This is the first in a (hopefully) series of posts that will document my experiences in buying bulk world coins by the pound, or as I've learned it's known in the business, poundage. While the usual advise is to focus one's collecting efforts, I know myself well enough to know that's never going to happen. As such, I have decided to start building my world collection through buying bulk lots. unfortunately I have been so far unable to find a coin shop in my area that sells world poundage, so my plan is to save up a little cash and buy a 25 pound lot from Black Mountain Coins.
In the meantime though I stumbled across a coin shop while out of town during the holidays and purchased a small lot (all they had) of world poundage.
Cost was $5 for 1.6 pounds of coins, or $3.13/lb. This is significantly lower than others have reported as a market rate, so already the lot has started off well.
The first thing I noticed were some large Mexican pesos.
These are from 1959-1962, and are heavily debased, 10% silver coins, totaling about 1/5 oz. of silver. Not a lot mind you, but basically these four coins just paid for the entire lot. From others' reports it also seems pretty rare to find any silver in these lots, so find some on my first time out makes me quite happy.
I am conscious of the fact that as I buy more of these lots, a larger and larger percentage of the coins will be duplicates (though probably not for a while, as I'm keeping unique dates/mm, not just unique types), and as such the cost per coin I keep will steadily rise. The obvious solution is to resell the duplicates in bulk lots to help defray this rising cost, but I also plan to separate out duplicates of currently circulating coinage of currencies commonly seen in these lots, and sell those separately. I assumed Canadian coins would be the most represented, and that certainly held true for this lot.
That's just under $4 worth of Canadian coins. I figure British, Mexican and Euro coins will also be common enough to warrant separating, though in this small lot there was only about $1 worth of those coins. Still, even without the silver coins, the current coinage would have nearly paid for this lot, so no complaints here.
There were two 19th century coins in the lot. The first was a heavily worn 1870 Spanish 5 Centavos.
The second was a much better preserved Austrian 1 Kreuzer coin from 1881.
The rest of the coins ranged from the 1940's to the 2000's, with Mexico, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, and Japan being the most numerous. My favorite coin of the lot was a 1 Franc from St. Pierre & Miquelon, a French colony of the coast of Newfoundland I didn't even know existed, which has only ever minted two coins. I'm half way to a complete collection!
In all the lot contained 113 keepers, which works out to about 4 1/2 cents per coin. There were 34 duplicates / culls, and 9 tokens. I'm keeping the tokens, but I'm just going to dump them all in a bag. I'll go through them at some point, but for now I've got plenty on my plate just with the coins.
Overall I would definitely rate this lot an A.
Posted 01/06/2012 5:20 pm
