"The Dow 30 for Coins?"

CharlieB

The Dow Jones Industrial Average on the NYSE comprises 30 Individual
companies such as Alcoa, GE, IBM, and Proctor and Gamble. They are
big, and are from different sectors of the overall ecomomy so that a
level and general trend of the stock market can be represented.

What if some stock broker asked you to name your Dow 30 coins, could
you? I'd be hard pressed not to be subjective. The analogy to stocks
has to be somewhat similar. It has to be a coin that is popular, well
known, you don't have to own or ever will, but it is a coin that
impacts coin collecting and a lot of collectors. These coins should
represent different denominations the same way stocks are represented
by different sectors such as manufacturing, consumer goods, technology
and chemicals, etc. Since the forum represents collectors and dealers
who specialize in various areas, a lot of you know better than anyone
what is really sought after in your area of specialty.

If coins become even more popular over time and make up a greater
part of people's assets, as I think they just might as the
certification process and market pricing guides gets more refined,
then there might just be the need for a Dow 30 for coins.

I have my specialties but I confess I am not keeping up with moderns
and some are really hot. I am not a proof collector so I am not going
to second guess that. I am not an error collector but I'd probably throw
out the 1955 double die for consideration if I were backed in a corner.

Could we come up with a Dow 30 for coins?

Here is my pick: 1916-D dime and I have one. I am not
collecting mercuries but the coin is popular, well known to just
about everybody and the coins are sought after in any grade and it
is an icon among mercury dimes.

Agree or diagree with the 1916-D?
A coin you recommend and why?
Or would you rather just forget this thread and go trolling?

- Charlie B -

Monstavet

Doesn't Coinage do this every month for coins in MS65 already? It has never been helpful to me, and does not seem to reflect anything that is going on in the market as I see it. It mostly just looks like a big long flat line to me.

CharlieB

I am not sure what their basis is and if
the average collector would agree with
their picks.

rgiesick

I agree with the 1916 -D it seems to me that you could take the key dates and do this, but I don't think there is enough collectors to really move the 'market' on a daily basis. Volume is not high enough and the ability to see 'all' transactions that have occured is impossible. I have been thinking about this sort of thing for a while and have thought of something like www.etopps.com might be a way to handle this. Basically you can buy collectable cards online and sort your inventory. You can sell your cards in ebay and claim your cards in etopps, the main difference is that the cards are virtual you only own them if you request them for delivery and if you do that no more trading within the system... I have many more thoughts on the subject if anyone is interested let me know.

-Randy

cladking

All of these coin lists that have been made so far have a fatal flaw.
Unlike the Dow 30 which is up-dated frequently to omit has-beens
and include more popular issues, the coin lists have remained static.
The Salomon list was extrordinarily interesting but it tracked only
very valuable coins and made no attempt to adjust for grading or
weighting. It may have been a fairly accurate representation of the
coins it tracked but they were not a good representation of the market.
Just as the dow is separate indices for different market segments, so too
should be a barometer for coins. One index could track older circulated
coins and weight them to their prices. When a coin begins to not be
collected as actively it should be dropped for one that is. There should be
another index for high grade classics and one for moderns. There should
also be one all encompassing list for the US coin market as a whole. With
an effort these indices could be more meaningful.

rgiesick

Cladking,
Yup you have to have several markets, you have to be able to look at the markets in several ways as well. But looking at the volume alone is not enough because coins would appear on and drop off the list so quickly you would have a different list on a weekly basis, but if you could look at the popularity of a coins staying power as well as its current volume you may have something. And as far as what coins get on the list in the first place, they would be nominated just like CharlieB stated, and would be removed if time proved they could not hold on... Overall you have to watch every coin that way you can track what coins make the grade to be included on the list and what coins do not, you have to watch them all to see what coins are to be dropped from the list and what coins are to be added. You need to know what coins are selling and what coins are not, what coins really have the staying power etc. A lot of data exists already, it is just a matter of sifting through it all. And coming up with the criteria on what makes the grade and what does not. Seeing all the transactions is impossible so this could never really be 100% accurate.

-Randy

shylock

You know Charlie, Ebay of all places may be the one source that could do this accurately due to sheer volume. They could easily interface a program that calculates which series/dates/varieties get the most bidding activity. Unlike stocks they don't fluctuate much over short periods of time except for recent issues (like the Buffalo commem). But I'd be very interested to see their stats. Collectively we could probably guess what they all are, but we might be surprised by a few.

keets

i wonder what the merits of something like this would be. tracking 30 random dates or even 100 random dates would only give a rough idea of what a small segment of the hobby is doing. to compare it to the stock exchange is really useless since the dow is regulated and watched closely while coin sale records are pretty much voluntary and for the most part unreported. imagine something in place to verify sales between individuals. just what we need, government involvement in coin collecting.

al h.

cladking

That's just the point. Don't use random dates, use coins that
can be considered representative of the overall market. People
would attach significance to the degree they believed the coins
were truly representative. Only one of the Dow stocks was on
the original index. Most of the rest are out of business.

TomB

The Greysheet does this with their slab percentages. They use twenty coins in two different grades each and then take the overall percentage of slabbed price vs Greysheet. The July 1988 monthly issue contains the algorithm for the work.

tompkins

You cannot do this by tracking key dates---as others indicated you need to track coins that are indicative of the total market. The gray sheet and various other price guiides do this. How are the Dow 30 selected? They are all widely owned and heavily traded making it easy to determine a market price. I'm not sure you can say that about any coin; and certainly not about high grade key dates. One of the dealers' newletters (I think it is David Hall) tries to put a subjective rating on each series. I don't think you can do better than subjective; and I suspect you also cannot narrow it down any more than a particular series. And I think any attempt to boil it all down to a single number would be misleading, at best.

Pete