Ancient Coins

Ancient Coins - $10 Million Worth Of Pennies

Can you imagine carrying $10 million in pennies? Well maybe if you had the coin collection that was recently sold in Long Beach, California, it wouldn't be so difficult.

288 pennies brought that $10.7 million in an auction. The collection consisted of 301 rare, early American pennies. Often referred to as 'large cents', these antique copper coins are about the size of today's quarters. They were minted during the time of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, roughly 1793 to 1814.
At the end of the auction, there were 13 pennies left. These remaining coins were expected to be sold within a week of the auction.

The auctioneers were as surprised as the collection owner at the prices the coins were bringing. Two 18th century pennies broke the record for the highest price received for a rare penny. A sweet price at $632,500. Hopefully the new owner feels like he got his 2 cents worth.

Other coin collectors had been waiting decades for these coins to come back on the market. The pennies are well known, and the owner had been holding onto them for years.
The auction officials said a sale like this one happens once in a lifetime. The turn out was exceptional. About 200 collectors were there with hundreds more placing their bids over the phone and on the internet.

The collection owner guesses he had spent a little over $5 million on the pennies, so that was a nice return on his investment. Read more...

Coin Values

Coin Values - Even Coins Get Grades

Coin grading is the process of attempting to determine a coins value. It provides a basis for both buyers and sellers when deciding on the quality of a coin and it's market value.

When people first started collecting and grading coins, they were divided into two groups or grades. Coins were either new or used. But after awhile those grades were much too broad. Something a little more defining had to be used.
Even though the grading system today is much more sophisticated, it's still based on human interpretation.

If you submit the same coin to 2 different grading services, you may get 2 different grades. Sometimes even the same service will give a coin a different grade if it's submitted more than once.

This has been taken advantage of by coin sellers trying to get a higher grade for a coin so they can put a higher price tag on it. One company had the idea to use computers to grade coins. But the computers showed less consistency than human graders did.

Coin grading is a continually evolving process. As more and more people start collecting and more coins are passed around, the grading system grows. More distinctions are made and more categories are created.

So even though the grading system is a good basis for determining the value of collectable coins, it's not something to be believed and followed blindly.
The best thing for any new collector is to learn some basic coin grading on their own.
Read more...