Last week, the US Mint released the 230th Anniversary Flowing Hair silver medal coin. At first my buyer was somewhat interested in the coin but as release date approached, he never got back to me. That’s probably because the coin was preselling for maybe +$10 over the cost after shipping on Ebay. After fees and shipping, you’d be taking a loss on the coin. With 75,000 of these medals, that’s A LOT for a medal. And most medals don’t do well (ala presidential medal coins.) The ONLY thing that made the coin interesting was that 1794 of the medals would have a privy mark on them (a 2.4% hit rate.) So there was a bit of a lottery component to the coin. The other unique aspect was that the MINT was limiting the coin to just 1 per household, so that meant people couldn’t really go nuts.
If you somehow hit a privy coin, then my guesttimate was that it would be worth about $2000+. If you got a normal coin, you’d lose about $10-$20 on the Ebay sale. Thus, you’re risking $10-$20 for a 2.4% chance to win $2000. Let’s say it’s a $20 lottery ticket. To hit 1 privy, you’d need to buy about 41 tickets, which would cost you $820. However, you’d win $2000, so a profit of about $1200. So the math said to take the risk.
Fast forward to a couple of days after release and due to high demand, Pinehurst was paying $125 per coin. That meant you were making money, regardless of whether you hit the privy coin. However, the coin was heating up on Ebay and was hitting $175. As I type this, most people have gotten coins in hand and Ebay is hitting $195. This caught my coin buyers by surprise because no one expected the coin to be this hot, especially the standard non-privy coins. I think we’re all assuming the coin will settle back closer to retail, but it seems to still have legs. Either way, with the success of this ‘lottery’ style release, it wouldn’t surprise me if the MINT starts doing more of these in 2025.
too bad not know that pinehurst was paying above retail until it was already sold out at Mint.
Yea that’s usually how it goes. They wait to see how the market reacts and then they put out a price. If market tanked, they wouldn’t have been buying.