When Market is Not Moving Up
Cougar1978
Posts: 8,313 ✭✭✭✭✭
There are numerous strategies to handle this. Feel free to add to my list. A lot of this I learned when started setup at shows in 1990 after 89 crash.
- Reduce or eliminate buying until bids are showing positive growth. Lower bids stuff you never could own becomes more affordable. Could be good time to buy.
- Reduce prices to increase turnover. Sale items you may decrease to 5-10 pct above bid.
- Don’t giveaway your best / corner stone items.
- If you have to sell to pay off debt, etc your in trouble. Consult a bankruptcy / CC lawsuit attorney. Develop realistic budget.
- Reduce fee, book, and subscription spending. FIxed Overhead is your enemy cut it to the bone.
- Consider downsizing inventory - example - from 200 slabs to 100 which fits new total investment goal. As long as you have enough items fill your cases at shows your good - currency and junk in stacked Cowans sheets help fill any void in cases. Cheap slabs I may even stack 6 deeps. You could put best one on top look like champ.
- Do online (eBay) if show expenses leaving you in red. Reduce number of shows setup or become vest pocket trader. I do both shows and online sort of like a pro set run / pass offense.
- Don’t cave in from pressure from other players to give material away. They have their own agenda.
- eBay lets you start auctions at your price. If 99c start scary I may start at blue sheet then if no bid activity throw back in store or reduce opening bid next cycle. Bidder activity can vary.
- Improve skillset in moving inventory quickly. If your sitting on it in down market, you lose.
Coins & Currency
1
Comments
-1) Or buy, buy, buy and build inventory
You know one time I put slabbed DE on top stack common generic dollars guy stops by “Impressive inventory, what a beautiful slabbed stack of Saints” He then pulls out slab box of Saints “Would you like buy some with bids down I have been hosed on these as of late. Just defaulted on my Amex account.”
@Cougar1978 DE?
double eagle
Look at your inventory from the perspective a potential DEALER buyer. If what you have is "dead" product, get rid of it for what the market will bring and resist spending the money until something with real upside potential becomes available.
Always think like a dealer and buy like a dealer. You don't HAVE to own anything.
HIBERNATE!
As a collector, I use the opportunity to get coins I otherwise couldn’t. I was hoping gold would go back below $1000 for the last several years to buy more but that may not happen anytime soon. Irks me that I didn’t have much money when it was $250 back in the early 2000s.
TurtleCat Gold Dollars
DE is Double Eagle
Yes just think what one could buy if gold goes back to 250 or lower. I think then demand would catch up with supply. Silver would suffer too.
Demand is always caught up to supply.
As a collector, I tend to focus on other numismatic interests if my guess is that a flat US coin market may be followed by lower prices. If my guess is that the market will stay flat indefinitely, I continue to buy US coins. Right now I'm building early medal sets and only occasionally buying a scarce type for my US federal and colonial type - those that rarely appear at auction in my price range.
I bet you wouldn't want to go back to the salary you had when gold was $250.
Nope. I want the best of both worlds!
TurtleCat Gold Dollars
Actually it was the height of the Internet boom and I was raking in huge bucks as a contractor.
I remember getting back into coins right around that time and making an initial round of visits to my local coin shops. One of the first was mostly a precious metals dealer who told me that gold was "dirt cheap" and I should load up on it. I figured it was a self-serving assertion and proceeded to ignore it. Whoops!
Yes when market down on some things people can sometimes miss buying opportunities. I missed one similar in 2001.
For me:
Tell that to dealers who specialized in classic commemoratives. They're still waiting for their day 30 years later. What goes down doesn't always come back up.
It’s a hobby ......who cares 😄
I give away money. I collect money.
I don’t love money . I do love the Lord God.
No one likes losing large amounts of money regardless of how wealthy you may be.
What does losing large amounts mean ?
Coin collecting is a hobby .... upon the sale
of coins I own I don’t care if I win or lose money .
I give away money. I collect money.
I don’t love money . I do love the Lord God.
I guess it comes down to personality. I'm not a fan of losing 40-50%+ of the original purchase price regardless of the initial investment amount. Unlike other hobbies which may provide function or skill, coin collecting is more akin to hoarding. I'd rather hoard metal towards the bottom of the price curve and not at the top or during a free fall.
Sometimes one can lose large amounts of money just by buying a coin. Yes, it's a hobby, but I don't want to lose my shirt buying or selling.
I have already lost my pants buying numismatic literature that has dropped significantly in value.
RMR: 'Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?'
CJ: 'No one!' [Ain't no angels in the coin biz]
Use market highs and lows to buy and sell what makes you happy
Experience the World through Numismatics...it's more than you can imagine.
Coin collecting does offer opportunity to improve one’s skill and hence that skill can provide less losses or perhaps gains ... maybe .
I’d argue hoarding gold and silver bullion is
not coin collecting .
I give away money. I collect money.
I don’t love money . I do love the Lord God.
You don't lose money if you treated it like a hobby. You never get the price of your golf clubs back
If you treat it like an investment, you will always be disappointed.
Golf clubs have functionality. At a minimum you lose calories with each stroke. What functionality do metal disks entombed in thick plastic slabs have?
At a minimum knowledge.
I give away money. I collect money.
I don’t love money . I do love the Lord God.
"Golf clubs have functionality. At a minimum you lose calories with each stroke. What functionality do metal disks entombed in thick plastic slabs have?"
Metal disks entombed in thick plastic slabs enable coin dealers to eat.
