GoldFinger1969

You're measuring from a recent peak to a recent trough. It was $7,000 an ounce a bit over a year ago.

GMO of Boston is a great value shop. They like small cap global value.

There was a mania in 1999-2000 with valuations. No where near that today. Look at TSLA. I still think it might be overvalued, but does anybody still think it's going back to $25 or a market cap of $30 billion ? NFLX....everybody has it. Disney could have bought the whole company for $12 billion. Today it's 20x that amount. Never bet against America, WC.

Pages 3 & 4 of this thread aren't showing up.

I doubt that Bridgewater's asset allocation reflects that piece. Dalio himself may have changed his views. I met Ray before he hit it big. Wish I had given him my resume.

An excellent read -- but that doesn't necessarily mean it contains INVESTABLE information.

Stocks aren't cheap -- but they aren't at bubble-like valuations, either. And U.S. stocks encompass some of the best companies in the world. Don't discount private property rights and the rule of law (as long as Bernie and AOC aren't in charge). If you doubt their importance, go talk to an investor in Chinese education stocks.

Did you see all the $$$ coming in for NFL broadcast rights from the networks, cable companies, Amazon, Facebook, etc ? Same thing with other sports broadcast rights. Now go look at a coin infomercial at 4:30 AM. The meme/NFT/sportscard bubble is unique to the products that have widescale, TV and social media exposure. ESPN, NFLN, FoxSports, even CNBC/FBC/Bloomberg will talk about the big business of sports and ancilliary items like cards and NFTs. No such outlet for coins and money unless you are talking about the financial channels discussing the money supply. You make a good point on gambling -- RobinHood is for momentum growth investing, not for value stock investing. Coins are a value investment, if you can call them investments at all. Gold and coins are an inflation hedge. Well, BitCoin has gone up 20-fold in a few years but it didn't drag up gold or silver -- if anything, it sucked money AWAY from them. Gold and silver would probably be 20-50% higher if not for cryptocurrencies.

First, thanks for coming into the forums and giving us direct answers from the company and people who should know. Not many individuals/companies will do that. Second, because you are marketing a retail product that might appeal to many beginners and newcomers to the hobby.... do you have any thoughts on if there has been a general uptick in the number of people looking to graduate to certified coins of the type that the Green Label encompasses ? Are the combination of online buying and Covid stay-at-home giving people more exposure to coins as fun things to collect and/or investments/speculations ? Are we being dragged up by the meme/NFT/sports card bubble ? Maybe spillover from online coin buyers at Ebay, Heritage, or GC ? Any thoughts appreciated. We have had many discussions on the long-term demographic viability of the U.S. Coin market and always appreciate direct feedback from those in the business 24/7.

"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" -- John Maynard Keynes

I saw that, but still don't really get how it works....

"As "investment", coins are a dead asset. It's what Buffet says about gold but at least gold has some utility as jewelry, a central bank reserve asset and to some, an alternate form of money as a liquid store of value. Today, the most expensive coinage also has an outsized dependency on the TPG label (plus the CAC sticker for some US coins) which doesn't mean anything to the non-collector, except for the price. Coins generate no income in the form of interest, dividends, rents or royalties. The annual yield is negative due to carrying costs. Coins have no status value to non-collectors which, in the absence of "yield", is necessary to incentivize the non-collector to hold it." Two of the most unique coins recently purchased and sold -- the 1933 Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle and the 1908-S MS67 CAC Norweb Saint -- each returned about 5% a year. So these 2 super-unique coins were purchased by the types of people (ultra-rich) who are price insensitive and for whom the expenditure won't change their lifestyle at all...and even these well-heeled "investors" only got 5% a year when even owning the S&P 500 index would have beaten that handily. You would need to buy bullion coins or numismatic coins where bullion was a good portion of the value....then have gold (or silver) skyrocket in the next few years....and then the return would be comparable to stocks. You'd have to buy LOW and sell HIGH -- either one is tough to do, to do both will make someone one-in-a-million. And you'd have to stay out of coins/the asset class for years (decades ?) so as not to lose $$$ if you sold into or at the top of another bubble. That is why I say just enjoy the damn collecting....enjoy the coins....and if you make $$$, great...if not, who cares....and if you die with them, your heirs will learn a bit about why you held 'em.

Monetization and differentiation taken to excess are bad....but they also transmit information and lead to transparency, something that wasn't the case pre-1986. Of course, except for a few heavy hitters, coin collecting wasn't big business pre-1970's so you didn't need the transparency then you do today. It is what it is, as my uncle tells me....just enjoy what you are doing and don't make any purchases you can't live with.

Palladium, Rhodium etc.....are where the action has been. Not gold !

Bernard, you sort of answer you own questions. As I and WorldColonial have discussed with others here, there are a MULTITUDE of factors impacting the demand for coin investments. Online has been a boom IMO....it's definitely a PLUS...is it enough to erase most or all of the demographic and price headwinds that have been in place since the 1980's ? I dunno.... An entire generation of coin collectors grew up with nothing on TV, if TV even existed when they collected. There weren't the demands on one's leisure time that there are now (cable TV, smartphones, social media, etc.) OTOH, you have higher disposable incomes....much greater access to information at the stroke of a keyboard....message boards to discuss and learn....online auctions to buy your dream coin by paying a buyer's premium instead of shlepping to dozens of shows and coin dealers....etc.

SQ collectors ?

Looks like gold and silver had a "Flash Crash" like equities did about 11 years ago: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gold-drops-silver-tumbles-u-235316172.html

Oh, ASE's.....I thought we were talking spot silver pricing. My mistake. So the premiums for silver are dissipating ?

