The Current State of the So-Called Dollar market.

keets

If anyone actively collects these medals I would ask a simple question --- What is your opinion of the current slowness in the SC$ market?? I find that sellers who typically will have some interesting items aren't offering anything, and the major auction venues like Heritage/ Stack's are either not offering anything or only have mundane and/or common items(even if they are Bryan Dollars). The choice examples or the rare items seem to be missing entirely.



Any idea of what may be going on??



Al H.

ScarsdaleCoin

Maybe you are not looking in the right places, last two shows (Houston/Fun) I did about 50 pieces ...and many were R4-R6

keets

I've had guys tell me that they have seen dealers at the major shows, maybe 2-3 per show, which have medals for sale. Like your R4-6's it's hard to comment without knowing what they are or what condition they are in. Experience tells me that many of the scarcer medals are in lower grades or have problems which make them unappealing while many listed R4-5 medals tend to be always available in higher grades like MS63-64.



My impression and query is based on the fact that over the last year-to-year-and-a-half things have dried up. The summer to autumn of 2014 had many , many better quality and scarcer medals being offered and selling for good prices, than the drought started.

Zoins

I look for toned and larger gold SCDs which seem to be generally rare and in short supply so I haven't really seen an increase / decrease.



Here's a HK-19 R5 PCGS PR63 ex-Gardner Nevada Dollar SCD PCGS 26094307 that I was following that sold for $1,997.50 in Gardner IV, so there are a few pieces appearing here and there.



Also, a few years ago, coindeuce had a HK-511 R5 Cradle of the Union gold SCD and I haven't seen another offered since.



I do think it would be nice if there were more SCD collectors that had and liked to share awesome photos like many members here have for coins and tokens. At some point, I do need to invest in some photo equipment and experience myself which is on my list but I'm not sure when I'll be able to do.

telephoto1

A lot of the neat stuff is in strong hands... plus who wants to sell a rarity into a slow market unless they have to?

GoldenEgg

Also, a few years ago, coindeuce had a HK-511 R5 Cradle of the Union gold SCD and I haven't seen another offered since.

One of these popped up on eBay in early 2015 - it sold quickly! It was NGC MS64 I believe.

coindeuce

The HK-511 in gold that I owned was part of a 3 piece set that I had purchased from an old timer from the Albany area. I think he may have been the original owner. I reluctantly sold the set to Steve Tannenbaum, and after his untimely death, I assumed that the set remained in his estate. I do not know where or with whom the set is in possession of presently.

In the time frame from which I purchased the set (HK-510 / HK-511 / HK-512), I witnessed first hand another Mint State HK-511 in an NGC holder, which was priced way above the market. I do not know the current location of that medal either.

I am essentially in agreement with Keets opinion. It seems that a majority of the R-5 or better SoCalled issues are and have been in strong collector hands for several years. One can never predict when fresh material will appear in the market, however I am confident that rare issues will continue to occasionally trickle in to the market, and timing of opportunity is key. Vigilance is the operative expression. Like the opportunity I missed to obtain a nice AU condition HK-593a from Keets recently.

keets

Like the opportunity I missed



Sorry, buddy, I will go stand in the corner for a few minutes!!

OldeTowneCoinShoppe

For what it's worth, I bought an SC-303 in NGC MS-64 RB (and I think possibly undergraded) for a measly $20 at the recent FUN Show. SCDs are CHEAP right now.

keets

one expectation I had when the "Gang of Four" collaborated on the second edition of the SC$ Bible was that it would bring medals into the open market. I have had first hand accounts of collectors buying choice examples from the entire catalogue during the 80's and 90's for as little as $5-$10. that must have been nice!! doing the math back to 1963 and forward to 2008 means that a 30 year old collector inspired by the first book would have been 75 when the second was released. my reasoning was that those collectors would liquidate their holdings, but it started to happen prior to 2008, actually around 2002-3. Heritage helped when they held semi-annual auctions for Exonumia at Long Beach for a few years. rising prices caused a little So-Called Dollar market boom for almost a decade, but it has faded.



I suppose that was the first wave and that there will be others to follow as collectors age.

cladking

Originally posted by: keets

one expectation I had when the "Gang of Four" collaborated on the second edition of the SC$ Bible was that it would bring medals into the open market. I have had first hand accounts of collectors buying choice examples from the entire catalogue during the 80's and 90's for as little as $5-$10. that must have been nice!! doing the math back to 1963 and forward to 2008 means that a 30 year old collector inspired by the first book would have been 75 when the second was released. my reasoning was that those collectors would liquidate their holdings, but it started to happen prior to 2008, actually around 2002-3. Heritage helped when they held semi-annual auctions for Exonumia at Long Beach for a few years. rising prices caused a little So-Called Dollar market boom for almost a decade, but it has faded.



