Revenant

As I've referenced recently, I've been sitting on and trying to accumulate some cash in my hobby budget to maybe buy a 1924 $20 double eagle in MS65 - my grandmother's birth year and now a newly 100-year-old coin. My grandmother would have been 100 years old in February if she were still alive. I finally got some things moved around and have saved enough that I now have almost $2600 in my hobby budget, and the coin, back in January, was going for about $2,500-2,600. But gold has moved up about $295/oz in the last 3 months and the coins are now going for about $2,900-3,000 now. I'll soon have about $2,800 available. If I wanted to pull the trigger on it and get the coin while not quite having enough to buy in in my hobby budget I think Shandy wouldn't give me a hard time about it. But I think I'm still just going to watch and wait a bit for now. I may regret it later if the price of gold keeps heading up in the near term, but I don't know that it's going to stay at these levels. The same people that have been predicting $3,000-5,000/oz for years are again going insane and screaming "buy now!" but, they've been saying this for quite a long time. Gold hit about $2,050 in 2020 and hit about that same level in 2022. $2,050 in 2020 is about $2,475 now. So it would seem that this may only be an adjustment for 4 years of inflation. And that is the inflation adjusted 2020 peak. We might (and probably will) see it peak and drop back again, just like it always tends to. Until this recent spike, it's been basically flat for 4 years. I looked up the all-in sustaining costs for some of the major gold miners and, they've gone up some, but they're still in the range of about $1,300-1,400 for most of the big ones, which is only up modestly from the $1,200-$1,300 it was a few years ago. This spike up might have some legs yet, and it does bother me to watch something I want getting more expensive, but I'm going to calm myself and wait a bit yet. The higher prices will inevitably bring more marginal production online with a lag, high prices always bring sellers onto the market, and spikes in demand spike premiums, which sour people on buying for a while. All of which will help reverse the trend. Because of some bonuses and other things going on I'll probably get to add another $1100 to my hobby budget in the next 4-6 months, in addition to the $200 a month I normally get for my discretionary spending. And that also means that, barring a continued huge spike up, I might be able to get the double eagle and maybe one other thing - maybe a coin from Sweden to add to my old, world gold set. On the other hand, maybe it's time to go for something from Mexico now that I have Venezuelan gold. Or maybe it's time to try to get some of those Zimbabwean bullion coins. I guess we'll see how it all goes.

Interestingly, numista does suggest the 2014 is much more common, but you'll nice the 2017 is marked as being worth even less. Because even in 2014, but certainly by 2017 these things were just being grabbed up by the bulk to sell to collectors. So I wouldn't put it past someone to just see a low mintage and slap some insane value on it, but a relatively low mintage does not mean it's rare with these things. 🙄

I hear you, but this isn't a situation like having a Mercury Dime slot in a US type set where you could have something like a 1916 vs a dirt common date. There's no significant difference in rarity or desirability of the 2014 vs the 2017. I have several of each, including a 2017 that I seriously considered grading last year but I chose not to because I was already sending in a lot and I wasn't sufficiently convinced that that 2017 would beat the MS66 I had on my 2014 by more than maybe a point, so I chose not to send it. If they don't change this scoring, I'm probably just going to send in that 2017 with some Turtle coins in June. But, while that would put me back in competition, it still leaves us with a situation where that one coin just ruins the entire set. That one coin in MS64 is now worth more than 95% complete set in fairly high grade, and it's worth more by a factor of 6, even with me having that MS69 $2 Bond coin. Without that MS69 a 95% complete set loses to that 1 coin by about 9:1. That completely fails to reflect the relative rarity and desirability of different coins in that set. The 1997 $2 coin is FAR harder to get in good condition than the 2017 50C. They give my 1997 $2 in MS64... a whooping 16 points, currently. Again, that score is just... silly.

