go missing or show the wrong thing, but that is from listing errors on the sellers part which the program has no way to know. The other auction places like GC where the prices stop a couple years ago are because the auction houses themselves made the decision not to keep releasing them or to just release them in batches as time goes on, not PCGS deciding not to show it.

 

US coins appear overpriced vs world. Will many US players go bankrupt if crash?

I see a lot of investors going to low pop affordable world. No greysheet, holder, or sticker game.

 

Then they are doing a lousy job at it. Their index has been declining for years.