Coin pricing questions

Spinynorman

I received a nice lot of mostly Unc and Bu that I'll probably turn around and sell most of, but I'm not sure about pricing on these three. Any help would be appreciated.

Turkey 1942 10 Para. It's very late die state, but it is Unc. My Krause only goes to XF for pricing.


Portugal 1953 10 Centavos, Unc with better color and luster than shows in the pic. I'm wondering
why the price jumps from $3 in XF to $30 in Unc. A lot of the Portugese coins from the 50s have
pretty high prices in Unc, even though the mintages weren't low. Is there a real market for them?


Tonga 1968 2 Pa'anga. Appears to be gilt and it is counterstamped "commonwealth member 1970".
Know anything about it?

shirohniichan

The Tonga piece is listed as KM 39 at $12.00 in UNC.

Spinynorman

Thanks, Shiroh! I didn't look past the regular issues...

Askari

As I understand it, modern Portuguese coins are sufficiently thinly collected that they're collected most significantly only in Unc. In short, that's where the competition is. And it's also where the challenge is. Portugal was a fairly poor country back then and coins got spent. It's not uncommon for the coins of poor nations to have a strong premium for Unc.

SYRACUSIAN

That's exactly the case,at least from my experience with Greek coins of the 50s.

Take into consideration that these were the days of the last silver legal-tender coins,that were hoarded by virtually everybody,especially after the nightmare of WWII. A 1959 Greek set of the 1/2 dr,1 dr and 2 drs (cupro-nickel) sells for $500 in gem BU (from rolls of course) ,while it's almost given away in grades below. Now check the Krause price of these coins and you'll have a good laugh.

edited to add: there are two reasons for these ridiculously expensive prices:

1) Nobody bothered to hoard rolls of the humble non-precious metal coins, but instead focused on silver mainly and
2) The new euro-collector whose expanded interests are the relatively modern coins ,that sky-rocketed the already high prices of these coins in gem BU. They're very unattractive if they don't come from rolls due to their composition.

Spinynorman

Excellent answers! Thanks. So selling them will probably be like that Albanian 1940R .05 Lek that I had a while back, put it on eBay at my minimum price and hope that the right collector sees it. The guy in France that received that one was very happy!