Well, I've been a bit quiet lately because I've been hoarding my cash and working on some other things, but I thought I'd pop in and check things out. I got quite a shock when I saw this: I've said before that I thought that set was strong enough that it had a good chance of holding up over time, so this immediately got my attention and then I see this: I've been aware that Xanno was trying to complete his set and he was rapidly filling his in, but how is it even possible that he's suddenly beating me by a factor of about 6 and why is my 100% complete set now at 95%...??? Well... Apparently Xanno graded and added 2017 50 cent bond coin and so they had to add that as an eligible coin in the slot... except they apparently did this by disallowing the 2014 from the slot, even though it clearly fits the slot, kicked my MS66 out, and gave his MS64 coin a point value that makes most of my gold coins blush... 3,647 points? I mean... My MS69 $2 Bond coin only gets 205. 3,647 points? Someone was smoking something... I accept no other explanation. April 2nd... Someone was a little late, but this looks like a joke. As you might imagine... I've put in a request to get my 50C back in... and if they don't change that score, I'm going to be asking for that too. That score makes the rest of the set completely irrelevant. I mean... April 2nd was Tuesday. You can't even blame this on a case of the Monday's or a Friday afternoon. And the eclipse wasn't until the 8th so they couldn't have blinded themselves by this point... All in good fun. I mostly find this so insane it's funny, but I wanted to remark on it and preserve it for future laughs. Edit: They added mine back, but left it at 20 points and left his at 3,600... I've requested the score change... I mean... really???

After my mother-in-law got me an MS70 2013 Koala, that got me looking at the set again. My wife got me the 2014 and 2016 in MS70 coins as part of my anniversary present a couple of weeks ago. Around the same time I scored pretty good deals on the 2019 and 2022 coins... As a funny aside, entered in the 2022 coin this morning, and I saw the pictures entered in the data base for the coin... that... doesn't quite look right... So that leaves me just needing to get the 2015, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2023, and (soon) 2024 to bring that set back up to being 100% complete for the first time in years. I started the set back in 2008 and 2009 and won "Best in Category" in it for those years (along with a bunch of other people), but I haven't had the set caught up and complete in... 15 years. Wow. Time has flown... But I'm having fun just making some low-effort pick-ups when I find one at a reasonable deal. I think I'll keep looking and slowly trying to get the remaining coins over the next 9 months or so as I find them at attractive prices. "Low-effort" might seem kind of blah / harsh but... when you compare buying large lots of raw coins, searching through them, and submitting yourself to just picking up pre-graded MS70s for barely more than the price of the silver + grading... it's a different process. No dig to those that do this most of the time or exclusively in their collecting, but it's a different process and... it's just easier. On another front, because my collecting efforts haven't been very cost-heavy the last year or so - in part because past major award wins have subsidized the grading and building of some of my last few project sets - I'm sitting on more hobby money than I've had in a while - pushing $2,000 - and I'm seriously considering continuing to hoard some cash until I have the ~$2500 I'd need to buy an MS65 1924 Double Eagle. It'd be a large gold coin - the largest I'd own by a wide margin - and it's a Double Eagle, which I think is one of those "must haves" if you collect US coins. And 1924 would be for my grandmother's birth year. If I ever went for a 2nd one, I'd go for a 1920 - grandpa's birth year, my namesake. At the same time, not winning a major award this year and not having a $500 use-it-or-lose-it credit takes off the pressure to find / have things to submit and also frees me up to change my effort or where I spend my energy. I've been somewhat avoiding spending my time and budget on pre-graded stuff the last couple of years specifically because it doesn't help me with the goal of using / burning that credit. But I will probably be submitting something, because I'll get the $150 credit when my membership renews, and that will probably go towards some turtle coins. My step-father has discussed in the past the possibility of getting a non-1932 double eagle just to have one, just because neither of us see that 1932 double eagle in the cards. As part of this I'm realizing that a gift card that my brother-in-law gave me for my birthday has a slightly higher balance than I'd anticipated, and I'm discussing / considering with my wife spending that on more household expenses and rolling the equivalent cash into my budget fun / hobby money to get closer to that $2,500. Another one of the big ticket items that's kind of a soft-entry in my list of wants would be buying a new camera body - a mirrorless one this time - to replace my D600/D610. I've discussed / joked in the past that a double eagle could be my wife's 10th anniversary present to me. Maybe if I buy the coin, she could do that herself in 10 years. I guess we'll see how it all works out.