The silver sold at a premium of about 150-200%. The gold sold at a premium of 100-150% or so. Even paying secondary prices at shows or online, you are talking about premiums to underlying metal content of maybe 300-500%. In 1979-80 and 1988-90....you had premiums of 1,000-1,500%...and more !!

I think you misunderstood me. One of the reasons I enjoy collecting Saints is the history behind the coins and the stories associated with each type (circulated or not, year or mint mark, era of striking and use in commerce, etc.). To me, that's a reason to want to own gold coins in general and Saints in particular....NOT a marketing ploy to get me to "pay up" or perpetuate a pricing bubble. Similarly, I would pay up to get an L88 or Big Block 427 Corvette as symbolic of the 1960's musclecar era. I would NOT pay up for a Ford Pinto or Yugo as symbolic of the 1970's or 1980's. Junk is still junk !! I think this is why the Mickey Mantle 1952 Topps Rookie Card has done so well the last 10 years after basically flatlining for many years. It tripled in price from 1990-2010....then has gone up 20-30 fold in the last 10 years. Partly it's the new grading, but mostly it's lots of people who grew up with baseball and/or Mickey Mantle and associate the card with the Golden Era of Baseball and the idyllic 1950's America. And lots of those people now have Big $$$ to spend on such a card. Conversely, unless you know alot about American monetary history or are a numismatist, you are unlikely to know about Americna coinage, including Morgans and Saints. For me, I was a bullion investor first and then learned about the coins from American's past.

I have to believe that just like stamps, that the basic American coin collecting targets that kids and later adults bought will suffer a lack of demand going forward. And certainly no foreign demand for them. However, I think that Morgans (silver) and Saints/Liberty's (gold) can rise alongside their underlying metallic content and count on some foreign buying support for some coins in some grades. That PCGS 3000 index was clearly associated with 2 price bubbles in the last 50 years. Personally, I'd be surprised to see a 3rd bubble but I don't discount rising prices for some types like I listed above. In fact, during the 1988-90 coin bubble, MS-65 common Saints traded for 8-10x the underlying gold content; today that would translate into a price of $15,000 or more. So if you get a move in the gold price -- whether it's 20% from here or 50% -- you could easily see the generic benchmark for Saint-Gaudens $20 Double Eagles at $4,000 - $5,000 or more (up from about $2,500 or so) -- and they wouldn't be anywhere near the bubble-like nose-bleed territory of previous eras on a relative basis.

(1) Lots of different forces. Some are buying coins for bullion purposes...some bullion + numismatic (think high-quality generic Saints)....some buying strictly numismatic (Saints > $5,000 and pennies/nickles/dimes/quarters/Morgans where the metallic content is close to nil relative to the coin's cost). Clearly, most buyers are representatives of large major metropolitan, East Coast cities. They are found across the country -- just in smaller quantities. You still have some people into collecting regularly circulated American coinage, though not in the numbers of the past. And moderns, like the State Quarters program and stuff like that. (2) I think it is growing -- mostly beause of online. But the only way to be 100% sure is to do an apples-to-apples comparison of coin shows that existed 40 years ago and compare to today (FUN, Long Beach, ANA). Ditto for smaller regional and/or local shows. Ditto for dealers businesses -- though this can also be a beggar-they-neighbor situation with larger, more established dealers getting business from weaker or closeout businesses folding. But online....Heritage, Stacks, GC, even Ebay and other niche dealers -- lot more people on those platforms than 3 or 5 or 10 or even 20 years ago. I myself have been an on-again, off-again collector but a bit more stronger the last 20 years. I only started buying from Ebay about 10-12 years ago.....HA and others in the last 2 years or so. As for Long Beach.....from what I have been told/seen, FUN has been GROWING the last few years and the last few decades. But that might be a function of the timing (January) and locale (Florida) which counts as a nice change of venue for most of the country trapped in cold Winter. As other shows fold or lose relevance, some of this attendance might goto FUN or other big nationals or regionals. I hear Whitman Baltimore (November) and Bay State Massachussets (April) are both doing nicely. Coins took off in 1979-80 and again 1988-1990. You had 2 major bubbles....prices rose in the 1970's as gold and silver each went up over 20-fold....they dragged up EVERYTHING that kids and adults had collected since World War II. Collections that had cost a few hundred bucks were now suddenly worth thousands....collections that cost thousands were now worth hundreds of thousands. Many bought MORE stuff at the inflated prices. The 1988-90 bubble was accentuated by expectations of Wall Street $$$ coming in.....the emergence of the TPGs (PCGS, NGC)....and a fear following the 1987 Stock Market Crash. (3) Get people excited about the HISTORY of coins and not as INVESTMENTS or SPECULATIONS. Having said that, watch show attendance triple or quadruple in the next few years once coins get hot again if/when gold crosses $3,000 an ounce and silver hits $50/oz. and crytpos tank or are severely regulated. The X-factor with Robinhood and coin collecting is that 25 or 50 years ago, when you bought into a bubble or lost your shirt, you were alone. Today, you have the power of the Internet to learn and commiserate. Does that lead to longer staying power ? Maybe.

Silver is down about $0.70 overnight or so, about 2.3%. Gold is matching it down about $40 to just over $1,700. But it's a $100 drop in 2 days for gold.

It's probably an overreaction to the NFP report on Friday with bond yields higher.

This could all be a result of restricted supply, ala OPEC in the 1970's. Once the graders start to increase the supply, unless demand increases, prices will collapse. What would happen to the price of a 1927-D (worth about $2 MM right now in MS-65) with about 10 publicly traded....if you knew that 2 or 3 a year for the next 5 years would be coming onto the market once PCGS and NGC caught up ?