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Posted Today 4H 30M ago
When I first learned of the Omaha hoard, I became very enamored of the story. A mysterious collector stashed pristine BU rolls of coins in a bank safe, every year. I started assembling and stashing BU rolls of nickels from circulation to emulate that cache.
Ultimately, I decided that was pointless for a few reasons. First, as people have pointed out, modern mintages are high. Second, the coins need to land in the hands of an appreciative collector to be correctly valued, far in the future. Third, you have to store all those coins properly for decades. Fourth, investing that same amount of cash into an index fund would produce a tremendously higher investment return. Therefore, what you are really doing is accumulating heavy, difficult to store, fragile items to be inherited by a hopefully appreciative person far in the future, and accepting that the monetary gains will be massively inferior to basic sensible investments.
Regarding what might be valuable in the future, I have this particular thought. Get a coin book from 2000, another from 1980, another from 1960. Examine the lists for the high demand coins. Those are the ones that will probably be valued by collectors in the future. The current batch of coins is anyone's guess. I would hazard a prediction that anything described as "collectible" or "limited mintage" or deluxe today will probably be spurned by collectors in the future. Partly because more will be saved in good condition than collectors will demand, and partly because collectors seem to have an aversion to limited edition collectibles. We have Beanie Babies, comic books, baseball cards to thank for that.
Ultimately, I decided that was pointless for a few reasons. First, as people have pointed out, modern mintages are high. Second, the coins need to land in the hands of an appreciative collector to be correctly valued, far in the future. Third, you have to store all those coins properly for decades. Fourth, investing that same amount of cash into an index fund would produce a tremendously higher investment return. Therefore, what you are really doing is accumulating heavy, difficult to store, fragile items to be inherited by a hopefully appreciative person far in the future, and accepting that the monetary gains will be massively inferior to basic sensible investments.
Regarding what might be valuable in the future, I have this particular thought. Get a coin book from 2000, another from 1980, another from 1960. Examine the lists for the high demand coins. Those are the ones that will probably be valued by collectors in the future. The current batch of coins is anyone's guess. I would hazard a prediction that anything described as "collectible" or "limited mintage" or deluxe today will probably be spurned by collectors in the future. Partly because more will be saved in good condition than collectors will demand, and partly because collectors seem to have an aversion to limited edition collectibles. We have Beanie Babies, comic books, baseball cards to thank for that.
