Steve Hayden's $463m Civil War Token Sale of Feb 2021!
Zoins
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Crazy sale! The following is from Steve's email!
Is this a high water mark for Civil War Tokens?
Post any winnings you had from this sale here!
@SteveHayden said:
It has been three weeks since our auction and we are almost back to business as usual. We plan to add some choice Civil War and Hard Times tokens both to our website and eBay next week. The 450 lots sold for a total price of over $463m, our largest sale by a good margin. All the lots can be viewed with final prices in the Closed Auction section of our website. Here is the link to a printable PDF Prices Realized.
@dcw posted that this sale saw Steve's highest single lot prices for a set of copper-nickel Sutler tokens.
I didn't win or bid on anything at high prices but I did win a few condition census lots to further my collections.
Here's one of mine:
1863 Bridgens For Public Accomodation Civil War Token - Brass - F-630J-1b PE Bridgens NY - by William Henry Bridgens - PCGS MS64 POP 1/0 - Ex. Q. David Bowers Reference Collection, Steve Hayden (inv)
Comments
That was a typo as it was supposed to be a K not M.
D’oh! That’s a very big, and yet very small, typo!
Strange, as the typo went on and on throughout the email. I was trying to imagine what a half a billion dollars in exonumia looked like! 😆
Dead Cat Waltz Exonumia
"Coin collecting for outcasts..."
I also noticed that in his email from today. As DCW said it was repeated throughout the email. Must have gotten his M’s and K’s mixed.
ANA-LM, CWTS-LM, NBS, TAMS, ANS
I think it is the high mark for these tokens yes...
All kidding aside, the sale was very impressive. Especially those unique Ohio Sutlers than brought multiples of their estimates.
That was fun to watch!
Dead Cat Waltz Exonumia
"Coin collecting for outcasts..."
Watching the auction beyond the aggressive bidding there also seems to be a lot of new blood in exonumia as it wasn't always Steve's usual bidder usernames winning.
This was also the first of Steve's auctions in recent years which every single lot sold as normally there's 30-60 that are snatched up afterward at reserve price.
I bid on 8 items and only won 1 one of the few HTT's I wanted from HA's Donald Patrick sale. I paid $50 more than what it hammered at HA and consider that a gift as it could have cost a few hundred more trying to win it before.
All in all this sale just proved that while the general coin market continues to tank... Exonumia has now entered its 13th straight year of setting auction records.
Oh I also saw a few bidders that I know have sold their collections in recent years actively bidding... Which just proves once exonumia is in your blood it's hard to shake!
Expensive sutler tokens!
There was one guy with a "win now" mentality who dropped $50k on four lots. A second bidder took him to the moon on all of them.
Here's an example:
Estimate $2000-3000:
Dead Cat Waltz Exonumia
"Coin collecting for outcasts..."
It's unique and sometimes it's worth winning unique. It's in nice condition from both a strike and surfaces perspective.
For the underbidder to go so high, here's what it must have felt like. Not sure what it was like for the winner as he or she could have just put in a super high, winning bid.
Those with a financial background use m and mm. Those with an engineering background use K and M.
M is the Roman numeral for thousands. I have seen both M for thousands and MM for millions especially in business and I have also seen K for thousands and M for millions which is from the metric system for kilo. Given the small “m” in the write up I imagine Steve is using the former.
Latin American Collection
Good point! I updated the thread title to use "m" as in Steve's email. No other changes in the original post necessary.
Good info. I agree exonumia is going up. I think this is powered by the Internet and all the information that is now available.
I ended up being lucky and getting most of my lots reasonably, but one of my wins, a Don Partrick token, was fairly pricey this time around relative to the Heritage sale. I think it was due to the lack of slab photos. I hope Steve can add slab photos when auctions are run on his own site in the future, like he does on eBay.
Overall, nice auction result.
I saw one low grade pop up on eBay as 5 figure inventory...
Curious how long that will take to sell?
Conventional US stuff (particularly common or mid-grade material) seems to be slipping without the broad collecting base needed to support it at its previous prices, but specialty areas like these Civil War tokens, quality world coins, and pieces of genuine rarity have been climbing like crazy. My focus is chopmarked stuff, and the supply has just dried up. Many types have nearly doubled in the past year.
Glad to see such strong results, there was some real care put into assembling this collection.