Tell a short story of a coin you bought and then sometime later the price dropped DRASTICALLY.
MWallace
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Here's mine. When it was discovered that the 2007 Washington $1 was missing the edge lettering on some of the pieces, the price quickly rose to $600-$700. Too much for me at the time so I waited to see if the price would drop. The price did in fact begin to drop. When they got to $125 I decided it was time to buy. Today they can be bought for less than $20. Ugh!!
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I haven't had this happen yet. I have had it go the other way, wherein I parted with a coin and the price went up drastically. Looking forward to hearing others chime in.
That's just as bad.
When I was a yung'un back in late 1979/early1980 I spent several hundreds of dollars on silver coins... welp we all know how that went.....
Yep. I got the 2025 Proof Set from the mint when they came out, parted with the penny for ~$40 and come to find out they are now selling for ~$200. Learning experience.
Purchased a roll of 1989 "No P" quarters for thousands back in early 1990. Sold at 5c on the dollar a couple of decades later.
(That didn't really happen, but it could have, almost- but not really.)
I have not had that experience fortunately. Have had it go the other way several times though. Purchased a coin at HA auction for $3800, and after the value kept climbing and now it stands at $11,500. Another coin purchase was at $5,000 and over the last five years it's now valued over $11,000 and has since CAC'd too.
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I paid $90 for my "godless" dollar. Sure there were others I've forgotten.
Bought a Sacagawea reverse pattern for $4000 at a FUN show, finest known at MS68.
Prices shot up shortly thereafter - another MS68 sold for around $30k at HA so I sold mine for $27.5 - same coin now brings about 1/3 of that.
A while back, I hand picked about 20 of my favorite commem halves, including all of the most valuable issues in MS 65-67. A few years later, they were worth about half of what I paid.
I've found the best way to buy Commemorative silver is in a PCGS holder with a CAC sticker.
Silver Roosevelt dimes have a 20 year history of only going down in value. I once sold a 1954S MS67FB pop 5/0
at the time to a type set collector for $3500. Today a 1954S MS67FB pop 41/13 can be had for a couple hundred.
I used to collect key dates. I bought a 1932-D & 1932-S 25C’s when the prices showed a big decline from the peak some 20 years ago. The problem for me was the decline continued after I bought them. And continued to the point the valuations declined another 25% from the peak prices. I waited years for what turned out to be a slow recovery, but sold eventually at a loss.
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I worked on a vegetable stand as a kid back in the 1960's and found many Jefferson nickels to fill the slots in my collection, but I could never find the 1950-D. So, I saved my money and my mom drove me to a coin dealer, and I bought a BU 1950-D for $15.50. The price sagged for decades and may still not have recovered to that level.
But sometimes luck evens things out - in a vending machine at work back in 1991, out popped an AU 1950-D nickel in my change!
I was buying PCGS Morgan Dollars in MS65 for $365 each.in 1989...bought about 8....i just sold these rattlers on ebay last year for $249 each....funny how coins were pitched as an investment back in 80's and 90's...IRA, Coin Funds, Etc...some of those folks probably did not do so well...
Most collectors don't realize it, but a number of very important type coins were much more expensive in 2012 than they would be a few years later. I bought this 1808 quarter eagle in what became the heigth of the market.
Then the prices dropped by tens of thousands.
Of course when the prices drop like that on a really scarce item, there not no much to buy. The people who have them are not going to sell a very scarce coins at a depressed price. The one offer I did have was from a person who had one in a lower straight grade with a big scratch on it. He offered to trade his coin plus he would pay me $20,000. That was a firm pass.
I still have the piece, and it has recovered to close what I have in it, but I'm still underwater after more than a decade.
On the other hand, I have this piece which has gone up a lot since I bought it.
The lesson is, even "blue chip" coins can lose money, even years after you bought them.
My story is probably yet to come, as I just spent $5000+ on a relatively common $20 gold Double Eagle!
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1804 Dime in PCGS 45 paid like 54k for one, later several more came out and price plummeted to about 30 or so.
Bought several 69DCAM Eisenhower dollars for $700-$2,500 each when they were just hitting the market…as they were extremely ‘rare’ back then….and are practically a dime a dozen now…. I gave most of them away as Christmas presents so I didn’t have to see them any more to remind me of the foolish mistakes I made buying them…..
I used to mostly just trade and the worst I ever did was a long series of trades starting from near nothing that got me up to a ratty 1964 mint set worth about $5 at the time. I traded this for a remarkable gem red 1907 cent. I left a lot of money on the table but that wasn't the problem. The cent spotted in just several months so I was left holding the bag and a 20c coin.
I've never bought anything "hot" or "popular" and have been lucky not to have any real losses. Of course it's pretty painful to have to redeem a roll of cents I paid $1 for in 1968 dollars for 50c in today's money.
Half of my Liberty Nickels I purchased in PC 6 holders. The bottom dropped out of the series in this grade starting in 2016. Fortunately, I didn't buy any of the expensive coins of the series before the crash. The 1896 in PC 6 around 2006 was a pop 4 coin, and I knew someone who owned a complete set in this grade. Paid $17K for an all there 1896. He sold several years later.
Even at the end of 2014, it was a $15K coin. It was a $6K coin in the fall of 2016. Was offered one for $6K and I passed. It now is a pop 31 coin and the last one was auctioned 18 months ago for around $1,700.
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When I was 16 (1968) I made my 1st expensive coin purchase. I bought a 1913 Quarter Eagle for $35. Now that was a lot when you consider my hourly wage at a fast-food restaurant was 35 cents an hour and I made a whole 5 cent on every GRIT newspaper I sold. I still have the gold 2 1/2 - dollar coin and probably will never sell it. I don't have a downside to this purchase other than it took me over 100 hours to earn $35 (before taxes). This gold coin is what got me hooked on collecting coins. I'm 73 and still love this hobby.
