Question About The Ancient Coin Market.

If you look back on auction results (e.g. on coinarchive), you'll see there has been a fair bit of variation in the last couple of decades. Metal detecting has really changed the market, as has the instability in the middle east.

I haven't been collecting long, but I have seen some minor changes in the UK market, mainly regarding certain types which are more or less available at the moment than historically. One example is the coinage of Carthage - not long ago a large number of coins from Carthage went on ebay, driving the price down a lot, and now the price is recovering. This sort of thing can happen when a load of examples of an interesting type is imported and suddenly floods the market. Of course, if the supply ever exceeds total demand, it can permanently decrease the value of a coin - if a coin type is rare but a hoard containing 1000 of them turns up, its price will likely never fully recover.

Some coins have remained very low in price due to lack of interest, despite their rarity. In my opinion, barbarous issues are criminally undervalued. Uncleaned coins have gone up in price, but remain very cheap, despite the fact that they are an exhaustible resource.

Wish I had bought up some eastern silver while it was still basically worthless - prices have gone up a lot. Still pretty low though, so I might still be in luck.

Much like the coins of Nectenabo, I have a coin of dubious attribution. It's a monogram of Leontius, which I'm hoping will be decided to be Leontius and not a malformed Leo.

I've been interested in ancient coins since the 1970s. The following are the first things that come to mind when thinking of overall trends:

1.) The internet, both in terms of facilitating commerce and as a research tool. In the last couple of decades, the number of active ancient coin collectors has increased exponentially.
2.) The cultural property debate. Unless the tide is turned, ancient coin collecting will be increasingly restricted. "Old collection" coins with secure pre-1970 provenance already command a premium.
3.) The opening of Eastern Europe in the 1990s, combined with the wide availability of metal detectors, caused many ancient coin values to drop significantly with a flood of new material. The 1990s are sometimes remembered as the "golden age" of ancient coin collecting. Prices then climbed steadily (see #1 above) until 2008 (see #5 below).
4.) Hoards. None is more spectacular than the Mir Zakah II hoard discovered in Afghanistan in 1992 containing more than 500,000 early Indian, Indo-Greek, Indo-Scythian, Indo-Parthian and Kushan coins. Some coin types from these cultures now sell for as little as 10% of their former value.
5.) The financial panic of 2008. Many collectors stopped buying or sold their collections. Prices dropped due to over-supply and lack of demand. The precious metals crash in 2011 was another hit. Along with collectibles markets in general, prices for collector-grade ancient coins have been flat to slightly decreasing each year since. High-end coins ($10,000+) continue to soar to new heights.

In Austria, and I assume the rest of Europe, there is a definite numismatic hierarchy, the more academic and prestigious is Ancient coins. At Vienna University, the numismatics department focuses mostly on ancient and medieval coins. I think it is the USA coin collecting market that focuses on modern coins( from 1492 on. I think a lot of that is due to the activities of the Third party grading companies they have matured the market for USA coins and other similarly aged world coins but are very sloppy when it comes to Medieval and ancient. The USA grading system really doesn't lend itself to ancients( and medieval). Therefore the demands on Individual collectors is higher for ancient coin collectors.