What Are The Most Commonly Collected Foreign Coins?

I'm going to bet that English Pennies have to be way up there.

Personally, in no particular order: Early African, early Indian (I realize these are continents), early French, Italian and Mexican (especially the large silver pesos). I have a few examples of each country from the bulk purchases. I don't go looking for them but if the price is right I'll scoop them up.

South African gold?

What makes you think people in those countries don't collect their own coins? Without meaning to be disrespectful, the US is a newcomer to the hobby of coin collecting, as is Australia, simply because we are young countries. Coin collecting has been going on for thousands of years, Chinese, Greek, Roman, any culture that issued coins had people that collected them.
US coins are the most collected coins in the US, for sure, however, try and find them outside the US, as I am sure many members here will attest to. It can be very difficult.

I think you're seeing the "Franklin Mint effect" here. Any coin actually made by the Franklin Mint is pretty much guaranteed to be a poor investment and only worth bullion, and any country that was a flag of convenience for the Franklin Mint has tended to suffer from the association.


Of course they do. But the extreme popularity of coin collecting in America, compared to elsewhere, is partly cultural, and partly economic. Coin collecting is a "rich country hobby" - if the vast majority of a country's population are grindingly poor, then there'll be very few coin collectors there.

As for the general rules, I have a theory: that collectors are more likely to get interested in particular countries if those coins don't look too "alien" to them. Particularly, the language used on the coins is a major determinant. A foreign language can be a major barrier to someone just starting out in collecting foreign coins.

Thus, American collectors are most likely to want to collect coins from the English-speaking world - Canada, Britain, Australia, etc.. Coins with foreign languages that use the Western alphabet (eg. French, German, Mexican, ancient Roman) will be less popular, and coins with "weird foreign writing" on them (eg. Russian, Greek, Chinese) will be less popular again.

A collector in Germany, on the other hand, will be most likely to be most interested in coins from the German-speaking world (Germany, German States and Colonies, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg), with British, French and American coins less so, and Russian and Chinese coins less so again.

Unless a collector has a personal reason for behaving otherwise (if, say, their ancestors came from Poland, or they saw wartime service in France, or they go for a holiday to Turkey, or their spouse is Brazilian) then this is likely to be the rule.