What do you Think? The madness in Gold & Silver, Are more coins coming out of HIDING

Like all of have been seeing for the last couple of years the T.V. ads to come down to some shop and sell you unwanted gold and silver. Well, Do you think that some once hidden/hoarded collections of coins are coming back on the market, because the person died leaving their collection in the hands of their children that don't know anything about the value of the coins.

What are you thoughts?

 

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Quite honestly, even with the gold and silver market up, I haven't noticed much difference in the amount of new material coming to market. The situation where people inherit unwanted coins is always going to happen, in good times and bad.
Guy

 

Yes, but most the stuff coming out is just more of the very common stuff that has always been something of a glut. I'm sure there have been some goodies too but not enough to make a noticeable change in availability. Rare coins do not have major changes in availability because well they are RARE! (things like the 1903 O dollar not withstanding) You have 100K coins and 1 of them is rare, and another 100K coins come out of hiding and you find you now have 2 rare coins. You've doubled the population of the rare one but it has no real effect on demand and availability in the marketplace.

 

This is going to happen over and over and over again. The cold hard fact is that the average age of a Coin Collector is 50's+. All of these coins will eventually find their way into the market thus driving prices down. Unless some miraculous Numismatic Promoting happens, which I do not see happening anytime soon.. because frankly the average Joe Doesn't care.

 

Which is why the average Joe collector should will all their coins to me.

 

It depends more on the demand than the supply. If you have a lot of collectors, even fairly common coins end up being valuable. And if you have very few collectors then rarity means little. Small town trade tokens are a good example. Some are very rare in terms of population, but not even worth a 3 digit number due to the scarcity of serious collectors.

 

Eventually all collections will change hands. It may be a collector loses interest or passes it on to his children. Or a person finds a long lost stash of coins from some relative and has no interest in keeping them.

But the way I see it is even if old coins becomes available for sale it doesn't necessarily mean it will water down the market. A lot of coins from previous collections are not high grade and many collectors back then used to clean the coins. This may lower the market for low grade coins but probably not the better grade ones.

 

It is a very sensitive subject. This phenomenon of the death of the baby boomer can be compared to the tide going out in economic terms. "There are a lot of shells left over." Numismatics should be promoted to ensure the longevity of the art. It is a fear of mine that oneday these coins will fall into the wrong hands and end up getting melted for gold/silver value.

 

This is true, and the average age has been 50's+ for at least 37 years now. I would bet it was 50's+ long before that and will be 50's+ for a long time to come.

And Doug is right, all you can do is expose people to the hobby, you can't make them a collector. They either have the bug or they don't. If they don't have it no matter how much encouragement and help you give them the "interest" will last only as long as you are helping. Tf the bug is there, once exposed they will take it and run with it. In most cases it will go into remission while they establish a career and raise a family, but then they come back, often in their 40s, but are then involved for another thirty to forty years. And that is why the average age is so high.

 

It is giving people more incentive to scavenge for these coins but i think it is world wide web that is ultimately increasing the exposure and availability of rare coins.

 

Please - I'm not ready to leave just yet!

 

The first of the baby boomers just started retiring a couple years ago. With average life spans pushing 80 we probably won't start seeing significant death rates among the boomers for another 15 years and no significant decline in the number of boomers for another ten years after that. So we will have 25 years of adding new collectors before there is a significant decline in the population of boomer collectors. That's a long tide.