Investing In Coins?

I'm really just planning now, getting ideas. Right now I'm only collecting and enjoying the hobby.
I'm going to check that thread out now, it may take 30 minutes; my connection is super slow.
Thanks, clembo.

I'm fairly new to coin collecting myself, under a year of collecting, but I've learned a lot since I started collecting and a lot of my current knowledge came from right here on the forums. We probably have plenty of people here that use coins as a form of investment and profit, and have been in the business long enough to learn how to actually use the coin market to make money, so your best advice is going to come from them (I think a guy here named nohope does a lot of buillion and rare coin trading, maybe look him up). So what I'm going to tell you is strictly my opinion and shouldn't be taken as a tried and tested theory.

Basically, it still boils down to get into coin collecting for the hobby. You may sell a coin or two, you may even get a few bucks on a sale every once in awile, but do not expect to make money as a private collector.

Coins really don't have a good reputaion for appreciating well, in my humble opinion. The only coins that really rise in price dramtically are key dates and buillion coins if you buy into the market at the right time and sell at the right time. But you can go into any coin shop and buy a 130 year old Morgan dollar for under 20 dollars. You can buy a 130 year old Indian Head cent for 3 dollars. Just because its old and just because a lot of people don't know about it doesn't mean its worth a lot of money.

Now, with that said, coins do hold a value well. And they do appreciate over time even though it could be decades. So coins are not going to be like baseball cards/pokemon cards/beanie babies/furbies/tickle-me-elmos/ect. and go down in price after you buy them or after the fad's over. Your three dollar coin is not going to be worth one dollar ten years from now, with exception to some sort of catastrophic loss of demand.

So if you really want to invest in coins you have to have a lot of money to begin with and really take some risks. Buy up high grade key dates and semi keys. Buy up bulk silver/gold/platinum when prices are low and sell when its high. Research sleeper coins and market trends to try to figure out whats going to be hot and when.

Overall, it you want a for sure investment with less stress and work involved. I'd reconmend just good old fasioned stocks and bonds.

When it comes to coins, I am a collector and not an investor. The only opinion I have is that I feel coins are at best a long term play. The only way to make fast money is to take the advice of trdhrdr007 above; cherry pick a good deal that you can quickly flip for profit.

The only other way I can see it is if you a really good eBayer and know what you are doing. What I mean is: being able to buy at a very low price and then quickly resell at a a higher premium. If you can buy single coins at nothing and put them into a more desirable set, then you may have a better chance of selling them. Example: last year I bought a 4 pack of Large Cents someone had up for auction, I already owned 2 of them and three of them were very low grade, but the forth one was the keeper. I lucked out and bought the bunch at a very low price and now have three coins that I could resell later on. I figure that if I could put a set of ten different dates then I will have a better chance of selling them. But then again, I may loose money if no one wants them, like everything else it is just right place at the right time.

Educate yourself...pure and simple. Find a series you really are interested in and learn everything you can about it. Look at things like mintages, surviving populations, auction figures, current publications on it (if there is much), etc. Keep in mind, that in most cases what you'd be doing is speculating. I do consider myself a collector/investor, but I've very, very particular in what I buy and what I pay. You might hope that a particular coin/series goes up in value but reality can hit you square between the eyes on this one. The coin market is relatively efficient and supply versus demand is pretty well already absorbed in current pricing. Just love what you buy and be prepared to deal with the future might bring. And, of course, read everything you can about the subject.

Don't be a confused collector! We are what we decide to be.
The only reason I ever buy a coin is to sell it! Maybe someday I will have the luxury of being a collector. Go to the shows and shop around. Find several examples of whatever you might wish to acquire and compare, compare, compare. Make an offer when you think you have found the best one. As far as a type of coin that increases in value quickly, well, all I would say is go with higher grades rather than lower ones.

If you're not intent on being a coin dealer and doing this as a business, it takes a lot of time to make money at coin collecting. You have to wait for selling prices to surpass your original buying price, and for coins that had 20-50% markup to begin with this puts you way behind other types of investments.

There are a few cases where you can make money right away, but it requires a lot of luck and tremendous insight to speculate in commodity bullion coins at the right time, or to pick the sleeper coins just before they wake up. And to make any serious money you have to do it on a large scale. If I'd hung on to my $100 1889-cc morgan for 10 years I could have tripled my money, but that would only put $200 in my pocket. In order to make $20,000 I would have needed 100 of those 1889-cc's, and it would have taken considerable effort for me as a collector to find that many of them. Even if I'd been a dealer it's unlikely that I could count on getting that many in 10 years.