Are Coins A Good Investment?

But Lady
After my MBA and 40 years in the market I am reading it
However the thing is to be prepaired for the unprepaired
Hmm this forum does not support png I try again
What the chart says is that june or july will be safe to buy anything in gold

I look at coin collecting as an investment (some coins) but really see the average collection as a private savings account that for the most part no one else knows about. Your money is not gone but transferred into another asset which you may keep for years, drawing interest you may not even know about, until a time comes to sell them. I have been more than surprised by dirty old coins I had put back as they cost me little at the time of purchase, some years ago, and was shocked when I offered them to a dealer this summer. Nickels I paid $10 to $15 for years ago were now $70 to $100!!! My advice is buy wisely, build a diverse collection and be willing to HOLD on to it for a few years. The longer the better and most importantly DON'T OVER DO IT! Keep within your budget so financial needs don't require you to keep selling off your collection. Enjoy what you are doing and when possible go with the classics of old as they don't make them any more!

I do not know the term cat whiskers
But this chart has been doing this since 1999 but my chart is limited to five years max

This is a very specific kind of statistics and if you want to look at the formations borrow Edwards and Magee Stock Trends it still is the Bible after all those years

What you see are scallops followed by a break out trying to go exponential ( ballistic ) and luckily coming down each time .
If it did not come down it would go very high and probably be over with .

The average cycle lengths has been 12 monthly candles with shorter 6 and 3 months cycles running interference .
If you have a long time horizon Full stochastics are a marvelous indicator . The red flagging means overbought and correction coming .

^ I'm of the same mindset as Carl - this compounded with the aesthetic quality of metals and the huge amount of historical learning to be gleaned from them made them an irresistable hobby about three months ago when I started looking at them on Egay. Oops! can't spell ;)

I think so especially rare coins

Last week I cashed in some coins I no longer wanted. I put the money back into coins, but it was a cash transaction - no barter or dealing. I made money: $675 worth of coins brought $1087. Retail for the coins is considerably more, but unless I take a chance on ebay or Heritage I pretty much have to live with a dealer's margin, which in this case was around 50% over wholesale on collectable coins, and 10-20% on bullion. On average I had held these coins 12 years. That works out to 4% interest - about what I would have gotten if I had put the money into a CD. Most of the gain was due to gold's recent appreciation in value, and not due to any intrinsic rarity (ie the whizzed 1892-O eagle increased in % value as much as the 1891-cc eagle in AU - as said before, it's hard to beat the margin between retail and wholesale on collectables).

I'd surmise that I could have made more if I hadn't bought the coins at retail originally (ie if I was a dealer), but that wouldn't have changed the outcome on the gold by that much because it's primarily bullion driven. If I had waited longer, maybe the rate of return would have improved, too, but 12 years is already a pretty good wait. If I had picked better (for instance, if I had put all the money into 1938-D walkers or 1889-cc dollars in 1995) I would have done better, too. But I could just as well have put the money into Isabella quarters or other commems and gotten nothing. And even with the best picks I would still be up against that high margin on the mid-value collectable. An 1889-cc dollar listed at $600 might wholesale at $400, and then only if a dealer happened to need it. Over 12 years the bullion coins worked pretty well I'd say.

In the 12 year course, I conclude that if I do it right, the coins will hold their value against inflation but not much more. That's why it's a hobby for me, not retirement savings, and why my "earnings" got plowed right back in to new coins I liked better than the old ones.

I think coins can be a good investment, but I'm in it for the adventure and the hunt, not really in it to profit.