Coins We Love: 💰🌽 Corn or Coins? 🌽💰

The weeks after the ANA World’s Fair of Money are a bit tricky. We have a ton to catch up from in the office and there are always issues that need to be taken care of yesterday. So, once you get past the first week and a half of catch-up, you sit back and things seem to get quiet for a day or two. Today we’re in the lull, and that’s quite alright. We’re still selling coins left and right, we still have packages arriving, but the “lull” just means that we feel back to normal. The market continues to be incredibly active, coin values continue to increase for the most part, and we’re still seeing new collectors buying everything from $20 coins to $75,000 coins. It really is an interesting time to sit back and try to take the pulse of the market from the high over-arching view.

One question that I keep getting asked, but I really hate answering, has been posed to me several times this week. The inquiry is, simply put, “What coins are hot right now?” Frankly, I avoid answering this as there’s not a 100% truthful answer. However, my initial response and thought to this question this week really seems to hold true. I’ve worked at pricing about 500 coins this week (give or take 100 or so) and I tend to take a rabbit-hole approach when researching pricing trends, etc. My initial response this week is that if I had a collection of Morgan Dollars that were averaging $200-$2000 per coin, I’d be a seller. The demand of the market has definitely gone up on these as the supply has dwindled. These have long been the most popular U.S. numismatic items for collectors, so they ALWAYS sell…but I haven’t seen such a lack of supply and such a high demand on these large round objects ever before. It doesn’t mean that I’m right. The prices could easily continue to skyrocket, but that was my initial feel. Also, collector coins under $500 have become far more difficult to locate. Things like better date Buffalo Nickels, Barber Dimes, Seated coinage, Lincoln Cents, etc. Heck, our Mercury Dime inventory is lower than it has ever been…and the question is why? Well, it’s a COVID shortage is what I’ve told people. I can’t get fresh corn at my grocery store either. Maybe Mercury Dimes are the corn of my local supermarket? I can speak for DLRC on this, but we are getting far less coins under $500 offered to us in collections and through coin shows than ever before. And when we do, they are selling all over the place. I had another retailer tell me the exact same thing. He’d never dealt in lower value coins before the pandemic began and he started seeing that coins under $300 have a wide collector base. So, there’s my answer for this week. I tend to think that these trends will continue as we still deal with the affects of a pandemic, but please don’t take my words to say that other parts of the market aren’t just as active. They really are across the board, but I picked these two segments of the market as I was dealing with those types of coins in my research. Next week, maybe I’ll talk about gold. Our better date gold inventory has certainly grown over the past few months and that’s not a coincidence. But, I have to leave something to talk about in the future as I haven’t even had a chance to review the yellowish pieces that have returned from the show just yet!

Thanks again for reading…we hope that you find something of interest below and that you enjoy this week’s Coins We Love and the highlights that we were able to bring back to you from the Suburb of the Second City!

Numismatically Yours,
John Brush

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