By Kathleen Duncan for Pinnacle-Rarities

That is the question. The Collector’s Acceptance Corporation was founded by John Albanese, one of the industry’s top experts. His goal is to address the problem of low-end certified coins dragging down the bid levels. While PCGS and NGC do an excellent job, both have been grading coins for over 20 years. Inconsistencies are inevitable, resulting in coins that probably shouldn’t be in their stated holder. These problem coins are difficult to sell, becoming a large percentage of the available product on the market and suppressing bid levels. For example, if a Barber 50c in PCGS PR67 sells in auction for $5000, it probably is not a particularly pleasing coin, but CCDN (AKA the Bluesheet) picks up this bid. We would probably charge over $7500 for an attractive and properly graded PR67.

Are some coins worth 50% more than others in the same holder?
Yes. One of CAC’s goals is to establish a market for those premium quality coins and post bids for coins with their sticker of approval. PCGS and NGC are of equal value, if CAC approved.

Should you purchase CAC coins exclusively?
No. This would unnecessarily limit your buying options, as only a small percentage of the coins graded by PCGS and NGC (the two services CAC recognizes) have been submitted. Also consider CAC is offering an opinion, just like PCGS and NGC have done. If you had different numismatic experts grading at CAC, would different coins get approved? Absolutely. A particular mark or variety of toning may disturb some numismatic experts and not others. Grading is exceptionally subjective, and collecting is a highly personal experience. There is simply no substitute for viewing the coin in hand.

Should you send your coins to CAC?
Maybe. If you are planning on selling them at auction, it’s not a bad idea. Due to the number of online and phone bidders, a CAC approved coin may realize a higher price than an equally nice non-CAC one. This seems especially true of NGC material. If you are planning on selling them privately, not unless the dealer you work with will pay more for CAC approved coins. For most dealers this is not the case. If selling is not in your immediate plans, reassess the market in the future. If CAC is a dominant market factor, their policies or stickers or any number of factors may have changed. (more…)

I had an interesting conversation with another coin dealer the other day. We were discussing what we are buying (and not buying) right now and he mentioned to me that, for the last few years, he has been primarily focused on buying only the key date coins in all series, even in such esoteric areas as Charlotte and Dahlonega gold.

Focusing on keys has been a great strategy in mainstream series such as Barber coins or Morgan dollars. Issues like the 1901-S quarter and the 1893-S dollar have clearly outperformed the rest of the market during the last six to nine years. This got me to thinking: is this performance also the same in the market areas in which I specialize? To determine this I decided to select a small group of key dates from each series and to then compare them with a “generic” date as a baseline. The results are interesting.

The first item I chose was the ever-popular 1861-D gold dollar. As a generic comparison, I selected an 1859-D gold dollar. The former is the key Type Three issue from this mint while the latter is one of the more common dates.

In June 2000 Heritage auctioned a PCGS AU55 example of the 1861-D gold dollar for $12,075. Today, a similarly graded 1861-D would probably fetch over $30,000. I think it’s a safe bet to say that this issue has at least doubled—if not tripled—in value since the beginning of the decade.

In comparison, an AU55 example of the 1859-D gold dollar in AU55 would bring around $3,750-4,000 at auction today. In looking back at auction records from the 2000-2002 era, I noted at least three AU55 coins selling for $3,000-3,300. The price growth of the 1859-D gold dollar has been marginal at best. This does not totally surprise me, given that the Dahlonega market is very collector-oriented and that this sort of market is generally skewed towards rare dates or “neat” specific coins.

(NOTE: An important factor that I am not going to delve deeply into here is gradeflation. Even though the 1859-D gold dollar in AU55 appears to have experienced little price growth in the last decade, it is likely that coins sold as AU55 in 2002 are, by today’s standards, at least AU58; if not better. Gradeflation is, for many more common coins, what has caused the greatest amount of price increases). (more…)

From Wayne Sayles Blog Ancient Coin Collecting

Anyone who follows the media coverage of cultural property issues has hopefully been inoculated against IAB (infectuous archaeological bias). A prime example of how twisted the coverage can get is shared with us by Associated Press in a June 3o, 2008 article by Maamoun Youssef titled “Egypt retrieves ancient relief in London“. The sub title is “Egypt retrieves a 2,500-year-old stone relief from Bonhams auction house in London”, Here is Paragraph 1:

“CAIRO, Egypt (AP) — Egypt retrieved a 2,500-year-old limestone relief from London after its sale was blocked by Bonhams auction house because it had been looted from a pharaoh’s tomb, Egypt’s antiquities authority said Monday. A team of Egyptian archaeologists traveled to Britain to retrieve the artifact, which bears hieroglyphic text engraved in six rows and a cartouche of an ancient Egyptian queen, Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities said in a statement.”

Now what sort of image does that conjure up? The only way I can read this is that Egypt’s Supreme Archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, forced Bonhams to turn over an artifact that Egypt claims is looted. One might just stop reading at that point—and indeed many do. Anyone in public relations or advertising knows that the first paragraph is often your only shot at the reader. Well, I did read on and much to my surprise I find that it was actually a staff member at the Metropolitan Museum in New York who alerted Bonhams about the piece and it was Bonhams who voluntarily withdrew the item before the sale.

Yes, it seems incredible doesn’t it! The same Metropolitan Museum that is getting slammed almost daily it seems by archaeologists and retentionist nations is protecting the interests of Egypt—the most aggressive cultural property nationalist in the universe (well, alright, some might have other candidates for that position). (more…)

By: Peter J. Cooper

Investors are being won over to the case for precious metals on a daily basis, and the case against this asset class is also weakening by the day. Time then to consider how to gear up to achieve maximum returns in this asset class, albeit with higher risk.

With the UK’s second largest bank, Royal Bank of Scotland predicting a stock market and credit crash within the next three months, it is hardly surprising that the bank’s latest fund for expatriates has a heavy weighting for gold. The ongoing geopolitical tensions between Israel and Iran are also reason enough for nervous investors to seek refuge in this traditional safe haven asset.

Royal Bank of Scotland has given gold a 25 per cent weighting in its latest Autopilot capital guaranteed deposit account targeted at UAE expatriate customers. Performance is weighted equally across four sectors: emerging equities, developed equities, property and gold. The new fund will track performance of the four sectors when rising, and divert to cash when a falling trend is identified, so gold could be its sole investment class.

The role of gold in this new account is bound to raise eyebrows and comes as the bank is warning customers to expect turmoil in equity and credit markets over the next three months, an unusal statement for the second largest UK bank. Time indeed for UAE investors to consider a little diversification into precious metals.

This column has recently presented quite a detailed case for investment in gold and silver both on the grounds of the supply and demand imbalance in the market, and because speculative interest is likely to build in an increasingly inflationary global economic environment.

Buying bullion or coins and storing them is one approach. But what if investors want to gear up to achieve maximum leverage against the price movements that seem highly likely in gold and even more so in silver? (more…)