Pulling these from change, I'm sure they would be / seem rare in the same way I always thought it was cool when I found Canadian and Mexican coins mixed in with my change as a kid - the novelty made me not care about the fact that the store had basically cheated me by carelessly passing them on to me. I saved most of them. I still have a lot of coins I got that way... but... There's circumstantially "rare," legitimately "rare," and then there's "valuable."

The obvious one that most of us are going to know and recognize on the Boards is Coin928 - Congrats to him - but we also have a double-win for Deposito I think (and I feel like maybe he's been on the boards in the past, but maybe I'm remembering wrong) and we also have a win from Electric Peak. So, a few recognizable names there. Congrats to all of them and the others we don't know.

Ultimately, if serves any purpose, I suspect the NGCX scale is only going to serve to create market confusion among casuals and newbies and I don't think it will bring new people in. I honestly wonder if this hobby really has any legs left because most people my age and younger aren't into it and all I ever seem to see is people saying, "My grandpa died and gave me this. How much is it worth" (while looking to cash out on it probably.) We need to bring in a newer generation, and I respect the attempt, but I don't think this is the way to do it.

Yes, they ditched the cards and the last time we got the jab the Dr told us that it was now considered endemic and we were going to just have annual CoVID shots now to go with the flu shots. Such a joy. The world keeps turning and finding ways to try to kill us.

To this I would add, White Balance / White balancing can be tricky when you don't have a grey / white object in the shot for calibrating on.

As a ChemE, I'd always heard the term "noble metals" applied to metals that generally don't rust or tarnish. It's also sometimes funny to me to think that aluminum was once considered semi-precious, or at least valuable, because for a time it was very hard to produce / separate metallic aluminum. Then they found a cheap way to do it and all of a sudden you get aluminum cans instead of tin cans. But it was surprising and funny to find Italian coins from the ~1950s made out of Aluminum.

My reaction to my latest booster was pretty terrible at the injection site. Same for my son and Mother-in-law. I was quite shocked. I had redness for days in that spot and the skin was hot to the touch.

About 4 years ago my Mother-in-Law went to New York and, while she was there, she stopped by the Mint in Philadelphia and bought me a proof SAE and a 2019 Birth Year set for our then new baby, Sam. I hadn't really been aware that these were a thing, so I hadn't gotten one when Ben was born, and, of course, in 2019, they were sold out of 2016. I've kept an eye out on eBay for the last few years but 2016 seems to be a harder-than-most year for these sets and if one ever comes up the seller is usually asking something silly for it like $125-150. About a week ago one came up for bid with a starting bid of about $41.25. I was hoping this would be a good chance to go for one at a more reasonable price, but there were several other people watching it and it ended up going for $96.00. I'm just not willing to spend that much on it, in part because, while I think Ben MIGHT like having one and might be jealous of Sam having one, I don't expect him to be THAT into it and for $100 I think there are other things I'd rather get him and other things he'd rather have. So, for now, I passed and I'll continue to watch and wait. I have an MS70 1/4th oz gold eagle for both boy's birthyears. I've also considered going back and trying to get each of them a 1/10th oz. While more expensive than $100, that's still on the list of things I'd rather get him / them if I'm going to be dropping $100+ on something.

I hope everyone on here had a Good Christmas a few days ago and is looking forward to a good New Year's Eve and New Years Day. We'll be hosting a New Year's Eve party this year because Ben really liked it that one year and he wants one. From a coin collecting standpoint this year was a little more muted than last year - Shandy got me a 2023 MS70 Panda, surprising me after head-faking with the Koalas. I also got Choya a 1982-D Half dollar to fill in a hole in one of the year-sets we started years ago. That was a surprise for him because he claims that he'd been looking recently and hadn't seen anything on offer. I looked and had seen several things, but it's entirely possible that what I was willing to spend isn't the same thing as what he was willing to spend. Shandy also did me a HUGE favor on a non-coin collecting front and bought me a padded foam case for storing some of the minis I've been collecting and trying to slowly paint this year. It amuses me to think that my old High School Art Teachers, if they're still around and kicking somewhere, would probably be happy to see me still painting and doing things with art supplies into my mid- and soon to be late-30s. Lately I've continued working on a project of pink and purple mechs that I'm painting for Shandy: My mother-in-law gave me a beefier version of my magnifying lamp that I can clamp onto my table and, when I get to do this stuff in my office, this will be doing like it's smaller brother and doing double-duty for coins and mini-painting... But I need to put it together... Shouldn't be too hard. Shandy meanwhile is taking up crochete, and so there are times now when I'll be sitting and painting and she'll be working with yarn. I'm quietly (for now) seeing if I can pull something off for Ben. If I pull it off, I'll probably be posting about it soon. We'll see on that front, but I never talk about it until it's done on these things.

