Market Trends PCGS Pre 1933 gold
JW77
Posts: 558 ✭✭✭✭✭
I have been out of the rare gold coin market for about 10 years for various reasons. I transitioned to bullion for most of this time and dabbled in some peace dollars, silver commemoratives, barber proofs over the last 3 years trying to find my next interest. After recently trading it all for "The One", I was looking for what else I could pursue to add to my current box of 1, with the intention of not exceeding a box of 20 over a several year period. I sort of caught the PCGS CAC gold bug again and decided to review pricing of Saints, Indians and Liberty gold. It was 10 years ago I sold my Saint collection, so I went to the PCGS price guide and look at the 10 year trend. The first thought that popped in my head was "you dumb a**". On the other hand it does not seem that smaller denomination Liberty and Indian Gold did as well (I did not look at $20 Liberty). Yes everything has rocked over the last couple of years, but looking back 10 years, $5 gold is flat to even down while Saints have doubled. I was only looking at generic or semi generic dates/mintmarks, no key dates. I know this was a very cursory look at pricing, and maybe it was too small of a sample to make a valid conclusion. My question: if this observation is correct, why didn't the lower denomination liberty and Indians not follow the huge 10 year run-up in pricing like the Saints. If my conclusion is incorrect, I apologize in advance for wasting your time, otherwise, I would like to hear some feedback from the members who actively have followed the market all these years.
Comments
I think Saints are just more popular.
yup, who doesn't love Saints! Are there any other factors such as the Fairmont coins predominantly impacting $5 gold?
Your observations are mostly correct, all of the PQ gold is way up but some series performed better than others. I think Saints in particular exceeded expectations for a few reasons.
Taking all those things into consideration, throw in a worldwide pandemic, a questionable economy and rising gold prices, and people realized that an MS65 Saint as a quasi-investment for a couple hundred bucks over spot was just too good of a deal.
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That's an interesting question. Unfortunately not a market I track that closely. But the Saints just exploded without lifting the rest of the market nearly as much, including types less affected by the Fairmont hoard. Idk
Thanks for the feedback, I failed to mention that I focused my analysis on the MS65 grade, so your comments were right on point!
Saints had a down period throughout the 2010s, COVID helped wake the series up.
Sell low, buy High, that's my MO
Edit
Saints are a bit shy of an oz of gold.
1 sig fig
JW
Throughout the summer of 21, I kept wondering if the Saint market was underpriced. Sept Long Beach I jumped in and bought a few generics. Only ms65 Saints but a few ms63 $10 libs and ms64 saints.
10%-15%+ back of online price guides. IIRC, I think I bought 30 ms65 Saints and 10 misc gold items. Bought some pretty pieces. My buddy and I went quickly through the show because I felt there would be others with similar goals. Turns out when we went back to a few dealers where we couldn't strike a deal, most of the material we wanted already went down the road.
I think prices have moved up quite a bit since then. A lot of people using the 5-6 generic Saints as a hedge against the dollar debasement. I think it will continue. The downside is that if these same people decide to move away from Saints, the downward force might be dramatic.
Gold is always good.... sometimes it is great....
Cheers, RickO