The Evergreen Portfolio: Timeless Strategies to Survive and Prosper from Investing Pros

Chapter 13. The Rare Coin Market: Understanding How It Works

Understanding How It Works

Van Simmons and David Hall

The rare coin market is one of the oldest and most exciting of all the collectibles markets. The Romans collected Greek coins! There has been an active coin market in this country since just prior to the Civil War.

For the past 40 years, the rare coin market has been extremely active, prices have soared, and the market for rare coins has grown to annual sales of approximately $5 billion, not including what the various government mints sell, and not including pure bullion coins.

For many decades, rare coins have been a superb inflation hedge and a great store of value. Rare coins are the most information rich (there is tons of information both from the U.S. Mint and private sources on rare coins) and liquid of all collectibles. And of course rare coins have a very strong connection to the gold and silver markets. Rare coin prices have performed superbly for the past 10 years. Although the rare coin market, like all free markets, has its ups and downs, the long-term trend has been up.

The world certainly has a lot of financial challenges today, and rare coins offer a superb hedge against one of the biggest challenges of all: the declining purchasing power of the U.S. dollar.

In the rare coin market today, the name of the game is rare gold. And considering what is going on in the world, this makes total sense.

Since the financial crisis that started around mid-2008, many commodities, ...