investing in modern coins

[e1cnr]

I see nothing wrong with investing in moderns, as long as it is not for conditional rarities that have a population in the millions and there are probably millions that have not been seen by the people who know enough about the coin / series to be able to tell that the coin is a potential top pop.

 

Many dealers consider moderns anything younger than them, and do not carry those series as for most coins, the prices are too low to mess with. This has made a great opportunity for the few dealers who specialize in clad.

[cladking]

There's a guy on one of the others coin forums who thinks that anything minted after 800 AD is "modern".

 

The definition is too variable to answer that question. Besides, what's "modern" today will not be considered "modern" 40 years from now. I wonder if when 100 years have passed since the last Ike dollar was minted if people will still call them "modern".

 

Perspective is a funny thing. A few years ago I thought ancient coins were very very old. But now days I think in terms of the pyramids as being just a little bit new fangled. The first coins arose after many centuries of confusion so they can't be anything but "modern".

 

Language has to be expressive of something and we need to define terms such that they reflect reality. The reality is the biggest change in coins is in terms of perception; people collected coins up until 1964 and then they quit. It doesn't really matter that much why they quit or that it was caused intentionally by the government. The only thing that matters is people quit collecting coins and the term "modern" certainly fits well for coins that have been made more recently and treated differently. It has nothing to do with silver really because people quit collecting nickels too which were unchanged (except for dating).

 

Of course if we call moderns coins made after 1964 we have to remember that this occured in different times in different countries. Moderns in some countries start in 1946 and some in 1968. So it may well be legitimate to call moderns to be coins made after WW II and variable by country. That's the nature of the real world; it never really wants to fit names or definitions. It is not beholden to language and all events and processes are impossibly complicated.

 

So, I don't really disagree with anyone here except that we all know a lot of the demand on any coin has some aspect of "investment". We can advise people of the danger of investing in coins until we're blue in the face but many are going to be motivated by the desire to make a profit. This happens because people see spectacular gains and desire to be "in on" the next one to explode higher. They simply don't understand that the determination of the most likely coin to explode is more likely to be properly predicted by a collector than an investor. They don't understand that a collector will not only see unrecognized rarity but know it's current value and have a better chance of locating it. This means a lot of money going into coins is "soft money". No not because it belongs to those with soft heads but because it will pull out of the market at the first scare and this usually occurs periodically when all those investors buying the same coins start getting tired of waiting for their massive profits. I believe modern coins are the best place for collectors. I believe this not only because rarity can be had for a song in many cases but because there isn't a lot of soft money distorting prices and the market. Yes, it's quite true that moderns are a trap for investors but they are the happy hunting ground for collectors. And it is in moderns that the most explosive growth is occuring and this will continue for another couple generations in all probability.

 

Of course moderns aren't for everyone. Some people would rather hunt moose in Maine and others something exotic in the wildest part of Africa. To each his own.