I suppose that was the first wave and that there will be others to follow as collectors age.

It wasn't at all unusual to find these in dealers stock books for $1 to $5. Of course you didn't see many of the rarities and most that you did see were worn but there were lots of bargains to be had.



Back in the '70's to '90's I'd have never dreamed these would get to the levels they are today. Ironically the internet has changed everything since mintages are so tiny and any of these can be googled up and then located in a matter of minutes. If I weren't so cheap I'd have sprung the $20 or more for the rarities.

ScarsdaleCoin

It got messed up when Goldberg didn't promote the Cosmique collection which had ultra rarities and top pops. The market on the high end sunk right after that filled by Baltimore auction of another large collection which sold half estimate

Zoins

Originally posted by: keets

one expectation I had when the "Gang of Four" collaborated on the second edition of the SC$ Bible was that it would bring medals into the open market. I have had first hand accounts of collectors buying choice examples from the entire catalogue during the 80's and 90's for as little as $5-$10. that must have been nice!! doing the math back to 1963 and forward to 2008 means that a 30 year old collector inspired by the first book would have been 75 when the second was released. my reasoning was that those collectors would liquidate their holdings, but it started to happen prior to 2008, actually around 2002-3. Heritage helped when they held semi-annual auctions for Exonumia at Long Beach for a few years. rising prices caused a little So-Called Dollar market boom for almost a decade, but it has faded.



I suppose that was the first wave and that there will be others to follow as collectors age.

I think one issue is that after the HK 2nd edition, HK seems to have stagnated. ATS has continued to move forward slabbing more pieces and SCHDs. Because of this, it seems that the SCD area is lacking the leadership it had during the 2nd edition.

keets

it seems that the SCD area is lacking the leadership it had during the 2nd edition.



I don't think leadership is the problem or the solution. my hunch, and it is only a hunch, is that the market for these interesting medals is quite small so the changes are more noticeable. there aren't that many major SC$ dealers who are well known and collectors aren't as willing to share information as they might be with more traditional Numismatic coins. when I sold what I termed the "So-Called Dollar Mini Hoard" back around 2004-5 it was a pretty big deal but only consisted of about 50-60 individual catalogue numbers. though the number was small the collector who assembled it had chosen some pretty key items and had done so anonymously.



that sort of thing seems typical, there aren't any individual collectors dumping hundreds or thousands of items at one sale.

topstuf

I useta like em but now I just sold my last one.



Can't use "so called" dollars to buy em.

Flatwoods

I had been watching this one all week.

I was hoping to win it but someone else wanted it more.

Looks like a nice example of a piece that you don't see often.



Ebay

Weiss

I got blown out of the water on an esoteric piece of numis-SCD-rea last week. 20% past my high bid that I thought was pretty solid.



I think it's always a thin market.

illini420

I have found that when selling these online or in major auctions, the market can indeed be very thin and that is why you see some of them selling insanely cheap sometimes, especially those listed in true auctions where the right buyer may not come across the listing in the week or two that it's available.



But for higher end, top pop pieces, there are strong buyers out there if you can find them.



I deal in quite a few of the so-called dollars, more and more of them as I learn more about them as they are quite addicting! When I have them at shows, many folks looks at them and seem to have no clue whatsoever what they are looking at. But for some, after talking about them for a minute or two and explaining the history of a few of the pieces, they become instantly hooked and often buy. Especially with the so-called dollars that were struck by the US Mint, those seem to be easy to sell, even to so-called non-collectors of so-calleds.

keets

you are correct about a thin market and a nice tactic if you can afford the case space at a show is to display a copy of the book. it really sucks 'em in!!

jonathanb

I see several factors in play here.

The US coin market has stratified over the past 10-20 years. There used to be a lot of auction houses; not we're pretty much down to three (Heritage, Stack's, Goldberg). I can't think of a fourth auction house that has regular sales with thousands of items.

Of those auction houses, Stack's is the only one that sells exonumia with any sort of frequency, and even then they don't seem to happy about it. This year is the first year in ages (20 years? 30 years?) that they aren't having a beginning-of-the-year Americana sale in January or February.

