Summer's Over...Let's Party!

I'm half kidding, of course, but now that Summer is over, we can all go back to concentrating on our coin collections. Collectors always find it difficult to concentrate on their hobbies during the summer months, what with kids out of school and nice weather to distract us...

I'm just returning from a short trip to NYC where I met with a client to specifically help him with his collecting strategy. We spent the better part of the day together and he was able to clean house of duplicates and upgrade his set where it makes sense. I used the second day to visit the US Open where Federer took apart his latest opponent...

The good news is the coin market is holding up extremely well against the overall economy. This is not all that surprising given that rare coins (as part of the "hard asset" class of investments have typically been a good hedge against during inflationary times. What makes our market even more resilient lately is the fact that the base of collectors continues to grow. Every new collector that joins our ranks helps to solidify the value base of coins in general. For example, if 10 new collectors decided to go after gem Barber quarters in September, the supply wouldn't be able to handle the pressure and prices would probably rise 25-100% from that small influx of demand. Morgan dollars have a much greater supply so we'd need a greater number of new collectors.

Gold, silver and platinum don't seem stable at all right now which is probably the worst drag on the market. Personally I like gold under $800 per ounce if it will stabilize. In fact $700 gold would be even better long term and would probably attract a lot of new buyers for better-date gold coinage as they started collecting. It seems to me that gold moves in step with oil these days, and oil has dropped like a rock in the past month.

Coming soon to DLRC...are some great new fresh collections. One of the collections contains over 350 freshly-certified DGS coins that are consigned to us from a client. All the coins are wonderful collector-grade material with a large amount of circulated Barber halves, Seated halves and the like. At DGS the most criticism we get is that we're too conservative -- and we love it! Check out these coins as they are graded accurately and fairly in our opinion and you will definitely find dates you need. The second deal is a fresh collection of world gold with some interesting US mixed in. Win and the boys seem to be getting more calls than usual right now as people are selling parts of their collections to trade up, or simply to raise money. No matter what side of that equation you are on, we want to hear from you. Nobody will treat you more fairly and we could really use the material.