Hello,
This is my first post, and I'd appreciate some words of wisdom from those here.
After receiving a number of French 20 Francs gold pieces from dealer specials and in trades, I decided to try to build a representative set of all the 20 franc pieces. If you're familiar with these, there are many variants (easily a half dozen with Napoleon I alone) but I wanted to keep it simple. Most of these pieces were bought at spot or at a small premium (5% or so).
The one piece with a large premium was an 1814A Napoleon, which had low mintage. Bought it from
ebay for $100 over melt, from a seller who thought it could be graded straight. You can guess where this story ends, as two different LCS said the coin was cleaned. This dealer has since listed other Napoleon coins in different years with similar appearances, so I assume they either break coins out of slabs, perform some cleaning themselves, or both. Seller is willing to take the coin back.
It would likely be graded as "AU Details" which according to the price sheets means a small premium over melt. Perhaps a little more considering the mintage of 327K.
My dilemmas:
- one, it's a pretty coin. While both coin store employees said it was clearly cleaned, they also remarked how lovely the coin looks.
- two, I would need to replace it. I now assume raw ones will be cleaned, in poor condition, possibly both, and even those go for a premium. I may be able to pay a bit less for a coin with less eye appeal, likely still cleaned, and for a high mintage year.
- Graded Napoleons are not that difficult to find, but have a high premium. The best I can find is ~$200 over spot for a low grade XF, and it goes up from there.
- The last option is to stop the effort, and begin recapturing some of the premiums I paid for these coins as I exchange into more common bullion.
The other coins in the set are raw. One of them has grading potential (LCS said it would come back as AU) but looking at price sheets and auctions, it wouldn't add much resale value.
I'm probably not going to continue to collect coins, this was a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. I would still like to finish the set, though.
What would you do?
to the Community!
Posted 03/06/2025 4:05 pm
