Summer is a slow time for numismatics, ....... or is it?

Clio · July 23, 2026 1:16PM

Anyone here ever want to put numbers behind a notion but just can't really put your finger on it?

On a bit of a whim, I wanted to look into my purchase trends when buying coinage across the years. We've all heard people say "Summer is slow for coin sales because people are on summer vacation with family" or some other comparable statement to support summer being generally slow.

Now there's obviously a massive amount this can change from person to person. If you only attend the Summer FUN show each year, I will suspect your spending in summer to be higher on average. In this particular info dump I am using my personal collection spreadsheet to analyze. This means someone who rarely attends coin shows and when I do it's not consistent year to year. The vast majority of my purchasing is online through auction houses, ebay, or direct on coin business sites.

The following is the data from ~7 years of 454 coin purchases. A little less than 64 coins per year on average. This however already is misleading as my coin purchases have steadily increased over the years. I suspect I have some of you reading to thank for this.

So, first thing I wanted to look at was what months have the most purchases. I generally purchase only to add coins to the personal collection or when I come across coins I think are priced right for me to flip and then reinvest funds into my collection. Generally, I am not out buying collections all at once, most are single purchases.

So straight off we can see that yes in fact the summer months seem to be lower on average. Already I can tell that this exercise is mostly just me discovering once again I don't have sufficient data to come to any valuable conclusions. I can't help it; I like looking at the numbers.

January stands out to me as an odd one because I know good and well in the world coin space, we have several large auctions going on I am always interested in. This may be that I just rarely win the auctions in January.

Ahhh ha! While the # of coins in January is the lowest month of coins purchased it is easily the highest cost per coin. This would make sense given the material is nicer and I can't afford as much.

I wish I had a more satisfying conclusion but again I just don't really have the data. Does anyone here feel like the months can influence their buying frequency? Or is it mostly up to chance?

pruebas · July 23, 2026 2:44PM

Very interesting. I never considered tabulating this data for myself.

The higher percentage of purchases in the spring and fall is explainable because these are the "auction seasons" for coin auctions. The spring season (and fall season) is a thing and many auctions cluster around March/April and September. August may be due to having so many coins being offered at either the ANA show or the ANA auctions.

And of course, January would be accounted for all the higher value coins offered during the NY auctions (which in the 1990s was in December, so maybe that is still reflected in your data).

Sapyx · July 23, 2026 8:35PM

I suspect it is to a large extent directed by the numismatic calendar you are involved with.

For example: where I live there is one annual coin show which has been running for a couple of decades, and is almost always held in May. So if you were to look at my stats, May would be a huge peak in terms of both number of coins bought and amount of money spent, as that event is my once-a-year splurge.

Other one-off events are likely to skew the data towards one particular month. For example, back in March 2009 I bought a 10 kilo bag of mixed world coins, and ended up keeping 418 of the coins - giving a noticeable spike on "number of coins" for that particular month I bought that bag. But you don't see that same spike in the "money spent" data, because those coins averaged out at just a few cents each.

atom · July 24, 2026 5:25AM

You ought to get the auction houses’ calendar of sales by month and compare.

Clio · July 24, 2026 5:38AM

@atom said:
You ought to get the auction houses’ calendar of sales by month and compare.

I think considering what y'all have pointed out to me about Auction houses suggests that seeing my buying on ebay only would be far more interesting.

angelo43 · July 24, 2026 2:04PM

I tend to be big buyer in January for the International in New York and related auctions and also at the ANA and the related auctions

Summer is a slow time for numismatics, ....... or is it?

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