I thought that rising prices brought more coins out of hiding...

RYK

From DW's latest blog...

Who would have ever thought that 1854-O and 1856-O double eagles would have been selling in excess of $250,000 for average quality examples? Fifteen years ago, you could buy these dates for $20,000-30,000 a piece. Today they are ten times as much and, interestingly, almost none have come up for sale in the past two years.

Conventional wisdom suggests that rising prices will draw out more coins from tightly held collections to the bourse, dealer inventory, or auction block. This has clearly not been the case for New Orleans $20's. In fact, one hardly even sees the common dates around any more. Has the interest in this subset of N.O. Liberty $20's exploded? Are there that many new date set collectors of $20 Libs? Is this any area of intense promotion and/or manipulation (and if so, why hasn't anyone called me)?

Coinosaurus

I think there is a different dynamic with these kind of coins. Someone who shelled out 30K fifteen years ago for a 56-O probably didn't need the money then, and probably needs it even less now, what with the stock market and all. Coins in the low-mid four figure range, on the other hand, were probably bought by more average income collector guys who paid a few hundred bucks, or even less, way back when.

CharlieB

Coinosaurus has it right.

Peaceman

When silver first started to go over $10, Peace $ went from a weekly average on ebay of 3000 to 6000. Now they are back to 3000, guess they ran out...

mrearlygold

There are a number of collectors working on sets of N.O. coins and the finer the coins the greater the interest.

BECOKA

I think that Hurricane Katrina may have actually had an effect. There are a lot of new gold collectors out there with the price going up so much. Once they find out there was gold from New Orleans it become a little more interesting when you add all of the other publicity the city has gotten.

Also it is just more interesting to collect coins from mints that are not around anymore.

UncleWiggly

Maybe some new stuff will pop up with the auctions going on for the ANA show in August.



Jerry

construct

I was hunting for New Orleans Type I Gold Dollars at the TNA show. I didn't find any. In fact I saw much more Charlotte and Dalahnega than New Orleans gold in all denominations. I wonder if Doug Winter's anticipated book on New Orleans gold has led to these coins being snarfed up.