How was the MOON show? Collectors? Dealers? (Josh?)

ajaan

Inquiring mind wants to know.

farthing

Didn't attend - too many family functions this past weekend.

wybrit

If past history is anything to go on, it would be pretty quiet for world coins except for Canadian. There are usually two or three decent tables (Larry's, Shakespeare, Chief) as well as CIVITAS, of course. All the best suppliers of Brit material have long since sold their best stuff and have not replenished. I can't believe it's been 4 years - I have not gone since 2005, my last Fall in MN.

CIVITAS

Well, as far as sales volume, it was far and away our best show in Minneapolis. The downside is it was a lot of really low margin lightside material that I didn't really need to attend a show to sell, but was glad to do it. It's not hard to sell Krugerrands, silver eagles, Proof Gold Eagles generic US gold and junk/circ silver dollars right now, but you have to sell a lot of that to cover expenses when you're making 2%. I did move a 30 piece lot of GSA dollars for a real number (not an easy thing to do these days). The deal was brokered by an 11 year old, which was a new experience.

As for Darkside, it was kind of slow all around. We had seen one of the main darkside dealers there a few weeks previously at ILNA and had pretty much stripped him clean of anything we wanted for inventory at that time. He hadn't really brought much new material. As wybrit mentioned, Larry's was there. We picked up a couple of nice pieces from him, but not much. He always manages to turn up a few nice and interesting things, but it seems less and less every time we see him. We bought a bunch of cheap-o stuff from his mountain of binders for our net price boxes and other purposes. Other odds and ends were found throughout the show. Because of the limited number of darkside dealers there, wholesale was pretty close to non-existent (which is typical at this show). Collector demand was kind of split between those who were so advanced, we just didn't have what they wanted and those who just didn't know what they wanted. Very little call for ancients, which is not unusual for shows that aren't NYINC, CICF, SFHB and Baltimore. Lots of tire kicking on the middle to high-end stuff. Cheap paper money was rather popular. We brought along our envelope of $5.00 Your Pick world paper money and sold quite a few notes (even after it had been pretty worked over at ILNA). The 30% off world coins boxes were also fairly popular, mostly filled with general world coins from $1-$20.

So, overall a very good show, but not a GREAT show.