Hypothetical Question on Creating a Hoard of Coins
erwindoc
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How hard would it be for one collector or one group of collectors/investors to buy up such a quantity of one type of coin that they were able to influence the price and cause artificial supply and demand problems? Could they be acquired without too many people noticing??? I recently looked over the PCGS top 100 coins and the some of the mintages were genuinely low!
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I think it would be doable with classic commemoratives, many common later date 19th and early 20th century proof coins, and ultra low mintage moderns (e.g. first spouse coins).
I think it would be difficult but doable for some issues, however at some point it will become noticed.
My Collection of Old Holders
Never a slave to one plastic brand will I ever be.
I have thought about that from time to time. It would be easy to get to a certain point but unless you have a lot of people acting for you at a similar time, it will be hard to be unnoticed and driving your own price up.
The other problem is that people have to want whatever you’re hoarding. A very low mintage item that’s inexpensive now probably won’t be missed much if you corner the market. But if it did, whoever else might have some would capitalize on it before you did most likely.
Unless you have the resources of DeBeers who keeps diamond prices artificially high.
Might be best to focus one one grade in particular too
That is an interesting hypothesis, and has been discussed here before. In fact, there were some notable attempts at just such a venture... I do not recall the details, but a couple of cases have been discussed in the past decade or so.... no one has been particularly successful that I know of... Cheers, RickO
Demand is not static, and available supply for already released coins is never evenly priced. You drive prices up? Interested buyers decrease while more holders become sellers. As you try to corner the dollar averaged cost of your hoard rises. You can end up with an on-paper gain. So what? You can't off-load them as the demand isn't there, and you crash the market if you push. If you plan on holding the inventory for long periods, you still risk losses to inflation and the opportunity cost of your tied-up capital. It's why smart players are careful about buying stuff to let it sit on eBay etc.
This hypothetical question IMO is not doable.