Why Do Graded Coin Values Mostly Seem To Decrease In Value Over Time?

the single biggest factor in my view is that numismatics is super popular with the baby boomer generation. many of them are retired or retiring. that means they are selling their collections rather than buying them. there has been a decrease in demand at the same time as an increase in supply.

its not all up or down. I mostly know large cents. rare variety problem coins are waaaay down. top pop slabbed stuff is way up. cac key date stuff is up. culls are up. what people want changes. prices go up fast but they come down much more slowly.

With a lot of coins for example ASE, the first 70 gets crazy priced as collectors want the 70's as more get graded the prices go down. The lesson to be learned is take your time, eventually most high priced conditional rarities will go down in price.

Please note this is for moderns. It changes with classic but a high auction price is no guarantee it will happen again.

Coins that decline in value. Coins can decline in value over time but its not solely because the populations go up as more are found in that grade, but because with high value coins specifically, the populations go up at a rate faster than the number of collectors that are willing to buy at that high cost and participate in high end registry sets. Therefore the price lowers as the next group of buyers/registry set collectors are only willing to spend a bit less. Unless a collector who bought one of the high value coins likes one better and wants to upgrade or thinks a second coin is a good investment, hes not going to be buying. At certain times like now its possible with high coin prices others are selling their collection and driving up supply.


to the CCF!

The main reason for this otherwise is population increase, and that it happens to modern coins such as a top pop business strike Delaware quarter more so than your classic older series of coins. Most of the older series have been out in the wild for a very long time with collectors searching them out, so finding new examples of the very top grades are much less likely to still happen than modern coins in which millions have been made but few have been sent in for grading. So lesson one might be to not invest long term/hold onto modern top grade coins too often since they are likely to have new examples that can exceed or match the existing top grade examples lowering the overall value. Classic coins generally will tend to rise since new examples of top grades are not being found, although sometimes I've noticed there are certain types of coins that rise or fall more than others and only those who watch the market pricing regularly might catch the trends.

I believe data dragon and I are saying the same thing. There are only so many people that play in the high end registry rate will pay the exorbitant price of the first conditional rarities as more are graded, the prices go down as both there are more available and also the rarity diminished. The ASE are a great example so many ms70's are worth a fraction of what they sold for when they were first graded, same with many modern coins but there are literally millions of coins that haven't been graded. People like Tbop has thousands if not millions of OBW rolls. How many of those coins are 70? Paying a premium for an ms 70 is in my opinion not a good long term investment. Hence why 90% of my coins are ms/PF 69, no premium for the slab.

I bet if you ask older collectors they may have felt grading at one time was a gimmick. I could be wrong, but that is how I felt at first when sports card grading rolled out. I just like cutoff dates for grading. I like that there only a few coins in certain holders and no more can be produced beyond a certain date. Just my thoughts.

Yes. Also I've found this extends a bit to errors where the first examples found of a new error tend to have very high value initially, but some types of errors are common and so as more people find them, the supply goes up to where all demand can be satisfied, and when supply exceeds demand for an example the pricing cools over time.




An interesting thought, keep in mind that there are added fees to these type of special holders, Early / First Releases - fee changed to Tier + $15 for 2023 https://www.ngccoin.com/news/article/10900/ and there are always going to be less collectors out there for specialty labels than the top grade coin collectors. Its just good to understand the important point here that modern top pop will more than likely decrease from an initial high value as more quality examples are found and submitted over time, unless there is a specific reason such as the coin was released generally in poor condition overall and so high grade examples are less likely to be found even if many were sent in for grading. If you can somehow identify where a coin may be hard to find in top grade and pick one up early before others recognize its difficult to find that grade and demand goes up, that may be a good potential investment strategy.

Since the label isn't important to me, I went to check if I have any special labels.

I have a few slabbed AGE. All are early release. I paid spot plus the standard premium for each of them. So the label had no extra value. I basically paid what they cost raw.


I picked up 3 different American Women Quarters I (auction) paid $9.62 to $14 and change. All are first release, I actually paid less than what the mint was charging for the set and to top it off, someone paid for grading and the fancy label.



So don't assume if a coin has a fancy label its worth more.