RMR: 'Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?'
CJ: 'No one!' [Ain't no angels in the coin biz]
Now you're arguing against the utility of the whole hobby.
What utility does the Mona Lisa have?
Art.
History.
Entertaining your OCD.
Giving you something to look for in parking lots.
Camaraderie in clubs and in forums.
The possibilities are endless.
Agreed. That's a hefty price for an ugly painting of what appears to be a 16th century transvestite.
So millions of people line up each year to oogle at an image of a transvestite. I am in the wrong business.
RMR: 'Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?'
CJ: 'No one!' [Ain't no angels in the coin biz]
That was my interpretation of the piece.
I'm sure others have different interpretations. 
Edited: Apparently I'm not the only one:
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/leonardo-da-vincis-mona-lisa-self-portrait/story?id=9662394
" Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is arguably the most famous portrait in the world, but now some are speculating that the woman with the inscrutable smile may not be a woman after all. They are suggesting that the Mona Lisa may be a self-portrait, da Vinci in drag.
Italy's National Committee for Cultural Heritage, a leading association of scientists and art historians, is undertaking the investigation. They think the artist who died in 1519 is buried at a French castle and plan to dig up his skull. Using CSI-style technology, they want to rebuild da Vinci's face. Will he resemble the mysterious Mona Lisa?"
There are many hobbies activities where what you spend on it is gone forever - dining, entertainment, sports events. Nothing wrong with that - do it while your still young.
My overall big picture on coins is its been about timing: 1972 - 89 nowhere but basically up. 1990 to now downslide. Classic Commems cheaper than 25 years ago. And other examples can be cited.
I remember a dealer (deceased, no longer with us) in 1990 saying the generics will never come back to their 89 highs. They haven’t and I don’t believe they ever will. I have dropped my buying substantially and cut subscriptions I can do without. But it’s not just generics. When I saw all the negs in the sheet this month for Barber and WLH I had to pour me a shot of Canadian Reserve (the 2015 oil price crash sub at $15 a bottle vs Crown Royal) . I sure am glad I own no big ticket material in those areas especially if had paid huge sticker premium.
"I remember a dealer (deceased, no longer with us) in 1990 saying the generics will never come back to their 89 highs. They haven’t and I don’t believe they ever will."
I agree. I remember what my grandmother paid for some gem generic Morgans near the end of her life, and am still shocked. This happened because people who did not have insider (dealer) knowledge simply did not realize how common what we now call generics were, even in high MS grades.
RMR: 'Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?'
CJ: 'No one!' [Ain't no angels in the coin biz]
I agree. One could still make that argument about 95%+ of the certified U.S. coin market.
I wasn’t involved in the market during these dates, but whenever I look at auction records for many coins in the early 2000s it looks like it would’ve been a great time to buy vs. now from a price standpoint. Objectively from my end it looks like the market was very much on the up during the first decade of this century.
If you have discretionary income (say, after the kids move out and are through with college), it's tempting to shift from filling a Whitman to chasing something that looks like it'll appreciate (say, MEL Prez dollars, Wide AM 1999 Lincolns. reverse proofs). That's where you get in trouble.
People have said since I joined the Boards in 1999 to "collect what you like." Belatedly, and after selling off big losers that were going to appreciate, I'm doing that.
Here's a warning parable for coin collectors...
Investment or hobby ?
1)Owning gov't bonds in 1950's - early eighties?
2)Buying the Nikkei in 1990?
3)Buying gold/ gold double eagles today?
4)Real estate- a can't miss?
IMO they are all investments
Getting Market timing right .. certainly helps returns.
Has gold outperformed stocks since 2000? yep.
Wasn't the Japanese stock market in 1990 a no brainer?
Even treasuries were a super play for the past 40 years.
What I want to know is what will be the best asset class for the next 10 years?
I'd guess cryptocurrencies.
I guess EM stocks
I give away money. I collect money.
I don’t love money . I do love the Lord God.
I've been buying an estate over the last couple of years. Most of the coins were bought between 1982 and 1995. The woman who owned them kept meticulous records. Her prices paid are obscenely high and this is over 30 years later in many cases.
Hopefully, she had fun. In the end, the coins were sold to help pay for her end-of-life care. In that sense, she would have been FAR better off having bought savings bonds. But she liked coins...and expo collectibles. Anyone want Columbian expo spoons that she paid way more than they are now currently worth?
You have to look at the whole market. 2000 to 2010 was pretty good for a lot of sectors, but not all. And 2010 to 2020 has not been good for most sectors, but not all.
Some companies were HUGE winners during the Great Depression. The overall market, however, was moribund.
Dehydrated food.
I will take advantage of a low market if there are coins I am interested in... never sell, so that aspect does not affect me. If I like the coin, I buy... Cheers, RickO
I try to take the long view on this, so ponder this for a moment: Not to be morbid, but eventually we are all dead and then it doesn't make any difference, whether you own a ten million dollar dollar, a modest collection of dreck, or if you're really unlucky, a formerly valuable collection of Canadian coins LOL.
Of course we all have to wrestle with our perceptions, personality traits and various demons while we are alive. That is the hard part.
I wrote some code in Java and C++ on my laptop. Anyone want to buy some worthless, intangible electronic tokens from me?
Sure it does, St Peter is kinder to those with pedigrees on the label.
Depends on the pedigree. Only a small number of them really matter.
RMR: 'Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?'
CJ: 'No one!' [Ain't no angels in the coin biz]