Opinion - Modern Commem And NIFC Numismatic Issues - Which May Develop Healthy Premium In 50 Years?

IMO the answer is almost none. Anything low mintage with high demand has an initial instant jump in value. If you manage to buy from the mint you make a good profit on paper. After that prices stay relatively flat. Everything else is available for less than mint prices in short order. I don't see that changing.

Edit to add: There's always the possibility that precious metals increase over the next 50years.

none of them

Both are produced relatively close to current demand and it is unlikely demand will increase as coins become less and less common.

Check the history of Silver Art Bars for an illustrative example. They were hot because the underlying silver value was slowly increasing and the Art content made collecting them interesting.

When Silver spiked, large quantities were melted and the market never recovered.

Correct a typo on my part, 2009 not 2019.

One point to clarify, the satin finish were not proofs, they were included in the uncirculated set, and there composition was 95 % copper, 3 % zinc and 2 % tin, the original composition of the 1909 cents.

The largest problem with NIFC is two-fold. One is that typically by law they have to recover the entire expense of production, from the raw materials through to the guy sweeping up the floors from the sales. And the second is that the various mints see these are major profit centers.

They're not rare enough nor collectible enough to command those same premiums in the resale market (sure, there are a few winners, but ...). So the initial purchaser takes a significant loss.

US Mint modern gold commemoratives will be significantly higher than today's prices. Mostly due to the increase in gold value.

Those examples are all circulation coins, not NCLT. Both supply and demand are different equations for NCLT. So a better analogy to study might be the historic behaviour of the only "old series" of NCLT in US coinage: Classic Commemoratives.

Classic Commemoratives were typically sold for a small premium - usually not over 200% of face value. Mintages were tiny. And they gradually became popular with collectors of the day, though many started off with very low demand, and many of the later series did not reach their immediate sales targets. Prices for classic commems slowly increased over time, then hit a sudden spike in the mid to late 1980s as investors discovered them. The spike proved to be a bubble, which burst in the mid-1990s and has never really recovered.

Now, compare this to modern NCLT. Mint issue price premiums are much larger - those restrike Morgan and Peace "dollars" are selling for 8000% above their face value, or 420% above the bullion value, and this seems typical for modern commemoratives. Mintages are also much larger - hundreds of thousands is typical. All of which means the popularity curve for these coins tends to be the inverse of the curve for classics: they typically start off very strong immediately on release, then weaken.

So, if classic commems are struggling to regain their lost prestige as investor items after 30 years, it seems to me much much less likely that modern NCLT is going to become a trendy category over a similar timeframe. I hate to break it to people of a certain age bracket, but 1982 was 40 years ago now.

Sap - excellent point regarding my comparison although as silver was also commonly found in many denominations issued at the time of the issuance of classic commemorative, some of the commems did go into circulation. But excellent point regarding the mark-up over face value. The only correction to your post is there are modern commemoratives with extremely low mintages --- even lower than the classic commemoratives.

Here are a few examples:

1937 Roanoke Island 350th Anniversary - Mintage 29,030. Compare it to Boys Town 2017P Uncirculated Silver Dollar about 12,000.
1923 Monroe Doctrine Centennial - 275,000 approx. Compare it to 1990 Eisenhower Commemorative uncirculated dollar - about 241,670.
1935 Old Spanish Commemorative - 10,000. Compare it to 2021National Law Enforcement Museum Unc Silver Dollar - about 9,400.

In fact since 2011 mintages of most modern commemorative unc silver dollars have been below 50,000 and often around 25,000. In some recent years below 15,000.

But I agree the difference is the mark-up is a bit higher - about 2.5 x average spot price for silver uncs (and yes for face value much higher) and it is impractical to spend these.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to still ask my original question as the old overproduced commemorative issued in the first half of the 20th century cannot be spent now and the mintages from those issued in the past 10 year has been quite a bit lower than those of the classic early 20th century commems.

As an aside, also look at some of the mintages of 2022's commems: 2022 Negro Leagues Clad Half dollar sold 9,775, the silver unc 8,448, gold unc 1,500 (! making this definitely a scarcity); 2022 Purple Heart fared better - Clad Unc - 12,460, Silver Unc about 14,000, Gold Unc about 1,670. And as usual the proof strikes had higher sales or those offering privy marks.

So to me it is an interesting time to ask this question despite some pessimism.