ANA Recap

First, my apologies...it's been over two weeks since I created a new posting but I've been in Baltimore (off and on) since July 25th. I was lucky enough to come home for two days over the weekend, but a a bunch of us that had eaten in Baltimore's Little Italy came down with a nasty food-poisoning bug, so the weekend was a wash-out. But you're not reading this blog to hear about that... so I'll move on.

The Pre-ANA...
As many people may or may not know there is always a "pre-ANA" show that precedes the big event. Usually held in a suburb of the host city, in this case we found ourselves in Towson, Maryland. The pre-show rarely attended by the public but it is a huge part of the commerce that we can expect at the main show, as well as guaging the mood of other dealers. About 30 national dealers attended the Towson show and we had modest expectations going in. We'd seen a lot of the same guys in Chicago a few weeks earlier, and the summer mood had been catious. Well, the pre-show was gang-busters from the opening bell. John Brush and I bought and sold a "pre-ANA show" record amount of coins in 2.5 days. I was able to get all the inventory home to process and this past week's DLRC Internet auction contains most of these new purchases. The most exciting purchases we made were: a beautiful 1921-S Walker NGC MS65 (on hold for a client now); 1795 $5 Small Eagle PCGS/CAC MS61 (almost sold twice at the ANA -- won't make it very long); Wass-Molitor $50 NGC VF25 (sold at ANA).

The Main Event
I rushed back to the main ANA on Tuesday morning for the opening of PNG Day and the momentum continued. We exhausted ourselves trying to keep up with the pace of business. Now, we mostly do wholesale at shows, and the ANA is no exception, but collector traffic was very good for the show. The trend of declining show attendance is still there and I think the ANA will report lower numbers than in previous years. But that's due largely to the fact that serious collectors are happy to stay home and acquire coins via the Internet. Why fly to a hot mid-Atlantic city in the middle of the Summer when you can point and click in your pajamas??? The Heritage sale was very strong, especially the Price Collection, which exceeded expectations. But our small, but very fresh Summer Harvest Sale also went crazy...and it closed during the Heritage auction! We realized over $250,000 against a pre-sale estimate of around $165,000! The coins were fresh and bidding was very aggressive.

DGS Update
DGS submissions are holding nicely at 1000 coins per month which is a sweet-spot for us. We're looking to add new graders and attributors for DGS so we can accomodate the greater number of submissions that are coming in. The market is slowly embracing our new company. Now that everyone realizes we are in this for the long term, and we're not trying to over-grade coins to get submission numbers up, collectors and dealers alike are snapping up DGS-graded coins because they are nicer than most other graded material on the market. We keep hearing that people are going to crack the coins out, but that's just fine with us. As long as buyers are happy with the coins they receive in DGS holders, they keep submitting and/or buying more. I think we've really struck a chord with our Visual Population Report as well. Folks love looking thorugh the coins we've graded. Later this summer we will add some nifty little features to the VPR like a "virtual collection" where you can create a collection of DGS coins that you don't even own.

Quick DGS Stats
Coins Graded as of July 31: 2,175
DLRC-owned coins graded as of July 31: 304
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# DGS Coins Sold by DLRC/DLRC Auctions as of July 31: 153
Sales Price of DGS graded coins sold by DLRC as of July 31: $78,804
Average sales price of a sold DGS coin by DLRC: $515.05

Interesting Message Board
While I've not been a big contributor to any message boards (due to time constaints), I have enjoyed reading and posting on CoinTalk. The tone of the boards is congenial and professional. There has been a very interesting analysis of DGS on there of late which I've contributed to. CoinTalk thread.

Well, that's it for today. It's been a loooooong 10-days of non-stop numismatics with a nice bout of illness thrown in for good measure. I'll be happily back at my desk this week to build on some great ideas I've had for our web sites and auction platform. Have a great week!

John