Graded Coins ?

This is my opinion: Buying graded State Quarters or westward journey nickels for investment purposes is a fools errand. They obviously *may* go up, but it is a speculative buy. There are too many high grade coins out there that have *not* been graded yet.

Mark, even though purchasing classic coins does not suffer the same pitfalls as recently issued coins, successfully investing in them is still not easy.

For starters, the transaction costs on each end are hard to overcome...the markup you pay if you buy at retail, and the hit you take if you sell back at wholesale (or below).

I don't know if there are many Franklin's out there that would be considered "investment" grade.

IMO, the higher grade UNC's are far more difficult to find than the Proofs, which are specifically made with more care and pressure (struck at least twice?).

success,

I don't know. My only advice is that it is *hard* to make money "investing" in coins. By "invest", I assume a buy and hold strategy.

Many people say that key date coins do the best (1909-S VDB cent, for example). Just the other day there was a thread talking about how *well* it has performed over the last 30-40 years (I don't remember the exact time range). Someone calculated that if one was purchased at the beginning of the time frame, that it had performed at about 8% per year since then. I did not confirm the math.

That's really not so hot. If that is a good performer, what does an average or bad performer do?

By the way, it is also *hard* to consistently make money in the stock market. Some folks do so, and are merely (statistically) lucky.

Now, what about flipping coins? That is a dog of a different color. But that still requires work, and knowledge. If you aren't able to buy wholesale and sell retail, there are still costs on both ends of the deal that have to be overcome.

My 10 cents on the matter (inflation).

I agree with oih82w8 in that high grade MS coins often are much harder to find than high grade proofs.

I am not collecting coins for profit, but I think that numismatic coins are much better to spend money on than many things. There aren't many things (esp. at my age) you can buy that appreciate in value or even hold their value over years....My hope is that my collection will maintain value and hopefully appreciate in value by the time I hand it down to my kids.

What do you think is a sleeper series that is undervalued in todays market?

BTW I am 20 yr. old....

If you go for the Peace dollars, look especially for the well struck pieces. Many are weakly struck.