What is your view on prices over a period of years?

What is your view on prices over 20 to 30 years?



6 emails with a similar question:


Purchases in 1990's period what is the possibility to buy and enjoy our hobby and have prices we paid keep up with inflation to 2015 that is 25 years later?


I have studies 100’s of catalogues, followed changes in fashion in what collectors enjoy and collect, numbers of bidders when information available, change in buying habits via multi-channel.


There is a link between price and quality and the increased demand for quality increase.


Collect long term, buy the best quality you can afford – MY BEST VIEW



What is yours?



Jeff

 

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buy what you love. do not do it for money. if you do you will not get as much enjoyment out of it. but if you are dealer... wait for more opinions. sure some coins will go up in value and others will stay the same or decrease in value. I have bought maybe 3-4 expensive coins so far out of maybe 900 coins. the thrill of having them is great. am I worried about there future value ? no. I know their rarity and know they will hold their value will increase in the future. I have no intension of selling them anytime soon. I want to enjoy them for a very long time.

 

I cannot afford top shelf coins, but I admire them. What I do buy are lower grade coins that fit my budget. I can still enjoy my collection as much as those that spend thousands (and I don't get heartburn from worrying how much I spend).

 

Very few of what we average collectors collect will even keep up with inflation let alone beat it . Collect because it's a great hobby with some great people and even if you don't make a ton a money , you will always have something left . And that's after all the hours of enjoyment you've had .

 

in the UK we start collecting at whatever age and do not stop or sell, I have been collecting now 55 years and never changed what I enjoy and collect. The love of Numismatics

Jeff

 

Anyone who takes up numismatics as an investment is a fool. You have as much chance hitting it big in this hobby as you do hitting the Super MegaBucks in Las Vegas.

Personally, I would rather blow $10K in Las Vegas playing "SMB" than putting it into coins as an investment. At least the loss in Vegas would be instantaneous, and I wouldn't have to wait 20-30 years to learn that I lost.

Chris

 

Same..

 

Best coins will always sell for more than second best. In recent years we have seen the spread between the grades increase in terms of price. If Perfect today is selling for 10 times Almost Perfect which sells for 10 times Very Nice, the question is whether 30 years from now will see that 10 times figure change to 100 or 2. People who hang around places like Coin Talk Ancients tend to be more interested in the coins than in the numbers but there are a higher percentage of people who consider themselves dealers or investors now than ever before. Will this number continue to grow also? We do not know. I do know that I would be quite happy if every coin were to decrease in value by a figure of 50% or even 90%. I'd buy more as long as there were still dealers in business to sell them. Every so often one of us reports buying a specific example of a coin that had sold for more according to sales records (prices realized or online summaries like acsearch). I can afford to lose the entire cash value of my collection. Some people can't. My prediction is that the super grade spread will taper off as the very rich lose interest and million dollar coins fail to sell for more than a million plus fees. Rich collectors will still buy expensive coins but they will not be bid up by investors or dealers who will turn around and try to sell it for more to the same collectors they outbid in the sale. Poor collectors who buy disposable coins and rich collectors who do not care what a coin costs have one thing in common. They do not plan on selling the coin. When I die there will not be a posthumous Triton catalog with my name on the cover. Some of you may get that honor but neither of us will know. Until then, I suggest you buy coins you can afford to enjoy whether that means EF aurei or recognizable culls and love them like family. Many people have spent a hundred (thousand or hundred thousand) times as much on the hobby as have some of us who post here. Some, not all, of them have enjoyed their coins as much as we do. If all you enjoy is how much more your coins are 'worth' now than what you paid, you may be a successful dealer or investor but you missed the only real reason for having these coins.

 

No. You would not be happy at all. Cheap coins do not pay a dealer's bills. The market must have wealthy buyers that are willing to spend small premiums on expensive coins (and sometimes large ones). Those are the premiums that keep a dealer in business, allowing him to mark other coins down to accommodate collectors on smaller budgets. Decrease the value of all coins from 50% to 90%, and coin dealers would close up shop overnight. You would have no source of new acquisitions other than trading with other collectors.

But I am green. I would like to hear what an experienced dealer has to say on the matter.

 

What Doug said.

 

Dealers as we know them would disappear to be replaced by a group that did not have shows in expensive hotels and issue glossy catalogs. They would not melt the coins because they would make less that way than selling them off to whoever would have them at double melt. I know a couple older collectors who bought denarii for silver value in the 1950's. Better coins sold for more and supported a trade but the level things most of us have now were flea market items that kids like me could buy for a half dollar. My wife collects bells, much of this has happened in that hobby since most collectors are over 70 and more collections come on the market than there are people who want any but the best ones. As a result you find them in flea markets rather than in glossy catalogs.

