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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;IdesOfMarch01, post: 1991904, member: 39084&quot;]According to my dealer, one of the forces at work in these cases is the effort of individual auction houses to stimulate bidding and inflate prices by promoting certain coins to specific clients who are known by the auction house to be interested in those coins.&nbsp; As a result, a bidding war ensues and the coin ends up going for 5x - 10x the &quot;estimate&quot; and probably 2x - 3x the price that it would have fetched without the pre-auction hype.&nbsp; A year or two later, the losing bidders have moved on to other coins and the winning bidder is left with a coin that might be worth less than half what he/she paid for it.</p><p><br /></p><p>Here&#039;s what I think may be an example of the above: In the August 2014 Heritage auction this Hadrian (in which I was interested) went for $80,000 (NOT including buyer&#039;s fee) on an estimate of $40,000:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]356713[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>Part of Heritage&#039;s description was &quot;... certainly among the finest known Hadrian aurei...&quot;&nbsp; My dealer recommended against bidding on this coin due to his knowledge that Heritage was actively promoting it to several of its favorite clients.</p><p><br /></p><p>Yet <i>less than one year earlier, </i>in the Roma Numismatics Limited auction of September 29, 2013, this coin sold for less than $11,000 (not including buyer&#039;s fee)!&nbsp; Roma&#039;s description of it only included &quot;... near extremely fine...&quot; while Heritage described it as &quot;MS★ 5/5 - 5/5&quot;&nbsp; and &quot;...deeply struck... with full &#039;mint bloom&#039;&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>While I think the coin was certainly undervalued in the Roma auction, it&#039;s clear that an almost $70,000 increase in price in less than a year is mostly due to Heritage&#039;s aggressive promotion and hyperbole-laced description of the coin.</p><p><br /></p><p>Consider this Titus sestertius from NAC May 2013:</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]356738[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>This went for 150,000 CHF (about $157,000) on an estimate of 40,000 CHF.&nbsp; My maximum bid wasn&#039;t even close on this one.&nbsp; NAC described it as:</p><p><br /></p><p>&quot;A sestertius of extraordinary quality with a portrait of enchanting beauty work of a very talented master-engraver. Struck in high relief on a very large flan retaining its original lustre exactly as it would have appeared in Rome in the first century AD. Virtually as struck and almost Fdc...&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>Really?&nbsp; There is either a little wear on the obverse and reverse or some evidence of a weak strike (note the wreath on the obverse and the head of Pax on the reverse) but that didn&#039;t stop NAC from what I consider to be a misuse of the description &quot;FDC.&quot;&nbsp; Who knows what this coin might bring at auction today?</p><p><br /></p><p>With respect to prices of aurei, especially 12 Caesars issues: My dealer tells me that in the past 3 - 4 years, Russian billionaires have become extremely active in purchasing Roman aurei, as have certain Arab oil sheikhs.&nbsp; For this reason I don&#039;t expect 1st and 2nd century Roman gold to ever revert back to their 2010 prices, at least not those aurei that are considered rare,&nbsp; EF, or among the finest of their type.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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