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Not a coin, but paper. I am working on a very niche set and saw a high-end note at Stack’s that was higher grade than I needed, but it was the first example I’d seen (including looking back at auction records) and it was a great note. I expected it to sell for around $700 (being generous) but was also just bidding to win since there was no real price history. The auction was held while I was at work, so I had a little audience watching as I kept bidding until I dropped out around $2000… I just couldn’t bring myself to pay that much. Maybe two or three weeks later another example—really nice but a grade or two lower, perfectly fine for me—popped up on eBay. I won it for under $500. Haven’t seen another one in the 1 1/2 years since.
I don't think I've ever been really "buried" in a coin... the only one that I can recall not doing really well at recouping my money on was the first 1909-S VDB I purchased raw from a LCS around 2005. It was raw and looked to be XF. Local guy sent it to ANACS and it came back in XF40... in an old soapbox holder at the time. At that point I had $1100 total in the coin with grading fees and shipping... fast forward ~ 5 years and I ended up selling for ~$950... that was my realization that 09-S VDB's weren't really all that "rare". Shortly after that I attended my first major coin show and I saw over a couple of dozen... quite the reckoning after hearing about this mystical cent during my childhood... bubble... burst... lol!
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I was doing a Registry Wad Nickle set, and the last coin I needed was a 1945 TDR.
Wow, I took a big loss on that. lesson learned.
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In my early collecting days (2005-2006), I was collecting commems and started a set of the most boring coins imaginable, early gold commems. I didn't understand grading quality within a grade yet, nor did I understand CAC.
I bought a 1905 Lewis & Clark in N65 from a Heritage auction for $9,600. I think I sold the coin 1-2 years later for about $5-6k as the market declined rapidly and I bought a very marginal coin in a very unloved series.
Two side comments on that set:
On the plus side in building that set, I later picked a Pan Pac $2.5 in an PCGS 64 OGH from a coin shop in London for about $400. The owner also had a 1926 Sesquicentennial which he valued for several thousand, clearly mixing up the coins. I recall stating that I thought he may be mistaken but he would have none of it, so I bought the Pan Pac and sold it to a dealer for a nice profit.
On the severe downside, I had another MS66 Pan-Pac $2.5 that I sold to a dealer in New Orleans. I shipped the coin, uninsured, and it was stolen.
This was all 15-20 years or so. Amazing how naive and stupid I was. The losses on that set culminating on the stolen coin nearly drove me out of the hobby. I happened to go to Dahlonega while visiting my mom in Atlanta, and got hooked again, this time on rare date gold. That wave carried me for the better part of the next decade to follow until I became disinterest or dissuaded by the market and how controlled the access to coins was and leapt into my current and likely forever focus on Latin American crowns.
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The 50-D was in my dreams as a kid too. Never found one!
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I can't remember the exact prices, but in 2005 I bought 2 sets of Wisconsin high and low leaf error quarters in NGC-66. One of the sets was a 3-coin set containing a regular Wisconsin quarter and one high and one low leaf errors. Prices plummeted later and I sold all of the coins for less than half of what I had paid. But I have had many other wins that kept me in coin collecting. Win some, Lose some.
This is why I stay away from old red copper. My experience has been that some of red pieces have been dipped and are not stable. The change color or spot within a year or less.
I can't give specific numbers but in 1989 i was building my first slabbed type set. I think I paid somewhere in the range of $200 to $300 hundred dollars for a trio of Silver dollars. a medical emegency in 1991 required me to sell all my slab coins. i think i got about $50 to $60 buck per coin. james
In 2008, I bought a lovely, original 1804 quarter dollar that graded VG10 at NGC. No long afterwards, a hoard was broken up and there were suddenly dozens of 1804 quarters on the market. The price dropped 30-40% pretty quickly. I don't know if that amount constitutes a "drastic" price drop, but it's not often that you can buy a better date Bust coin and immediately watch the price drop significantly, even in lower collector grades.
I just bought almost 100 MS-70/PR-70 ASE's when silver was $113.00 an ounce
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Not a coin I bought but a coin I (made) at PCGS.
In the early 2000's I was doing a lot of Proof Set searching to fill out a set and submitted two 1973-S Proof Jefferson Nickels that both graded 69DCam. At the time the pop was about 30 or less so I kept one and sold the other for about $170. Less than 6 months later someone made a huge submission and the pop exploded to well over 100 with the attendant price drop to about $35.
That's the problem with low pop Modern issues.
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A few of us others got the same thing, I get it
I could add my type set of the "old commemorative half dollars." I built the set over time about 30 years ago in MS-63 to 66 with the average coming in at MS-64. It's worth less now than I paid for it, and I was paying Grey Sheet prices at the time. If I include the Pan Pac $50 gold coins, I'd come out ahead, but the half dollar set is a loser.
I had a 1881/0 5$ that seemed to lose half of its value overnight back in the 80s. Might have something to do with the staple scratch I put on it pulling it out of a 2x2 but it stung regardless
11.5$ Southern Dollars, The little “Big Easy” set
I bought an 1868-S Proof set for $20 based upon Coinage Magazine predicting great things for that set. 62 years later, it's worth $13.
There is also the 1939-D Walker in PCGS MS 66 with splashes of color on the obverse and a nice, lightly toned reverse that I purchased from @MFeld for $650 at least 16 years ago. It's now about $450. It's a stunning coin, but CAC would not sticker it. I stopped collecting late date Walkers at that point. I'm glad I bought the coin because it is stunning, but I'm also glad I stopped collecting late-date Walkers in high grades.