The Business of Numismatics: January 2025 Greysheet Editor's Letter

Like many readers, my “collecting gene” causes me to be interested in categories beyond numismatics. In my role here at Whitman Brands, I have always felt that it is important to have an idea of what is going on in other collectible markets, and how they interact with and influence the behavior of the rare coin market. This also extends to the biggest market of them all, the equity market. Since I have recently written about the equity market, I’ll only briefly pass along a few facts. Writing this in early December, the S&P 500 index has set a fresh all-time high 55 times in the calendar year, reaching 6,086.00 at its peak. 2024 is a historic year for stocks, and 2025 will be challenged to follow its performance.

Going back to other collectible categories, I recently stopped in to the sports card store in my neighborhood. The previous ownership had coins and cards, but the new owners have converted into solely cards. Like many, baseball cards were my original love, with my elementary years filled with memorizing the Beckett price guide and making early Excel spreadsheets of my “inventory.” I like to chat with the workers at the shop as to how their business is and their observations on the market. While I am not a card collector, I know what is happening in all the major sports, so I enjoy looking at cards and learning about the price performance of the most popular stars. I am aware of the various aggregator and auction websites that are used for price discovery, but there is not one single source that is referenced when pricing cards. When I inquire about how they priced this card or that, I sense that the reply is somewhere between “best guess” and mildly confident that the price is not either too high or too cheap. I have found this to be the case with multiple card dealers. It seems the most active part of the card market is the trading of unopened sealed boxes, which are then opened in hopes of pulling the rarest autograph or parallel card in that given set. To me, this has caused the market to be very top heavy, in which a handful of cards from each set are white hot, while the other 200 to 300 cards are essentially worthless. To me, this could create a sustainability problem long term.

The art market, meanwhile, has experienced some contraction. Public auction sales through the first half of 2024 were down 26% year over year, and of the total lots offered in the benchmark May auction period, 32% sold below their low estimates. The annual art market report released by the Swiss bank UBS and Art Basel revealed that the average annual expenditure by high-net-worth individuals was down 32% in 2023. Usually, when the equity markets are producing double-digit returns much of that excess money flows into fine art, making these decreases a bit surprising.

All of this brings me back to the rare coin market and its advantages, namely much better price stability and much more transparent and data-driven pricing. Since they are collectibles, coins and paper money will never function like stocks (nor should they), but the tighter buy-sell spreads that exist compared to other collectible categories are an oft-overlooked advantage. Add to this the breadth and depth of the coin market worldwide, I see no reason why the long-term growth opportunities for rare coins is not overwhelmingly positive.

Sincerely,

Patrick Ian Perez, patrick@whitmanbrands.com