Exonumia has always been a niche market. Most pieces are inexpensive. eBay is currently reporting about 100,000 sold listings in their Exonumia categories. Roughly 95% of those listings sold for $100 or less Roughly 99% sold for $250 or less. That's tough when the large auction houses typically won't even talk to you unless you can consign items that are worth $500 or more apiece. I have about 4200 sale records for So-Called Dollars from those auctioneers in the past 10 years; about half of them were for $250 or less. The big players simply can't be bothered.

At the same time, the smaller players are mostly gone. There used to be at least a half dozen dealers with regular sales of exonumia. Not any more. Even Presidential has cut back, first from twice-yearly auctions to yearly, and now they've cut out the live portion entirely.

To fill the void, we now have eBay. For a while, eBay was fantastic. There is still a lot of good stuff on eBay, but it's incredibly difficult to find it. There were two big changes in the past few years that made a huge difference. One change was in eBay's pricing structure. They used to charge a sliding scale just to place a listing. That encouraged people to start their listings at a low price, and it also provided a bit of a filter so that people wouldn't list anything unless it had at least a chance of selling. Now most listings on eBay are free, which does the exact opposite. It encourages people to flood eBay with garbage ("Hey, maybe I can find someone who will buy this") since it doesn't cost anything to try. It also encourages people to list items with a very high starting price ("Hey, maybe I can find a sucker who will buy this").

eBay does have a dedicated category for So-Called Dollars, with about 3200 listings at the moment. Of those, 2900 are listed at fixed price, and over 1000 are from the a single seller.

Relistings on eBay are typically also free, so as a buyer I'm looking at the same stuff over and over that I didn't want in the first place.

The second major change happened about 2 years ago, when Google adjusted their algorithms and mostly stopped indexing eBay listings. As a seller, I used to be able to get 10-20 views on most any decent listing. Now I regularly have listings with fewer than a handful views. It's hard to get bids when nobody is looking at your listings.

All of that feeds back to the sellers. I've got piles of stuff that I _could_ list on eBay... but it's hard to do that when I'm worried about getting eyeballs. That leaves me with listing only those low-end pieces that I don't mind if they sell cheap... which in turn adds to the noise and discourages other people from looking.

I personally have close to 200 So-Called Dollar that I'd be happy to sell for $20-60 apiece, if I had a place to sell them. It's painful to list them on eBay when a $10 or $20 difference makes a huge impact on a $20 or $30 item.

Getting back to the question at hand, I'm going to say that the main issue is the price point. Most of the interesting exonumia, including So-Called Dollars, is in the $20-200 price range. that excludes the junk, and also excludes a lot of pieces that are legitimately rare. I don't know of ANY marketplace that currently handles pieces in that price range in a way that is fair to both the buyers and the sellers.

shorecoll

Interesting analysis Jonathan.

CoinZip

Its all about time & Timing ....

Zoins

To be more clear on the above, I think there are a few things.



Promotion: in a thin market, some news / promotion to reach new potential collectors can help grow the collector base. During HK 2nd Edition, there was a lot of promotion around the book and upcoming auctions. Those helped but ongoing promotion may be needed to help keep collector interest.



Collectors: it seems many of the top SCD collections aren't discussed the way coins and tokens are here. There are some photos on scd.com and s-cd.com but the photos are not of the same quality that are generally posted here to generate more interest. Photos that highlight the quality of the piece more than the variety could be useful. A regular poster like Broadstruck, Bill Jones, CAF, AB, etc. could do wonders for SCDs I think.



Pricing: given the thin market and evolution of the bay, many of the nicer SCDs are sold as BINs. These BINs are much higher than the prices for lower quality pieces that are on the market and the likely market price sold as an auction. Given the thin market, higher BINs may be need to offset the longer carry costs. Because of this pricing, the nicer pieces that are available may primarily attract more advanced SCD collectors that have their own established price estimates.



I'm not sure what the solution is to increase collector interest, but I think some collectors like the ones named posting nice photos and histories would help get more collectors interested which could then lead to more news promotion and then more collectors and demand.



One reason this may be difficult is that many advanced collectors may not have the inclination to publicize their pieces. One effect of publicizing collections is the creation of more competition in a rarity market.

jonathanb

FWIW, we'd happy upgrade the pictures at http://www.so-calleddollars.com if someone submits an improvement. On the other hand, one of the odd things I've found while working on that site is that a better medal doesn't always produce a better picture. For example, some of the nicest pieces are in holders that are hard to photograph or can only be photographed with unsightly prongs. I've also seen some pieces with luster or toning that was so gorgeous that the legends were hard to read as a result. That was definitely not what I expected...

