Buying graded gold

[jim4silver]

I stopped by one of my coin dealers today and he had just purchased a nice hoard of ungraded St. Gaudens. All but a few were in MS condition (the few not MS had been cleaned in some manner) and he said he was gonna send them off to be graded, and he expected MS 64+ on each. He let me look at them and they were awesome coins. I am by no means an expert on grading coins, so it was cool to see the difference between a cleaned coin and one that was "pure" so to speak. When you put them side by side it is easy to see.

Seeing these coins today made me wonder how many more of these coins are in the hands of collectors? I bring this up because one selling point dealers try to use on graded gold (besides the what I feel is BS confiscation argument), is that these coins are very limited and they often site the grading companies population numbers of coins graded by year and type.

I bellieve that there are still hoards of these coins (ungraded) that gold bugs and collectors are holding on to. The coin dealer said he bought the St. Gaudens from an older person who had been holding them for years and years. Although these coins are definitely more rare than modern day bullion, who knows how many MS 65 1927's are sitting out there waiting to be graded?

The premiums on these things are several hundred bucks over spot (MS 65 on common years are almost double spot price). I wish I had bought a bunch before they became so popular last year because they are beautiful coins. I doubt though that the premiums will hold up over time if gold goes way up and the population reports on these years and grades keeps growing as more of them get sent to be graded.

Jim

 

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[jewelerdave]

There are huge numbers of them.
The reason why most $20 golds are in MS 62+ is that most of them were used not as money but as large international checks for payments. A bag would be used for large corporate transactions. That bag would be deposited in a bank in Europe somewhere, and since gold is gold, no reason to melt them. Put them away and wright checks of your balance rather than use gold.

Of course all the pre 33 stuff in the US is melted and in fort knox. People gave most of that up for those wonderful pieces of paper called fed reserve notes. This was supposed to save the Economy in 33 and keep the debtors in Europe from taking the US Gold.

In any case. in the 60s and 70s when the banks opened up and US citizens could buy gold again the banks unloaded Decades of stored old US Gold. a $20,000 bag of gold had 1000 mint state Guadens or others in there. Keep in mind gold coins were done by the Millions for comercial transactions.

So yes, many have been melted, I have melted down quite a few myself over the years. In fact the recent ridiculouse premiums on the things are the reason why I sold all of them. a $300 premium on a 90% coin for a polished one...is insain. So I say unload em.

I have purchased several hords of the things of late, and people were happy to get $50 over spot for them. To witch case I sell them off for a $250 premium.

But yes. There are millions of them still out there.


Also the fact that population reports are total crap. Dealers all the time bust coins out of holders and send them in again to be regraded. I have some coin buddies that have found under graded coins at shows, Bust them out in the parking lot, and go back and sell them across the room for a profit raw.