Sounds like my initial impression was correct though, which is kinda cool.

Good to know. Though I like the idea of having and seeing both. If my pictures and comments on the Venezuelan coins are any indication, I think that die and strike flaws can be interesting and add a little character. Of course, some of those Venezuelan coins have a lot of "character."

Posting this a little late, but I thought I'd say "Happy Thanksgiving" to everyone. I found myself remembering a recent conversation with Ben, where he was wondering when he'd get his own cell phone (recall: he is 7), and we thought he'd probably get one in a few years, maybe as he's getting into middle school and starting to do things for school and such without us around or with him more, but we also pointed out that this would be subject to us having the money / funds available at the time for him to have a cell phone and pay the plan on it. We pointed out that it's always possible to have lean times and he just kind of shrugged that off and was like, "but that's not going to happen." Oh, how I wish I could share his confidence! He's too young to remember the year I didn't have a job. He's still really too young I think to remember much of the time before 2021, before his mother went back to work, and that was the point when we finally really got comfortable again - when we had 2 incomes again. Before that, we were making it, but we had to be more careful with the budget than we have been the last couple of years. But that was something I just had to think about and laugh about on Thanksgiving. "Yes, lean times do come. But they're not here right now, and that's something to be grateful for. And we have savings and a buffer to help us when lean times do come. And that's something else to be grateful for." On another note, I did manage to image the new 3P and 6P coins, and image the recent additions to my modern Italian projects. I thought I'd call out the results with the 3P coins. They're copper-nickel coins, so, perhaps unsurprisingly, they tone in a manner similar to what you see with some old US Nickels. There's a pretty major difference between the level of detail in the hair on the 1955 vs the 1957. I don't know if this is a die state issue or a strike quality issue. Were the details missing from the die at that point or did the coin just not get hit hard enough to transfer them? Overall, looking at the rest of the coin, I think the strike was solid but the die just didn't have the details to transfer. Here's a 6P reverse, just to share how the Leopard looks:

Yes. Stalin did a good job of making sure there'd be conflict and Russia has benefitted from keeping that going to make sure that they remain the power and the major influence and necessary party in much of the region. I suspect they might live to regret that though as they will probably soon live in a very chaotic region that they no longer have the muscle to ride herd over. Thanks for the heads up on that. I've been considering some of those 50 pence pieces. May yet make it happen. I'll still considering it.

One of the predictable outcomes of me starting to work more seriously on a collection / set of coins with a turtle theme is that its going to have me branching out into some more things and giving me extra opportunities to digress into, "Hey! Look at this thing I just found!" I recently found a seller offering 4 of these coins from that feature a sea turtle. I ordered all 4 of the ones they had listed. When those came in and looked great, and I saw the seller had listed 3 more, I ordered those too, just to have several to look at and for some extras. I have to say, it was a little jarring to see the old hammer and sickle on a coin dated 2018 - 27 years after the fall of the USSR. And that whole design looks very very anachronistically soviet. Moldova is a very small country stuck between Ukraine and Romania and it's right next to the port of Odesa. It has about 2.5 Million people. But as I read more, I've found that this coin doesn't actually come from Moldova. There's an even smaller, unrecognized, breakaway state called Transnistria that tried to break away during the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. The Moldovan government has not had control or influence over the area since a ceasefire agreement was made to effectively end the Transnistria War in July 1992, and Transnistria (the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic) has its own president. The currency of Moldova is the "Leu" and this coin is denominated in Roubles. Transnistria dropped "Soviet" from their name in 1991 and nominally abandoned the socialist ideology... but apparently not the symbolism and iconography, if this coin is any indication. Based on Numista, Transnistria puts out tons and tons of different 1 Rouble designs. It looks like in 2016 they did a whole "signs of the zodiac series" / set and in 2017 they had a "Coats of Arms of Transnistrian Cities series," several other commemorative issues, Chinese Zodiac issues... 2018 had their "Red Book of Transnistria" series, which included this coin, as well as a bunch of others. They put out a lot of these things.... a lot a lot. If you look at the coins of the "third rouble" (which has only existed since 2000) on Numista, they have 11 pages of coins / coin designs - 530 results. Venezuela has 136 results for the period from 1843-date. SO.... yeah. This little republic apparently likes to pump out limited-run, non-circulating coins with the best of them. A lot like Niue, but with nickel-plated steel instead of 1 oz silver coins. They are all non-circulating issues with limited mintages - this coin apparently has a mintage of only 50,000 - and they're all nickel-plated steel. So, an interesting little find to be sure.

