What world coins are the most collected top 5 (Non US coins)?

TheGoonies1985

I would imagine Great Britain and China would be on that list.

Abuelo

You can deduce looking at the countries with most graded coins.

John Conduitt

I don't think NGC encapsulations is a good guide. Canada, Australia and South Africa 3rd-5th? Not a chance.

Collectors of European coins buy a lot of hammered coins and therefore aren't going to slab them, which means they are also less likely to slab the milled coins. Most of what's on NGC are commemoratives. I think there are probably a fair few collectors of Russian coins but a lot will be Russian, and won't tend to use NGC.

China is interesting. I know hardly any collectors of Chinese coins (the historical holed money is too uniform) but there are clearly a lot of commemoratives being churned out that people want to slab. It's also the country where you would be most fearful of buying a fake, which drives slab numbers.

TheGoonies1985

@Abuelo said:
You can deduce looking at the countries with most graded coins.

Based on that if we ake NGC:

1- USA
2- China
3- Canada
4- Australia
5- South Africa
6- Great Britain
7- Mexico
8- Russia
9- Poland
10- Germany

I highly doubt Great Britain is behind # 3-4-5.

Sapyx

Most world coin collectors don't narrow down to a specific type, or even a specific country.

For example, "thalers" are quite popular with European collectors, but that term encompasses a large range of dollar-sized and crown-sized coins from hundreds of different countries in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. The definition can even be expanded to include Latin American dollars and dollar-sized coins.

In terms of "popular countries", one needs to look for countries where a large proportion of the population are coin collectors. Few countries can even come close to the collector ratio of the United States, but high up there will be Canada, Britain, Germany and Japan. Pre-Communist China used to have a very large coin collecting base, but the Cultural Revolution kind of wiped that out and it still hasn't recovered. Russia I would also add to the list, as the communist-era suppression of coin collecting has well and truly faded.

In the British Commonwealth realms, collecting coins "from the British Empire/Commonwealth" is moderately popular, second only to collecting coins from their own country. The British Empire of course includes Britain itself, so each of those countries will have a large minority of collectors who are also interested in British coins. And also given that British coins from the 1600s and 1700s are also popular in America with certain collectors of colonial-era coinage since "they circulated in the colonies", and combined with strong local demand within Britain itself, one can probably safely conclude that worldwide, at least in the English-speaking world, Britain would come a solid second place behind the US.

The TPG pop reports will tell you with foreign coin series are or have been popular or fashionable with American collectors, but won't give you global trends, since most of the rest of the globe still isn't all that crazy about slabbing.

WCC

If you are asking about specific coin types as opposed to the coins of a particular geography, it's almost certainly low-priced common coinage that a lot of (mostly local) collectors can both buy and afford, from the countries listed above here.

Otherwise, it is probably Spanish colonial cob 8R, pillar dollars, sovereigns, and maybe two ancients though I would not know which.

Abuelo

I'm not that sceptical. Might not be highly collected in the US, but is expensive to encapsulate. Perfect? Maybe not but I think is close enough.

Rexford

@PillarDollarCollector said:

@Abuelo said:
You can deduce looking at the countries with most graded coins.

Based on that if we ake NGC:

1- USA
2- China
3- Canada
4- Australia
5- South Africa
6- Great Britain
7- Mexico
8- Russia
9- Poland
10- Germany

I highly doubt Great Britain is behind # 3-4-5.

Australia and South Africa are higher because of bullion. So it depends if you count that.

neildrobertson

Back in 2017 I look up sales volumes on US ebay. This seems like it could be representative of US collectors.

If you look at TPGs or auction records, India is less represented. But I think there is a large India continent. It just tends to be lower value stuff.