Your Most Expensive Mistake?

A fake denarius of Julia Paula.
It was silver plated, with a lead core.
I bought it retail from a dealer in York, U.K. a very long time ago. It was an honest mistake by both the English dealer and myself. We both failed to pick it on the basis of style.

He had sold me very many excellent genuine coins before this one, and very many after. I subsequently met up with him at a coin show in Sydney some ten years later, and we both had a good laugh about it.

I had it in my collection for a couple of years before I took it to a long time coin dealer friend in Sydney; he very quickly identified it as a fake, and proved it to be so, by bending it in his fingers. I donated it to his fake coin reference collection.

I have learned quite a bit about fake ancient coins since then, but I ain't perfect. You NEVER stop learning.

I should mention, this purchase was back in August of 2012

Paid $500 for a coin worth closer to $100. This was due to a combination of inexperience, overzealous buying, and shady selling tactics. That ones haunts me to this day and was an expensive lesson to learn...

In one of my luckiest picks ever I managed to get a gold coin with around .8 agw or so. I kept it for a while and then sold it when gold was a little over a thousand dollars because gold couldn't go any higher than that, right? Right?

Needless to say that was right before gold made its big run so I missed out on some extra money. But since it is was all profit anyways it hasn't bothered me too much.

Kanga............




(1) Glad to hear your better side of the story.

(2) I'm a newbie with about zippo collecting. Moderns at face, or about face. So no bad news there.

Now Please take this in a good way....

We called our long lost cat "KANGA." He was a LION!

My biggest mistake was not so bad - paid $35 for a damaged Philharmoniker silver bullion coin ($10 over spot!) and then watched silver prices slide down... I also bought a Columbian half dollar (harshly cleaned, AU) for $20. This is because my budget is still on the pocket-money scale. One day I will be able to afford much larger mistakes.

as a teenager I sold the coins I got from my grandfather's estate for scrap (they were all circulation coins, about a quart jar full).

while the $8 an ounce did finance a pretty eventful weekend of beer, cigarettes and girls I see now how expensive (sentimentally) that weekend was.

my other grandfather passed recently and I was given a 1911 birth year set that was set aside for him as a child. circulated and not worth more than $100, but lesson learned, those coins will never leave the family (unless of course my grandkids get them and do something stupid like me!)

I just done this yesterday on an auction site. Bought a Half Cent of the same type for a type set. I guess getting old is better than the alternative. lol. At least both coins were nice coins and what the heck you can never have to many EAC's.