"Investing" In Coins...

Lol Nod!I also have BP as a significant part of my portfolio; with full dividend reinvestment over the last 10+ years it still has performed well compared to some of the other dogs I own.

Can't really beat the silver I have been holding though.

If we had crystal balls would we be kings?

Smart decision Duke.

I consider myself a 'researcher' - not a collector, investor, or dealer.

The only reason I have coins is for reference material when assigning die numbers to other people's coins or to subsequent finds I make - otherwise they would all go once I've photographed them. I'm not a collector because I don't really care whether I have the coins at all other than for the reason stated above. I'm not a dealer, because I don't really buy coins for the purpose of reselling them. I sell coins to feed the cost of writing and developing what I write online (it's not as cheap as a lot of people think it is). Publishing a book costs a minimum of $5,000 and often hits $10-$15K. Somebody has to pay to have the books made, and that's in part why I sell coins. So I'm not a dealer, but I do have an inventory worth over $30K, and a quarter million coins left to go through.

All this to say my cup is full and I have no clue what to call myself if only given the choices of "collector, investor, or dealer" - but I know one thing for sure - "investor" is not the right word to use to describe me.

And I whole-heartedly agree with your arguement that portfolios don't always (actually less than frequently) double every seven years, but we all have to have some sort of benchmark to use in discussing such things as the unknown world of investing, and this is the most commonly accepted "rule". I would by no means want to pull the wool over the eyes of the unsuspecting into believing this is always the case. I shall change my line of discussion at this time to include the following:

Most growth vehicles provide an average annual rate of return that is equivalent to a long-term per-annum of ten percent. Given this model, a well-managed portfolio 'should' double in value every seven to ten years given rather stable market conditions and that the investor re-invest all the proceeds and dividends earned through the course of the portfolio.

The past couple of years have been very far from stable, but the coin market has taken the same hit...so "investing" in coins would have been no better than investing in the market when all the apples and oranges are dumped onto the table and compared. I've seen a number of people take a bath on $20K-$100K coins they bought three or four years ago and cannot reap a third of what they originally put into them. The rare coin market is taking a huge correction becuase of "hard times" caused by printing tons of currency with nothing to back it just so big government can hand it out to executives so they can make the American public believe they are 'safe' so they won't freak out and crash the market altogether.

The bail out did a lot to ruin the infrastructure of our economy, and we will be paying for it well into the future. Relating this to coins - well, the rare coin market will take longer than the average cycle to come back to full-steam. We are still operating this country on borrowed time and money...and from what it seems, brains.

The simple solution to the bail out would have been to take the $700 billion and divide it equally amongst every household in the country. That would have been all the stimulus the country needed, and its effects would have cascaded positively throughout the economy.

I could not agree more with the first statement.
Borrow money from china so we can but their stuff.

Oh and the second statement, how much would that mean for my family of four, 10 grand? Better than padding some bank executive's payroll.
Those bank should have gone under, it's called capitalism.

Fenton to the rescue! $700,000,000,000 / 138,000,000 tax payers =

$5,072 per tax payer.

Approximately 40% of that 700B was tax breaks. $400 and $800 rebates for families (paychecks got a tad bigger), $8000 first time home buyer tax credit, $250 tax credit for seniors, higher education tax credit, AMT stopgap measure (this was big I almost got caught by that...), expanded earned income tax credit, etc...

Also went to fund the federal unemployment backstop ("the 99'ers") and a huge bailout of state and local governments.

Infrastructure projects were a small portion of that perhaps 20%. So with only $1000 per tax payer of infrastructure projects it was kind of unrealistic to expect that would bring us full employment. It's really just a backstop against a depression it would have required 10 trillion to really fix the unemployment problem (i.e. World War II spending magnitude; took that to push out of the Great Depression)

yeah, coppercoins, by your $100,000 math, we only have 7 million taxpayers in the US. I suspect $10,000 was a closer amount.

So all my semi keys and key date coins are a bad investment? They were purchased mostly 5 to 10 years ago. most of them at wholesale or dealer cost but not all of them . Also most graded by the big 3.

I bought them off of a dealer friend who needed to turn inventory. He was getting them from major dealers and wholesalers were I live at. When he couldnt sell them at the fleamarket after a few weeks and he had to pay for them or return them.I sucked them up for his cost. No they are all problem free and grades on the slabs are correct. Most of them are vf-au coins which are more affordable. They have all gone up in value on paper. I dont plan on selling them anytime soon regardless.