The Business Of Numismatics: December 2024 Greysheet Editor's Letter

We have arrived at the final issue of 2024, as the years continue to fly by. 2024 is the sixth full year (along with five months in 2018) that we have published the Monthly Greysheet, and it is our flagship product that we are constantly improving. We hope readers have found our “Featured Pricing” segment, as it gives us an opportunity to show a sample of some of the other projects we are feverishly working on.

The end of a calendar year gives us the opportunity to look back and evaluate the market. 2024 can certainly be considered a positive year for the rare coin business. Not only helped by the incredible performance of the gold and silver spot price, the demand for collector coins both vintage and modern has remained steady throughout the year. At the handful of major coin shows that I attended I observed solid business, especially on the wholesale side. While this has been the trend for some time, shows are increasingly events where dealers go to source large amounts of inventory to take back and sell to their retail customers via a wide range of commercial channels. There are a huge number of collectors now using apps and other social-media adjacent venues to buy their coins online. The marketplace, eBay, no longer has a monopoly on rare coin e-commerce. Every major auction firm runs weekly or monthly sales, offering coins from $50 to $50,000 or more. This is unequivocally positive for the business. Yes, seeing rare coins in person is the ideal way to buy, but the amount of assurance afforded by most third-party grading services makes buying online mostly problem-free. Should most shows move to a more dealer-centric/wholesale model? The next few years will go a long way toward answering this.

Looking at major U.S. coin auctions, we did not have as many “headline” coins sell this year, although I should state that this article is being written a week prior to the Stack’s Bowers November Showcase sale. So far no coin has sold above $2 million in 2024, and we’ve had four coins break the $1 million barrier. One of these was sold by Stack’s Bowers, the Proof 1825/4/1 Half Eagle, while three were sold by Heritage: the Proof 1855 Kellog & Co. $50 gold piece, the 1860 Half Eagle pattern (J-271), and another territorial gold piece, the 1851 Schultz & Co. $5. The most interesting aspect of this grouping is that they are all not what would be considered “regular issue” Federal U.S. coins. They are special strikes, patterns, and territorial (or private) pieces. I believe this shows the level of scholarship among U.S. collectors, to appreciate the rarity and historical significance of these more esoteric items. The amount of reference material available and specialist dealers enable these purchases to happen. As I have long said, the more information about a topic there is, the more willing a buyer is going to be to part with substantial funds to acquire a rare coin.

We sincerely thank everyone who has used our services to conduct business and/or add to their collection over the past 12 months. We are constantly motivated to be unequaled in the pricing and catalog data that we provide. As we continue to branch out into world coins and paper money, we hope to soon have a comprehensive suite of tools for dealers and collectors to utilize, making the universe of coin collecting that much more navigable. Have a great 2025!

Sincerely,

Patrick Ian Perez, patrick@whitmanbrands.com