Yes, I need dealers to sell me coins. No, those dealers do not have to employ a staff of experts and have sales that bring in $26 million. We would lose the importation of new hoard material and interest in the coins by museums anxious to impress visitors with piles of hoard material. The exit from the hobby of people only interested in resale would not keep me from buying their coins but only change the venue. I really enjoyed eBay back in the late 1990's when collectors sold their surplus to other collectors but now it is rare to find a coin not sold by a professional. I bought ancient coins on eBay starting in March, 1998, before they issued stock and started catering to professional sellers later that year. Those were the good old days. You can tell this is a fantasy since someone actually said something nice about eBay. Prices on better coins may drop but I doubt it will end dealers as we know them. Down 50% is possible; 90% is improbable. Cheap coins will continue to sell for nuisance value or what sellers require as a minimum cost to be worth handling a coin plus postage etc.

 

A realistic approach Bing,dropping big bux makes no sense to me and there are many other hands in my pockets all the time.I get the best I can at the time and NEVER regret it at all!....

 

It's all a fantasy anyway. People are people. Some are rich, some not so much, and we have our separate playgrounds. I can tell you this much from personal experience, and I should probably only speak for myself. If I weren't able to sell some expensive coins at decent premiums (which for me is around 10%), I wouldn't be selling coins at all. It would be financially wiser to work at McDonald's.

My recent disastrous experiment with 99-cent auctions on eBay taught me an important lesson, and that is that I don't need eBay to be my middle man when it comes to philanthropy. From now on, I'm just going to send all my rejects to @Aidan_()

 

Hi Doug

I enjoy you overview on numismatics as a whole. It is interesting how we all collect the same material but not only in the UK but Europe we differ about the period of time we build collections. The US market is the greatest in the world, dealers invest deeply into the hobby and the volumes are incredible that are sold. After saying that many of the greatest British collections were collected by Americans. Doug I have a number of friends from age 25 in Europe and upwards that collect, one has approx. several hundred coins and he was a great trader and started creating it from having 3'000 euro when he was 10. Today he is incredibly knowledge and his delight is grading up anything which he has that is not EF+. His collection is super + his library is amazing too. He did not buy as an investment and neither do I but we anyhow are the lucky keepers in our life-time of wonderful pieces of miniature art.

Doug this is only a regular Gordian III, but in the hand it has a wonderful medalic portrait, the coin is natural it speaks to me, if a coin can

Jeff

 

I agree 100% with this. Coins have been collected for hundreds if not thousands of years. There will be coin collectors as long as physical money exists, if not longer.

I love that coin. I'm not a big fan of bronze in general, but this one is nice looking.

 

Who is this man or woman putting these coins on the internet? is he a dealer? do you have a contact details for him?

Devi

 

Many of us collect for many different reasons.

 

I've always liked antiques (there is just something nice and cozy about them, ya know?)



... and I like to buy cool things and then put them into sweet OCD-order ...



... and yah => I also love animals ...



=> so my obsession with collecting ancient animal coins is a no-brainer!!

... it's nice when you have a calling, eh?



Prices? ... ehhh, it'd sure be nice for my inheritor if they'd continue to go up

 

It may be stating the obvious, but if one is concerned about a coin investment keeping its value, yes, buy the best quality you can afford, but don't forget about getting a good price for it. A collector could just as easily overpay for a coin in the 19XXs as today. This won't bother those of us who see the true return on investment on the coins we buy in terms other than their eventual sale value.

Nevertheless, it's indisputable that our hobby is already better than many others in that what we spend on it will retain SOME value. That value may be 5%, but I'd still not be lying to my wife .

 

I started collecting U.S. pennies as a child and finally completed it in my 60s. Prices on better quality coins have increased because those of us who plugged album holes with poor quality coins in our youth can now afford to upgrade them. But there are less young people in the hobby now. EBay has helped the hobby immensely - making it easier to find and procure coins and revitalizing interest for many of us. Coin collecting for me has grown into a study of world history. There has always been a repeating pattern of struggle between wealthy and poor. We are witnessing the greatest such struggle now, but global warming is a new game changer - changing not only the environment, but the market place and human activities. World economy, not just collectibles depends on whether or not we can prevent run-away global warming.