Since 2002, Blanchard has been telling our clients that the price of gold was going up – a lot. We believe that the current bull market will end only when gold surpasses it’s old high of $850. In today’s dollars, that would mean a price of more than $2000 per ounce! We’ve still got a long way to go.

During this same period, Blanchard has been recommending rare coins as part of our clients’ portfolios, since they are a better hedge than gold, a better investment, and offer more opportunities for windfall profits. We recommend rare coins even more strongly today, because of an historical relationship between gold and rare coins which takes much of the guesswork out of investing in rare coins.

Although rare coins are positively correlated with gold, price increases lag behind those of gold. When gold goes up, rare coins follow, and eventually go up much more than gold. Over the years, that lag has provided an early warning signal of impending bull markets and has produced periodic windfall profits for knowledgeable investors.

For example, some years ago, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Fidelity Investments, the world’s largest mutual fund company, was one of the principal investors in a partnership that invested in rare U.S. coins. The partnership was liquidated approximately four years later at a profit of more than 500%. More recently, and on a much bigger scale, an affiliate of Kidder Peabody and Company was the General Partner of a fund which was organized to achieve capital appreciation through buying and selling rare U.S. coins. Rare coin prices went up more than 100% within the year. Some coins tripled in value - and more.

Independent reports and indices, including those published by sources as diverse as Solomon Brothers, Inc., The Wall Street Journal, Consumer’s Digest, GE Private Asset Management, Inc., and numerous auction houses, confirm the fact that portfolios of rare coins have had high rates of appreciation. The total value of all certified U.S. coins is less than $10 billion and only a very small number of the rare coins in existence are actually for sale at any given point in time. As a result, a relatively small amount of money can move the entire market substantially.

Rare coins not only follow gold, but surpass gold. Bull markets in rare coins always occur during or after periods of rising gold prices, but reliable, independent reports show that average annual returns on rare coins have historically been more than 300% greater than the returns on gold bullion. Read Full Blanchard Report Here

By Mike Thorne, Coins Magazine

In Helpful Hints for Enjoying Coin Collecting, Bill Fivaz defines “cherrypick” as follows: “to purchase a coin with a variety on it (unbeknownst to the seller) for the normal price of the coin. The variety usually makes it more collectable or valuable. This term may also apply to purchasing an undergraded coin at the lower price.”

This is something we all want to do, right? Whether we’re buying a new car, groceries at a neighborhood store, or coins at a coin show, we all want to get a bargain. Nobody wants to pay full retail price for anything anymore.

So how is this possible in the case of rare coins? How can you buy desirable coins for bargain prices? The answer, in a word, is knowledge. In order to be able to spot a coin that’s under appreciated and thus underpriced, you need to know more about it (its unrecognized variety, its true grade) than the seller.

Unfortunately, I know of no courses you can take to acquire this knowledge, and you’re unlikely to find someone who will mentor you in this area. Painful as it may sound to those of you who didn’t (or don’t) like studying and homework, that’s what it’s going to take for you to gain the knowledge you need to cherrypick successfully. For openers, you’re going to have to acquire a numismatic library and read and study it diligently.

But what books should be in your library in order for you to learn to cherrypick? Obviously, I need to be much more specific.

To begin, I would advise you to buy copies of each of the major grading guides. These would include the The Official American Numismatic Association Grading Standards for United States Coins, (6th edition), New Photograde, and Official Guide to Coin Grading and Counterfeit Detection (2nd edition). Of course, it should go without saying that you need to study each of these books thoroughly, paying particular attention to the coin series in which you’re most interested.

Read Full Numismaster Article Here

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…)

By Jeff Starck for Coin World

Collectors interested in United States copper large cents, issued from 1793 through 1857, have numerous ways to collect coins representing each of the six types that constitute the production.

Some coin rarities aren’t as rare as many collectors may have been led to believe.

An 1804 silver dollar is but one coin that collectors of most means should be able to afford.

Skeptics may arise, but bear with us. Collectors desiring a real, historical 1804 silver dollar struck in the Americas, and not one of the myriad copies, can find them at relatively affordable rates.

The same can be said for the elusive 1943 copper cent struck by the U.S. Mint.

Much like a politician’s linguistic two-step, our wording is the key to this particular riddle: if you look slightly south, to Mexico, you can collect a silver dollar, of absolute North American origin, struck in 1804.

As for 1943 copper cents struck by the U.S. Mint, among the many world coins struck at the U.S. Mint in 1943 are cent (or centavo) coins, from five different countries ranging from Cuba to Surinam (Netherlands Guiana).

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