Past coin price and performance?

General discussions about canadian coins.
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newinvestor23
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Oct 18, 2009 1:45 pm
Location: Canada

Past coin price and performance?

Post by newinvestor23 » Sun Oct 18, 2009 1:54 pm

Hi,

I am new to coin investing, just getting into it. I invest in traditional means, stocks, got some gold coins (for bullion) but I would like to start collecting coins.
I was wondering where I can find past coin price or values? In charts or lists or anything?
For instance, if I was to buy rare coin that is AU-55 now, what was the price 2 years ago, 5 years ago? 10 years ago?
I know history is not always a past indicator of the future, but being new, I do not know how these coins will rise in the future and I just want to get a sense of ROI.
I plan to hold these coins for a while, so I am not worried about short term prices really.
Thanks again and I look forward to reading these forums
newinvestor

mkb
Posts: 94
Joined: Wed Sep 03, 2008 6:57 pm
Location: California

Post by mkb » Mon Oct 19, 2009 12:27 pm

Being successful at investing in coins takes a decent amount of work. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. That said, to track price history, buy some current price guides and some older ones from 10 to 30 years ago. They will give you an idea of how prices changed. But things are always being refined. The first big refinement was improved grading and recognition of eye appeal. The current big refinement is the identification of varieties, some of which have done very well. As a general comment, buy what is rare (less than 100) or very scarce (less than 1000). And there are three ways to do this:

1. grade (very high grade coins are all rare even though millions may exist)
2. availability (how many remain is more important than how many were minted)
3. variety (usually very few means tight demand)

In all of this, you need to gauge collector interest. Just because a coin is rare, if the coin is unappealing, no one will want it.

Overall, Victorian era coinage has done the best. There is very little in high grade, very little has survived (perhaps about 1% of the original mintage for some issues to as low as 0.5% for others), and there are many varieties within the series.

Be prepared to build a decent library on coins. Its easy to spend on the order of $1000 for suitable reference material. Also, get the appropriate tools such as a 10x to 15x loupe, a 10x to 30x stereo/zoom microscope, a digital scale (down to .01g), and so on.

And be prepared to read a lot on sites such as this.

Note that only a very small percentage of folks go the distance on developing the necessary skills to be successful at investing in coins, but if you do, you will know what is bargain is and what is not, and be able to make the majority of your purchases successful ones.

TBH
Posts: 244
Joined: Thu Oct 16, 2008 12:09 am
Location: sunshine coast BC

Post by TBH » Mon Oct 19, 2009 11:04 pm

Buy the best coin you can afford,and hope some future investor has deeper pockets.That's the way it works until you put in a lot of time and effort.

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