There are two groups of buyers for coins. The first is serious collectors/numismatists. No offense, but they amount to just about nothing financially. Look at the circulation of coin papers and
ANA membership, compared to the population. These people hold the nicest coin of a date for their set, and trade off the rest to get ones they need.
The other is the casual collector/investor/speculator. This is the main reason slobbed coins exist. Collectors aren't concerned about fake common date Morgans. These coins are slobbed to make it easy for people who couldn't care less about coins to invest in them. Common date Morgans in MS65 used to be around $500, until even the "investors" discovered there were hundreds of BAGS of them, and maybe 1000 collectors collecting MS Morgans by date.
So what do you do with 1000 collectors and 55 BAGS of 81S MS 65 Morgans? You convince non-collectors that they'll be worth a lot of money someday, and hope they'll buy 500 of them at $40 per and take $20,000 worth of this crap off the market.
The collectables market has always been very thin, which is fine, because so are quantities available. If you can make a breakthru into the non-collector market, havoc reigns.
For example, common Confederate notes used to be $3-$5. Then a promoter decided to do a big push and sell them to the generally pubic, pushing their historical value, and they needed 20,000 of them to start.
Within a month, they had wiped out the entire inventory of all major dealers, and you were lucky to find a note for less than $15!
Why? There might have been a few hundred collectors. If they could sell one note to .01 of 1% of the public, that's still 30,000 notes, prolly more than had traded hands between collectors for the last 20 years!
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Posted 07/17/2008 5:50 pm
