They say that the echoes of the Big Bang can still be heard today, billions of years after the event actually took place. On a much smaller scale the echoes of the Jay Roe Collection of California gold coins sold by Bowers & Merena Galleries are still being felt in the marketplace more than three weeks after the September 14 sale.
"I was really surprised at the strength of that auction," says Ron Gillio, co-author with the late Walter Breen of the authoritative work on California gold varieties, California Pioneer Fractional Gold. "Interest was greater than at any time I've ever seen it. The Period One pieces went for extremely strong prices and the attendance was about seven times greater than the average Cal gold auction."
To what do you attribute the success of the sale? "There were some collectors there who were determined to get those coins for their holdings no matter what. The pedigreed coins were in special demand. If a coin came from Norweb or the Kenneth Lee collection then the price would be much higher than normal for the grade and variety. The Period Two and Period Three pieces were more reasonable, but the Period One examples created a bidding war."
Isn't this an unusual amount of interest for such a highly specialized area of the market? "We just printed 2,000 copies of the new second edition of Breen-Gillio," Gillio said, "and Bob Lecce and I bought 1,500 of them. There are ten hardback copies and less than 300 paperbacks left between us. That's a lot of numismatic books to sell in such a short period on any subject."
Price records? Over 150 of them!
Jack Totheroh keeps meticulous records on California gold and can cite roughly 20,000 auction prices by grade and Breen-Gillio variety. He found that 152 all-time records (!) were set in the Jay Roe sale, plus another 25 coins were either second or third on the all-time list.
Gold takes a hit, begins rebound.
Gold bullion's climb toward $400 was momentarily derailed on Friday, October 3 as the price fell by $17 an ounce. The weakening dollar has led to another rally, as prices are moving north once again.
"Even with gold getting hammered everyone is really pumped up about the market," says John Dannreuther of JDRC, Inc., in Cordova, Tennessee. "This is the best kind of market that we can be in, in my opinion, because things are highly active without being crazy.
"Prices haven't moved that much in a lot of areas," Dannreuther continued. "The real coins -- by 'real' I mean 19th and early 20th century type coins and the rare dates in the popular series -- are as solid as they can be at the levels. As long as interest rates stay low this market is A+ and could remain so for years to come."
Bruce Amspacher has been a professional writer since the 1950s and a professional numismatist since the 1960s. He won the OIPA sportswriting award in 1958 and again in 1959, then spent eight years in college studying American Literature. This background somehow led him to become a professional numismatist in 1968. Since then he has published hundreds of articles on rare coins in dozens of publications as well as publishing his own newsletter, the “Bruce Amspacher Investment Report,” for more than a decade. His areas of expertise include Liberty Seated dollars, Morgan and Peace dollars, United States gold coins, sports trivia, Western history, modern literature and the poetry of Emily Dickinson. In 1986 he was a co-founder of the Professional Coin Grading Service (PCGS).
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