Whatever floats your boat!

[Roman Collector]

A 1975 proof FDR dime without the "S" mint mark will be sold at Great Collections. The auction firm estimates a hammer price of $500,000 USD. It's not my thing, but there's no right or wrong way to collect. 

[Bonshaw]

9 minutes ago, Roman Collector said:

A 1975 proof FDR dime without the "S" mint mark will be sold at Great Collections. The auction firm estimates a hammer price of $500,000 USD. It's not my thing, but there's no right or wrong way to collect. 

 

Worth about as much as one NGC XF Eid Mar denarius, and there are more Eid Mar denarii around than 1975 no mark dimes. But yeah, not my cup of tea.

 

 

Edited September 9 by Bonshaw

[Nerosmyfavorite68]

Too bad giphy never works for me here, and it's too much trouble to import from the phone:

Used Cars, "These prices are too..."

[Orange Julius]

Not sure why but this reminds me of the new story years ago about the son needing money, dumping his father’s coin collection onto a CoinStar machine. 😬 I wonder how many highly prized coins float through people’s hands without them knowing…

[CPK]

Takes all sorts, I guess!

[David Atherton]

Agreed, there is no right way or wrong way to collect ... but still, some things are head scratchers. 

[Curtisimo]

Wow! You could build an entire Aureus collection for that! It’s an interesting coin but definitely not my thing.

[DonnaML]

It seems the family bought the coin in 1978 for $18,200 and have kept it in a bank vault ever since. The increase in value certainly outstripped inflation. If only I'd had $18,200 to spare back then. . . . Not that it would ever have occurred to me to spend it on that!

[Spargrodan]

3 hours ago, DonnaML said:

It seems the family bought the coin in 1978 for $18,200 and have kept it in a bank vault ever since. The increase in value certainly outstripped inflation. If only I'd had $18,200 to spare back then. . . . Not that it would ever have occurred to me to spend it on that!

In hindsight a better investment than putting the money in a madrass for sure but very random and quite some luck. I just checked what $18.200 would have given you if you would have put that money into S&P500, it seems about the same value increase, actually a bit more than the coin but way less risky.

Edited September 9 by Spargrodan

[Heliodromus]

9 hours ago, Roman Collector said:

A 1975 proof FDR dime without the "S" mint mark will be sold at Great Collections. The auction firm estimates a hammer price of $500,000 USD. It's not my thing, but there's no right or wrong way to collect. 

No, but I expect that in a few hundred years our ancients will have held their value, and coins like this will be derided as fly-speck variants.

 

[ominus1]

....if i ever have to ask for a dime, that's the one im asking for...^^ :P...i think i have a few of those around...:D

[John Conduitt]

I always wonder with these stock market graphs whether they tell the true story. Yes the S&P has grown as the graph shows but it is a list of 500 big companies. Presumably, it is not the same 500 companies today as it was in 1975. If you invested in the 500 companies from 1975, some would now be worth nothing. So unless you were able to ditch those at their peak and switch to a new company you somehow knew was going to last until 2024, you wouldn't get this growth.

[Al Kowsky]

I remember collecting Roosevelt dimes as a school boy & finding a complete set from circulation finds, but stopped collecting them in 1965 when they were no longer made of 90% silver ☺️. I sold the set in 1970, after completing my military obligation, for a little over melt value of the silver. Roosevelt dime have always been a popular coin to collect, but someone paying 500 K for a freak error seems unfathomable to me 🤔....

[-monolith-]

8 hours ago, Spargrodan said:

In hindsight a better investment than putting the money in a madrass for sure but very random and quite some luck. I just checked what $18.200 would have given you if you would have put that money into S&P500, it seems about the same value increase, actually a bit more than the coin but way less risky.

Exactly !!!!!! That's what I tell the precious metal bullion hoarders that are bragging about current gold prices. You would have made a larger profit from the stock market with the same initial investment over the same span of time.  

[-monolith-]

I have a coin with a missing "s" can I sell it for $500,000.

[kirispupis]

You could buy 25 of these dimes for this Mickey Mantle card sold for $12.6M

What I find even crazier is the $5.9M spent for a Stephen Curry National Treasures card.