TopographicOceans

I only have one, sort of as an honorable mention in my type set.
I paid $46 for it. Though it is kind of cool, I don't have any plans to buy any more.

jcping

If PCGS included the SCDs in coin facts, this might attract more collectors to study it.

Collectors need easy to access information, eg, rarities, pop report, auction data etc. of course, a set registry could help a lot.

BG

Very nice points raised throughout this thread.









My one and only:

keets

Promotion

Collectors

Pricing



I don't think promotion is the answer and despite admiration for certain members here I doubt that if they actively tried to promote that it would have more than a temporal affect on interest. To that end, I have always tried to post high quality images of medal, both raw and encapsulated, whenever it seems appropriate. that might be one of the various weekend-type-threads, a new purchase, a question about an item or any of a number of reasons. I can't say how much of that has been "promotion" but it is mainly due to the simple fact that it is an area where I devote much of my attention. the effect on interest has been negligible, much like Broadstruck posting CWT's probably hasn't driven that niche upwards. the best promotion was the second edition book which increased sales and interest, but that is typical of any book.



of the three points to your post, I believe Jonathan may have explained things with an understanding that is quite clear --- the lower prices of most items tends to keep them from the venues which might otherwise list them for sale. a troubling thing for me is when a dealer with no actual knowledge or previous experience with the medals starts selling them. they almost always refer to the price list included in the second edition, a more than 10 year old price which doesn't really take into account quality or true rarity, at least not from my viewpoint.

Zoins

Perhaps an answer to promotions, photos and auctions would be a dedicated dealer auction site like Steve Hayden's civilwartokens.com site. Steve's site combines marketing, auctions, nice photos, and historical prices all in one place. Perhaps the work could be reduced by setting up a joint venture with Steve as Steve already has a site and sells SCDs on it.



Regarding posters here, I have seen the effect of certain posters here result in an increased number of collectors or posters of certain pieces. Absent numismatic press articles, I think posters here and elsewhere do help but limited to the audience here. If there were nicer photos and more activity on scd.com forums, that may help as well.



Regarding quoting the HK price guide. That was a two-edged sword when HK 2nd edition was released. I think it helped with prices of SCDs at the time but it needs to be kept up to date to remain relevant given the thin market. That being said, unless it or another price guide kept up to date, it's hard to prevent others from quoting it because there's really no other source and it exists.

keets

Steve Hayden's website isn't very helpful for So-Called Dollars, a much better "Tool" is to receive an e-mail from Jeff Shevlin or to frequebnt the auctions of PCAC. Jeff is probably the best current asset, he regularly does shows and is a Market Maker at a level past all others, specializing exclusively in these medals. still, his offerings tend to be spotty as of late and his website isn't very popular with dedicated collectors: he offers a message board exclusively for So-Called Dollars and it is worse than SleepyHollow.



in the end I don't believe a marketing campaign is what would solve the problem I have attempted to address. all the different things which have been done or suggested might be fruitless simply because the medals are genuinely scarce/rare to a point where they CAN'T be offered because they don't exist in any large, problem free better grades. perhaps it will be a slow trickle as the tightly held nicest medals come to market when their owners reach the end of the line, either dying or choosing to sell to settle their estates before that happens.

Zoins

I think it could be useful if Jeff and Steve have a joint venture to use Jeff's SCD knowledge and inventory combined with Steve's website and auctions.



I don't think that scarcity is necessarily an impediment if one considers markets for other scarce items like territorials and patterns. However, many nice territorials and patterns are known and sold with nice photos and TrueViews.

Pioneer

In response to the original question.... it may be that sellers who have nice SCDs aren't selling them... many of the rare items are being held I think. I certainly have many nice ones that I am not interested in selling since it took me a decade to find them. With that said, Jeff Shevlin's cases have a number of nice SCDs for sale when he sets up at major shows. I also agree with Jonathan's assessment.

Zoins

It's worth noting that the recent Steve Hayden auction for CWTs went very well.

Zoins

Originally posted by: Weiss
I got blown out of the water on an esoteric piece of numis-SCD-rea last week. 20% past my high bid that I thought was pretty solid.

I think it's always a thin market.

Good to hear that some parts of the market are going strong.

In thin markets, a single bidder entering or leaving can make a big difference. Actually, this can be the case in non-thin markets as well.