Thought I’d throw some notes out about some other nonsense that probably doesn’t rate having a stand-alone post: I recently found myself wanting/ needing to get more boxes again for the first time since 2020, and I decided to do something a little different. I remembered that NGC had sold red boxes with gold lettering instead of the standard grey / silver ones with blue lettering. NGC is sold out of those but there are sellers on Amazon that have them for re-sale at reasonable-ish prices. Just for fun I picked up some of them and I’m going to be using those to store the Italian coins I’ve bought to build sets for Shandy. I took the two silver boxes these coins had been in back for myself. Because, yes, what started out a couple of random modern Italian purchases to win a few BiC certificates and ribbons and make a quirky romantic gesture to my wife has slowly grown over 2-3 years into something a little bigger and (maybe?) more impressive. After adding the 20 Kroner coin from Denmark and the 20 Bolivar coin to my collection of world gold coins, I'd been at a bit of a loss on where to go next the last year or two. But it recently occurred to me that I work for a Scottish company that is majority owned by a Swedish company. I have a British Sovereign, but I don't have any Swedish coins in this set, and there are Swedish 20 Kroner coins that clock in at about 0.25 ozt and 23 mm in diameter that, while on the larger side (with the British Sovereign), do match the theme for the set. So I may be looking into one of those soon / next. Another option I've consider is getting one or more of the 10 Gulden coins for the Netherlands that have the different Wilhelmia portraits - currently I only have the Wilhelm III coins. I've also considered trying to pick up one of the older 20 Franc designs from Switzerland from the late 1800s. Regarding getting back into the Koalas, having remembered that my MIL got me that Koala at my wife’s suggestion, remembering that this was one of my wife’s ideas for buying me presents, and remembering that Christmas, our Anniversary, and Valentine’s day are all coming up, I’ve decided NOT to touch the rest of the Koala’s that I “need” for now. I don’t know if my wife will buy more coins for me for this set for any or all of these occasions, but I’m going to leave it alone to leave the option open for her, just in case it ends up making her life easier.

Just means I'll have to be patient, or lucky.

Not sure. It has a lower mintage but not the lowest mintage of the series. But there are some things I'm seeing that suggest it could be rarer specifically in higher grades.

I had mentioned recently that I’d ordered a Rhodesian 3 Pence (1 1957 in MS66) to go with the Rhodesian Federation 6 pence my wife gave me for my Birthday. Shortly thereafter I saw that I seller I’ve used for a lot of my Rhodesian Federation coinage had a 1955 and a 1964 in MS66, so I put in some offers, which they accepted. After the coins spent a week in the Post Office, after the substitute carrier once again just put a slip of paper in the mailbox and didn’t come to the door, ring the doorbell, or see if I was actually home or not (or claimed to, since this time they didn’t even put the slip in our box and I had to print the tracking information of the website to take with me, but I’m digressing..) I was able to finally get out and get them picked up. I still need to image the coins, but, as promised in another recent entry, here we get “A Bouquet of Flame Lilies.” As my prior posts and my naming conventions for these tend to indicate, I tend to view all of these Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland sets as 1 project in multiple parts and I’ve taken advantage of the different short-run denominational sets to break it into smaller, easier to tackle chunks that I’ve mostly taken on one at a time. At least for now, unlike the penny and half penny sets, this one is not a #1 ranked set. There’s a 100% complete set in the category, and that’s hard to overcome with a 50% complete set. The other problem I’m going to face here is that the 1956 is a key-date from a points perspective. That coin is worth considerably more than most of the other dates in the set in similar grades so it’s going to be hard to take the top spot in the category without getting one of those. There currently are no pictures that are up to my normal standards for these coins and sets, but one thing that you might be able to notice from looking at NGC’s pictures of the coins in the slabs is that these 3 pence coins in particular are quite small. At 16.3 mm in diameter, they are a fair bit smaller than even a Roosevelt dime, which clocks in at 17.9 mm. The 6 pence coins come in a little larger than a US penny, with a diameter of 19.4 mm. I have to wonder a little WHY did they make these so small given that they’re not silver – they’re copper-nickel – so it wouldn’t have been an issue of keeping the silver value / melt value down.

