I sat down with my wife earlier in the week and we ordered the gold sovereign. I decided on an NGC Graded MS63 1915 George V Sovereign – A coin struck at the Royal Mint during the Great War. It arrived yesterday. Below are some of the seller’s images.
I had been holding out to see if eBay would put on a 10% eBay bucks deal heading into Valentine’s day. They put on a 5% deal for president’s day and I decided to go for it. I’ll get about $22.20 in eBay bucks in April that I can use for something else later and I can stop worrying about the gold price going up while I wait – not that that seems too likely lately. Mostly I’m just not wanting to maybe wait another 2 or 3 or 4 weeks hoping for a 8-10% deal.
I’m sure my wife gets tired of hearing about the gold price with me on these things and lately it seems that my concerns about it going up are consistently, comically misplaced. I was so worried when it was going up when I wanted to buy that 1875 coin in August, and I bought when it was ~$1540/oz – it later dropped below $1500 again. 5 months later I was worried about it spiking up for the coronavirus fears when it was $1570-1580… and instead it’s been very flat for two weeks or so and was still about $1575 when I pulled the trigger on this purchase. It did spike briefly on fears we’d go to war with Iran, but it reversed almost immediately. I’m still laughing about that seller that was trying to build-in a higher premium on an 1875 gold coin 5 months ago because “gold is going up so much every day.” But, anyway – I digress.
The coin happens to have a silver sticker from WINGS – so I guess they agree that it’s an MS63.
I don’t necessarily view that as a bonus, but I’ll probably leave the sticker where it is – it certainly can’t hurt the value of the coin from what I can tell. I do and have generally taken a dim view of the things in the past and think they’re a bit unsightly. I’d never pay extra for it, but I guess I’ll leave it alone.
I’m picking the coin up for about $75 over the current spot price for the coin. The bullion premium would normally be about 3% or about $10-15 but someone paid $30 to NGC to have it graded, paid $12.50 to have it stickered, paid for all that shipping back and forth, and they’re giving me free shipping (~$5?). On top of all that I’ll be getting ~$22 in eBay bucks later and $5 in cashback on the credit card so it seems like a good deal for me overall.
I could have picked up a 1925 in NGC MS65 for basically the same price (within $5) but I decided to go this route. I’d rather have a coin that’s legitimately 105 years old than a coin that was probably struck after WWII. Part of what intrigues me about most of these European gold coins I’ve been trying to pick up in the last few years is that they’re all late 19th and early 20th century – pre-WWI. Part of the reason why that’s interesting to me is that I really feel like that was just such a different time and a different world and that those two wars changed so much about the world. A post-WWII re-strike just isn’t as interesting in that context.
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