Jordan - Modern Commemorative Coins: Invest Today - Profit Tomorrow

Fellow collectors,

I am a fourth generation collector who holds and perpetuates a set of coins from 1793 through 1964 that has very few gaps, so I understand what legacy means in every sense of the word. I have been an astute student of coins for more than 50 years and have had the benefit of three prior generations to get me to where I am today in my understanding of this thing we call a hobby.

With that said, I want to try to give you a realistic view of what is going on in the legacy and modern coin arenas. The legacy coins have been slowing down in popularity since about 1995. I could argue that point, but that is about the time that the real modern mania started and it has been accelerating ever since. If you consider the fact that most legacy collections are almost impossible to even complete, much less complete in high grade, and then consider that moderns are attractive, rare and are at this point still completable (even though the window is getting narrow), it's obvious why we all should be paying attention to this area of the market.

Take a 1907 $20 high relief Saint-Gaudens with a surviving mint state population of about 5,000 coins that has taken a hundred years to mature into the $10,000-$11,000 price range and compare it to mint state platinum eagles with their sub 3,000 mintages. As an owner of several varieties of the high relief Saint-Gaudens, I know that from an appreciation standpoint, the saint is pretty flat. As someone who just purchased several sets of the mint state platinum Eagles, they have just lifted off and you haven't seen anything yet. I will challenge you to look at any modern silver, gold, or platinum coin going and you will see what I mean by the reality of things to come.

The Baby Boomers, or those people born prior to about 1955, have been the holders of most of America's wealth for a lot of years. I have seen them give rise to booms and busts in almost everything from the 1960s muscle cars to the current boom in nursing homes. These people have motivated inventions, driven markets of every description, and in general financed this country.

With that said, I have to bring into perspective that these people (like myself) are getting old and starting to die off. As this attrition deepens, there will be a shift in amounts of money and interest in what coins will be sought after and hoarded. What you will see in the future is that the new breed of collector will come into the market, not with the perspective of old coins, but with the coins that he/she can relate to. This ultimately will be the moderns of today.

I am not preaching the doom of legacy coins, I am just stating that life has a certain evolution that is inevitable. Collectors who fail to recognize these foreseeable changes will most assuredly find themselves facing unnecessary losses.

We are on the tail end of the legacies and the front end of the moderns, so if you have a little money, a few years in front you and do a little homework, the upside potential in well-selected moderns is very impressive. This text is a good start on what you need to know to take advantage of the opportunities that modern U.S. coinage is offering us all today.

Sincerely,

Hank Swain

(Hank Swain is a fourth generation collector of U.S. coins.)