Observations About Collecting Silver Eagles

I've been actively working on my silver eagle collection for about six months now. I was in to collecting back in the late eighties, so I started off with several of the bullion and proof ASE's. All look good except for one that I had to get rid of. Seems someone at the time thought it would be OK to put their fingers all of the coin. 25 years later I found their finger prints.

This year I've been to a couple of large shows. The older the bullion coin is, the more difficult it seems to find them without problems. I'm pretty picky retentive, so I'm looking for virtual perfection. The odd thing is that I've found that most dealers who sell singles don't seem to handle the coins with much care at all. Most appear to have been in and out of rolls numerous times, have nicks/scratches, spots and black edges. I get that these are bullion coins, but if a dealer is going to offer singles for sale to collectors, I'd think that they would offer better examples and keep the unsightly ones for bullion sales. Fortunately, I was able to find a few dealers who know how to properly handle coins. One dealer I spoke with said that he only purchases new rolls. He said that the easiest way to see if someone has gone through a roll is to look at the edges. If there's no discoloration, then they're usually good. However, if he sees finger stains on the coins he won't purchase the roll because others have already gone through it for the better coins and have left what they don't find desirable. I had to pay a couple of bucks extra for a few that I bought from him, but perfection is worth it to me.

Another thing I've found surprising is how many of the proof ASE's don't look good. It seems as if many have been taken out of their holders and put back in. The result is marks & spots on the coins along with dust particles inside the capsul. I passed on a little over half of the individual proofs that I looked at. The one that I'm having a real difficult time with is the 5-coin 25th anniversary set. I looked at about eight sets and have yet to find one that didn't have at least one problem coin. The 3-coin 20th anniversary set was also difficult. I went to a large show on Friday and was getting discouraged with the conditions I found. Fortunately, I opened up the last 20th anniversary set that I came across and found perfection.

Now I'm down to needing the following 11 coins: 1992 bullion, 1995 bullion, 1999 bullion, 1994 proof, 1995-W proof, 2008 w/rev of '07 uncirculated, and of course the elusive 25th anniversary set.

The 1995-W is the king daddy of the series. It's worth more than the rest of the coins combined. The mintage is only 30k, but that seems pretty high given the prices they seem to command. At the most recent show I found five of them. Two were raw in the original sets (along with the AGE's). Unfortunately, both had minor problems. If I'm going to spend that kind of money, the I want virtual perfection. Another the same dealer had was an NGC PR-68. If not for a couple of milk spots I think it would have been PR-69 and I might have purchased it. I found another that was NGC PR-69. This coin looked really nice and could have been a 70 if not for a tiny tiny pin spot in the obverse mirrored fields. The dealer said that he wanted $4200 for it. I offered him $3700, mostly as a starting point so we could compromise somewhere in the middle. He replied that he'd be stupid to take that because he could "ship it at $3950", whatever that means. I threw out my top offer of $4000 and he said no, so I declined to go further. I also saw a NGC PR-66 which actually looked pretty bad through the case. I didn't even ask the dealer to look at it. Now here's an interesting observation. While I found five of these 1995-W proof ASE's at the show, I found zero Truman reverse proof small dollars and only two reverse proof Eisenhower dollars. The two Eisenhower dollars we actually at the ANACS table to be graded, so you might not even count them. Combine this with the fact that the mintages of these RP dollars are significantly less and it's just hard for me to imagine spending about $4000 for the 1995-W Proof ASE. I realize the ASE's are more popular to collect, but prices still seem out of balance.

I'm pretty close to completing the series at this point. So far everything is in original mint packaging (except the bullions). I'm hoping to have this series knocked out within a few months. Then I just have to figure out how to display them all. I'm open to suggestions, but definitely want everything to be air tight.

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