Investing In Rare And Key Date Coins

Comparisons for "back then" are useless. In 1964, authors were pointing out that if you bought a roll of each cent since the Lincolns started, your under-$100 investment would be worth five figures.

What they didn't point out was that was purely because no one bothered to do that, making MS early coins hard to find.

The second problem is that investments like that don't scale. Speculators in 1964 took that info, and figured that if they bought a bag (or hundreds of bags) of each date, in 50 years, they'd be millionaires. The number of collectors didn't grow 5000 times, and there were many times the cents available from circulation.

It looked like a no-lose proposition, after all, you could always spend them. Start counting the cost of getting them, storing them, insuring them or having them stolen, and decades of lost interest. The only reason a bag of 1964 LMC is worth more than face today is its copper content, not any collector value. I'm sure if someone wanted a hundred unc bags, it wouldn't be that difficult to find them.

good points.

a lot of that is speculation for sure.

i wish I was back in 1916 and picked up a few rolls of quarters. ;)

but with that said, there are coins out there that have and will continue to appreciate over time because of their scarcity and grade.

some coins in any grade, 1916 25c, 1916d 10c, 09svdb, will do well over time regardless.

this is the whole point of my post: research and locate those coins that will hold their values over TIME. not for quick turn around profits.

my dream is to some day pass these pieces of history on to my kids. the only trouble now is having the money to acquire these keys without my wife out. it is one thing to my wife to see an investment like the ATB 5oz bullion coins that I could have purchased for a total of $900 and have them graded, get good grades and turn around to make that quick profit. but it is hard for her to see the 'profit' in purchasing a key date i.e. the 09svdb for $1000 and sit on that for 50+years. so if any of you could or would throw out some speculative profit margin numbers for me so I could relay them to my wife so it might give her some ease on one of these purchases, it would be greatly appreciated.

another question, probably one of those that go "it is your choice" type questions would be if you had limited funds, say $500 to $1000 annually to burn on a key date, would you buy the lower grades to be able to at least HAVE that coin, or would you WAIT, 5 years or something until you had the $$?

in my own answer to this, I would probably go for the lower grade keys and cc's to acquire them quicker before they shot up in price. by the time I had enough money to buy an MS quality key, it might be years.