Question On Gold Sovereign Coins

Can you post pictures of the coins? the obverse and reverse

from those pictures, they look real. Closer pictures would be better. Have you weighed them and measured their size? I would suggest separating them.

Both common dates. Mintmarks are almost of all the same value for these dates.
Value in Unc. would be very close to
$Cdn320 + 20% for each.

Comment in COIN YEARBOOK 2011:
"Extra care should be exercised, as good quality forgeries exist of virtually all dates and mintmarks" (as with all U.S. gold as well).
These look quite OK from the pictures, but should be examined in hand with a jeweler's loupe, as a general rule.

From my experience, genuine sovereigns for George V1 far outnumber the forgeries. Take care anyway.

To answer the OP's specific questions:


Gold is like that. It doesn't corrode or tarnish like a brass coin will. As others have stated, the only thing that makes a gold coin "look old" is wear from circulation, and sovereigns basically did not circulate hand-to-hand at all much after the outbreak of World War I.


Five mints struck sovereigns dated 1925 (three in Australia, one in South Africa and the central mint in London) and all but the South African mint struck them in 1912. They are distinguished by little tiny mintmarks just above the date. Your coins have no mintmarks, so they are both London-mint coins. The Australian-minted coins are generally scarcer than either South African or British sovereigns.

Nobody should be asking $200 for a sovereign; that's way below gold price (currently $283). You might be looking there at a half-sovereign, which has the same design but is smaller and only half the weight. Yours are both full sovereigns (since no halves were made at any mint in 1925).

The other variable in determining a coin's price is condition. Some coins are better preserved than others. As you can see from the NGC database for the British George V sovereign, coins that show any kind of wear or damage are pretty much only worth their gold content. Genuinely uncirculated examples can be worth $100 or so more than that.


You could sell it at pretty much any coin dealer or jeweller; they will give you slightly less than the gold content price. You might get more by selling it online or finding a coin collector interested in it as a coin rather than a mere piece of gold, but if you need money in a hurry, it's nice to know you should be able to get at least that much money for it, easily.


Nobody ever really knows for sure what the price of gold is going to do in the next week, month, year or decade. All you have to do is read through the archives of the "Bullion forum" right here on CCF to realize this. People often say they are "investing" in gold, but what they are really doing is speculating - which is really just a sophisticated form of gambling. That being said, gold does have a very good history of holding on to its value, especially when other more volatile forms of wealth are crashing. If you think these are troubled times and you don't need the money right away, you might as well hold onto them. Or, you've got two, so get the best of both worlds: sell one, and keep the other.


Gold is, as I said before, pretty indestructible. Unlike bright shiny silver and copper coins, you can hold gold coins in your fingers without having to worry about leaving fingerprints behind. So in that sense, gold coins need less "care" than other coins. However, gold is very soft. Even the 22k gold used to make these coins is much softer than any other coin you're likely to have encountered. This means they can easily be damaged by dropping them onto a hard surface, or by knocking the two coins together in a pouch or pocket. I own a couple of sovereigns; I treat them with the same care as I treat all my other coins.