Precious metals prices make it easier for acquisition

I know that is has been almost two weeks since my last post but between Michael Phelps run for 8 golds and life being pretty busy, I haven't had too much time to write. It also doesn't help that I'm having trouble with my online account for Coin World AND the post office where I live sucks and hasn't delivered an issue of Coin World in three weeks. Needless to say, I feel a bit out of touch.

On the other hand, I can follow precious metals prices pretty closely and have been doing just that. A week or two ago the US Mint suspended sales of their proof platinum coins as platinum showed no signs of a rebound. There was some thought on this issue that the coins might never be brought back but I find this scenario unlikely.

Oh, as a side note, I just went to the US Mint's homepage and saw that one of their front page links was to the uncirculated AE platinum coins. Clicking the link takes you to a page with no products. Now there is an oversight!

But my reason for going to the Mint's website was to determine when the proof platinum eagles went on sale. My answer: May 5. They were removed from the website at the end of June and returned at the end of July before being pulled again. A rough estimate would be that they were only on sale for 11 weeks. With the 2009 issues probably not coming around till sometime mid-spring to mid-summer and I am pretty sure that the legislation for them says that they are to be sold until a sell out or the next issue is released. Neither of those events has transpired.

Besides the platinum situation all the metals have fallen and I for one welcome this. I do recognize that my collection is now worth less than it was two months ago but because I don't have a large budget and buy coins that I want to hold on to for a long time, I rely on other means to come up with coin funds and the high prices of precious metals have been a sizeable barrier to enjoyment of the hobby. I'm sure there are plenty that don't agree with me but if we're interested in bringing new members into the hobby its great to not have such a huge financial curve on it!

1880 Gold Dollar

Two weeks ago I was paging through the Red Book and I was looking for potential sleeper coins when I saw that the 1880 gold dollar was priced similarly to higher mintage coins but a mere 1600 were coined. This struck me as odd (pun intended) since most other coins with mintages that small would command huge prices in the marketplace. Now go back in time to this past Sunday. I was paging through my August 4 issue of Coin World and a dealer had a PCGS MS-62 1880 gold dollar for $399. Now that I couldn't pass up but as if to mock me, my inquiry to the dealer brought what I had feared: the coin had already been sold. :-(

But it got me thinking about why such a low mintage coin would be priced this way. Fortunately, a Google search revealed the answer for which I had been looking. Apparently a large majority of the total number of coins were hoarded in mint state so that even though the mintage is so small there are hundreds that exist in various grades of uncirculated. Now that is a good thing to know and to understand that mintages aren't the whole story! Here is a link to the full article directly.

Numismatically inspired t-shirt

Several months ago a few of my physics friends got me a t-shirt for my birthday. On the front it says "Obverse" and on the back it says "Reverse." There isn't too much more to say but the friends who got me the shirt are spread out all over the globe (at least one is in each hemisphere - north, south, east and west). Plus I really like my t-shirt.

Oh, but in looking for this I came across a whole website devoted to similar items.