I got some belated birthday presents from my wife’s family this weekend and I finally got to find out what my wife said when she said she’d given her mother her “other idea.” My MIL gave me an NGC MS70 2013 Koala. I had not been looking at these in a while and they weren’t on my wish list on eBay. She went into my registry sets and found a coin I didn’t have for a set and went on eBay and found it, in the right grade. The rest of the set up to this point has been all MS70s and they got an MS70. I’m quite surprised – she’s getting better at figuring this stuff out and finding stuff on her own. This does however make it more important to register things and have them in sets after I get them though. It would be sad to see her efforts wasted and fouled by an out-dated registry set. I’m not sure if it’s the byproduct of getting back into things here to finish the Austral set up and running after my submission came back but before the deadline or of getting a coin from my wife a few weeks ago, but I seem to have the bug back. I’d been building up quite a bit of money in my coin budget because I hadn’t been buying anything. I’d bought the raw Argentinian coins a while back and then nothing, and the raw coins were cheap. Now I’ve been buying a few things again – a few things for the 5 and 10 L sets, a couple of new Rhodesian coins… And it has me pumped to start making a few more posts here to talk about some of this. Also – miracle of miracles – I’ve updated that World Gold Coin custom set to include more coins and include some of the pertinent facts and design details. I know... It’s shocking. I think when I first got back into the registry a few years ago I bought a few more coins for the Koala set myself, but I dropped it because it was going to take too much of my budget at the time and I couldn’t do that and other things. Having gotten this 2013 Koala, I am seeing that several more of the 9 coins I’d need are on eBay in MS70 for only about $60-75. It wouldn’t be hard for me to get that set back to being much closer to being complete and up to date again for the first time in a very long time. We’ll see. I’ll be giving it some thought, and I may get a couple now / soon and a few more later. They are a nice group of coins and they’ve never been as impacted by the spotting issues. That’s why I played with them again a few years ago.

A couple of weeks ago I reached out to my Mom to ask her about the date ranges for the time when they were in Argentina, where they were, etc. I wanted to have a little more information so I could incorporate this into the set description for my Austral set: The coins I had gotten came mostly from my grandmother, giving me coins my grandfather had kept. However, apparently, not long after I reached out to my mother, my sister found this in a bunch of papers and other things my mother had given her: Inside she found these: My mother had her 14th birthday about a month after they got into Argentina, and her classmates had given her 1 Peso coins, which she put in this tin, and those coins have been in this tin for 50 years I guess. You can see "Birthday $" written on it. My sister returned the tin to my mother. Last night we were getting together to celebrate some birthdays - mine and my nephews. My mother had the tin. She gave each of her 4 grandchildren one of the pesos and then gave the tin and the rest of them to me. The coins are obviously circulated, but, more interestingly, they're about a 50/50 mix between the 1810-1960 1-year issue 150-years after the May Revolution coin (KM58) and the KM57 1 peso coin. But the coins are all from 1957, 1958, and 1960... Nothing from the later 1960s... and my mother got these in the 2nd half of 1970. And it didn't make sense for that to be a coincidence. It turns out, after a bit of looking, that Argentina last produced KM57 in 1962 and didn't produce 1 peso coins again until 1974 - years after they'd left the country. So, at the time my mother was in the country, the newest 1 peso coins that had been made were 8 years old. Odd to think about. I think I'll probably keep these in the tin for now. I could take them out and put them in flips but... The tin feels like part of the story for these.