What is the Rare Coin Market?

[World Colonial]

The coins you used as examples, I think they are "neat" also even though I have no intention of ever buying them. I like all three of them but still consider each of them relatvely overpriced. I consider them overpriced yet still understand why others like them even if I do not "get it". It is ultimately a matter of personal preference.

 

On your last comment though, I guess we will just agree to disagree, at least partly. Since numismatics is about the collector, yes I can see that demand in and itself has some significance. Not otherwise though because by this reasoning, coins with greater demand and therefore, higher prices can be implied to be more significant than those which cost a lot less, maybe not all of the time but usually.

 

In my view, there are different levels of significance and I did not mean that quote you used initially in a literal sense. I should have said that the most significant thing with many of these coins appears to be the price, which you may also not believe.

 

Simply because a coin is not rare certainly does not mean it cannot concurrently be significant. I consider many such coins both in the US and elsewhere that are common to be so.

 

The point I was really trying to make with a disproportionate number of the more expensive coins that are part of the "rare coin market" is that there is a lot more "hype" than substance in comparing the price of the coin to its merits.

 

Some of these in my opinion border on the absurd. In one particular instance, I read an article where a prominent member of the numismatic community supposedly made a claim about the 1907 "normal edge" NGC PR-67 eagle which sold for $2.15 million a few years ago. Apparently from this purported claim, we are supposed to believe that a pedigree which includes a prior US Mint director is so compelling that this coin should sell for as much as $15 million 10 years from now.

 

All I can say is that if this is supposed to be significant and justify its current much less future higher price, I must not have "received the memo". My response to that is "So what?" because that is a trivial level of significance. Most collectors not only have never heard of this long dead Mint director, if the coin was not in the Red Book, they possibly never would have heard of the coin either. The other and most likely reason most who do know about it is because of its price.