In that case, the manufacturer deliberately produced a limited number in order to drive the price up. It possesses no history or real meaning other than to serve as a form of legalized gambling.

So, yeah - I guess whatever floats your boat.

[Bonshaw]

2 hours ago, John Conduitt said:

I always wonder with these stock market graphs whether they tell the true story. Yes the S&P has grown as the graph shows but it is a list of 500 big companies. Presumably, it is not the same 500 companies today as it was in 1975. If you invested in the 500 companies from 1975, some would now be worth nothing. So unless you were able to ditch those at their peak and switch to a new company you somehow knew was going to last until 2024, you wouldn't get this growth.

The S&P 500 is rebalanced quarterly, both in the amount of each company, and swapping companies in and out. These changes are public. The index tracks the evolution of these stocks *after* they are announced, so if you disregard taxes and transaction fees, tracking the S&P500 is indeed possible.

Taxes and transaction fees are a different story. Even S&P500 index funds have to distribute capital gains and dividends. And there are transaction fees associated with swapping components. 

If you are in a tax-sheltered account, you don't pay taxes. That leaves transaction fees. In an index fund, those can be quite small, the Vanguard expense ratio for the S&P500 is only like 0.05%. 0.1% is more common.

So, with that caveat, yes - in a tax-sheltered account, you can track the S&P500 to within better than 0.1% a year.

[Spargrodan]

4 hours ago, John Conduitt said:

I always wonder with these stock market graphs whether they tell the true story. Yes the S&P has grown as the graph shows but it is a list of 500 big companies. Presumably, it is not the same 500 companies today as it was in 1975. If you invested in the 500 companies from 1975, some would now be worth nothing. So unless you were able to ditch those at their peak and switch to a new company you somehow knew was going to last until 2024, you wouldn't get this growth.

I realize I wasn't clear earlier, what I meant is that if you had invested in an index fund tracking the S&P 500, you likely would have done quite well. However, as @Bonshaw mentioned, there are other factors to take into account, such as taxes, account fees, fund management fees, and regional considerations.

[CPK]

2 hours ago, kirispupis said:

You could buy 25 of these dimes for this Mickey Mantle card sold for $12.6M

What I find even crazier is the $5.9M spent for a Stephen Curry National Treasures card.

In that case, the manufacturer deliberately produced a limited number in order to drive the price up. It possesses no history or real meaning other than to serve as a form of legalized gambling.

So, yeah - I guess whatever floats your boat.

It's kind of amazing, when you think about it, that our hobby is as affordable as it is. I was watching Heritage's recent sports memorabilia auction, just out of curiosity. Seeing baseball cards, signed balls, etc. hammer for hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, when even a top quality portrait denarius of Julius Caesar can be had for well under $10k puts things in perspective a bit. 

[kirispupis]

32 minutes ago, CPK said:

It's kind of amazing, when you think about it, that our hobby is as affordable as it is. I was watching Heritage's recent sports memorabilia auction, just out of curiosity. Seeing baseball cards, signed balls, etc. hammer for hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, when even a top quality portrait denarius of Julius Caesar can be had for well under $10k puts things in perspective a bit. 

It is amazing. I assume that all the regulations turn people off from ancients collecting, because if only 1% of those who collect modern coins switched to ancients, our hobby would be completely unaffordable.

Another example: not long ago my son sold a sports card at auction for $14,000. It was not old. He'd pulled it from a pack a few months earlier. The guy who bought it then turned around and sold it for $30,000. The new owner then tried to sell it even higher, but the player didn't have as great of a season, so he wound up selling it for $3,000.

Although some speculation already exists in ancient coins, I really hope it never gets that bad.

[Spargrodan]

43 minutes ago, kirispupis said:

It is amazing. I assume that all the regulations turn people off from ancients collecting, because if only 1% of those who collect modern coins switched to ancients, our hobby would be completely unaffordable.

Another example: not long ago my son sold a sports card at auction for $14,000. It was not old. He'd pulled it from a pack a few months earlier. The guy who bought it then turned around and sold it for $30,000. The new owner then tried to sell it even higher, but the player didn't have as great of a season, so he wound up selling it for $3,000.

Although some speculation already exists in ancient coins, I really hope it never gets that bad.

Unfortunately I think slabbing coins is not helping and is directing the market in this direction.