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In 2018 CoinWeek published an article by Doug Winter titled “Eight Great U.S. Coin Collections,” i.e., https://coinweek.com/doug-winter-eight-great-u-s-coin-collections/ You may recall that in one of my previous posts I mentioned that Doug Winter is a renowned dealer of U.S. gold coins. He has written numerous informative articles that you can find on his website. In this linked article he lists the following great U.S. coin collections: 1. The Ed Milas Collection of No Motto Half Eagles 2. The ELIASBERG Collection 3. The NORWEB Collection 4. The GARRETT Collection 5. The ELROD Collection 6. The REED Collection 7. The PITTMAN Collection 8. The BASS Collection While most of the coins in these collections were U.S. coins, they also contained some world coins. In the above pictures I show the obverses and reverses of 5 coins that I now own, which were previously part of one of the collections listed above. The coin information in the list below corresponds to the pictures going from the left to the right. Note that the indicated pedigrees are listed on the coin slabs. • Eliasberg pedigree, U.S., 1866-S with motto $5 gold, PCGS 53, NGC census (53 total, 2 in, 8 better) • Eliasberg pedigree, Brazil, 1774-B 6400 Reis gold, NGC 62, NGC census (9 total, 1 in, 0 better) • Norweb pedigree, Brazil, 1730-R 400 Reis gold, NGC XF details, NGC census 1 in XF details, 1 in MS 62 • Norweb pedigree, Brazil, 1734-R 400 Reis gold, NGC 62, NGC census (11 total, 3 in, 0 better) • Garrett pedigree, Brazil, 1855 5000 Reis gold, NGC 63, NGC census (49 total, 12 in, 8 better) When I find a coin, which I like, that has a pedigree listed on the slab, I will pay a premium for the coin only if the pedigree is for a well-known collector, like one of the collectors shown above. I think that such information makes the coin more interesting, and therefore more valuable. Doug Winter provides more information about “Pedigrees and Numismatics” in the following article, https://raregoldcoins.com/blog/articles/pedigrees-and-numismatics. One of the things that he mentions is that “At this point in time, the Eliasberg pedigree is considered the most valuable among collectors. A coin with an Eliasberg pedigree typically commands a 10-15% premium due to its high level of demand. In terms of desirability, the next tier of "name sales" includes Pittman and Norweb.” I would personally add a 25% premium to what I’m willing to bid for coins with these pedigrees. What do you think about pedigrees on coin slabs? Please leave a comment below.

Well, I've been a bit quiet lately because I've been hoarding my cash and working on some other things, but I thought I'd pop in and check things out. I got quite a shock when I saw this: I've said before that I thought that set was strong enough that it had a good chance of holding up over time, so this immediately got my attention and then I see this: I've been aware that Xanno was trying to complete his set and he was rapidly filling his in, but how is it even possible that he's suddenly beating me by a factor of about 6 and why is my 100% complete set now at 95%...??? Well... Apparently Xanno graded and added 2017 50 cent bond coin and so they had to add that as an eligible coin in the slot... except they apparently did this by disallowing the 2014 from the slot, even though it clearly fits the slot, kicked my MS66 out, and gave his MS64 coin a point value that makes most of my gold coins blush... 3,647 points? I mean... My MS69 $2 Bond coin only gets 205. 3,647 points? Someone was smoking something... I accept no other explanation. April 2nd... Someone was a little late, but this looks like a joke. As you might imagine... I've put in a request to get my 50C back in... and if they don't change that score, I'm going to be asking for that too. That score makes the rest of the set completely irrelevant. I mean... April 2nd was Tuesday. You can't even blame this on a case of the Monday's or a Friday afternoon. And the eclipse wasn't until the 8th so they couldn't have blinded themselves by this point... All in good fun. I mostly find this so insane it's funny, but I wanted to remark on it and preserve it for future laughs. Edit: They added mine back, but left it at 20 points and left his at 3,600... I've requested the score change... I mean... really???

I have not been active in this society for a few years. I have been slowly selling off my collection. I have been battling a rare blood cancer. I may only have only a couple more chemo treatments left, fingers crossed. Prays are welcome! I have lots of time on my hands and been forced to retire middle of last year. I decided that once I am indeed in remission, full time retirement is not really for me. I have recently started to submit coins to NGC once again. I got my results back for the 400th Anniversary Silver Medal. 2020 Silver Medal Mayflower Voyage 400th Anniversary RP 70 2020 Silver Medal Mayflower Voyage 400th Anniversary RP 70 2020 Silver Medal Mayflower Voyage 400th Anniversary RP 70 2020 Silver Medal Mayflower Voyage 400th Anniversary RP 70 2020 Silver Medal Mayflower Voyage 400th Anniversary RP 70 2020 Silver Medal Mayflower Voyage 400th Anniversary RP 70 A perfect submission!! Now waiting on my 2020 US Mint annual set. Keith Stevens

As I've referenced recently, I've been sitting on and trying to accumulate some cash in my hobby budget to maybe buy a 1924 $20 double eagle in MS65 - my grandmother's birth year and now a newly 100-year-old coin. My grandmother would have been 100 years old in February if she were still alive. I finally got some things moved around and have saved enough that I now have almost $2600 in my hobby budget, and the coin, back in January, was going for about $2,500-2,600. But gold has moved up about $295/oz in the last 3 months and the coins are now going for about $2,900-3,000 now. I'll soon have about $2,800 available. If I wanted to pull the trigger on it and get the coin while not quite having enough to buy in in my hobby budget I think Shandy wouldn't give me a hard time about it. But I think I'm still just going to watch and wait a bit for now. I may regret it later if the price of gold keeps heading up in the near term, but I don't know that it's going to stay at these levels. The same people that have been predicting $3,000-5,000/oz for years are again going insane and screaming "buy now!" but, they've been saying this for quite a long time. Gold hit about $2,050 in 2020 and hit about that same level in 2022. $2,050 in 2020 is about $2,475 now. So it would seem that this may only be an adjustment for 4 years of inflation. And that is the inflation adjusted 2020 peak. We might (and probably will) see it peak and drop back again, just like it always tends to. Until this recent spike, it's been basically flat for 4 years. I looked up the all-in sustaining costs for some of the major gold miners and, they've gone up some, but they're still in the range of about $1,300-1,400 for most of the big ones, which is only up modestly from the $1,200-$1,300 it was a few years ago. This spike up might have some legs yet, and it does bother me to watch something I want getting more expensive, but I'm going to calm myself and wait a bit yet. The higher prices will inevitably bring more marginal production online with a lag, high prices always bring sellers onto the market, and spikes in demand spike premiums, which sour people on buying for a while. All of which will help reverse the trend. Because of some bonuses and other things going on I'll probably get to add another $1100 to my hobby budget in the next 4-6 months, in addition to the $200 a month I normally get for my discretionary spending. And that also means that, barring a continued huge spike up, I might be able to get the double eagle and maybe one other thing - maybe a coin from Sweden to add to my old, world gold set. On the other hand, maybe it's time to go for something from Mexico now that I have Venezuelan gold. Or maybe it's time to try to get some of those Zimbabwean bullion coins. I guess we'll see how it all goes.

Five additional RLM pedigreed coins that I purchased after the original Heritage RLM auctions are shown in the pictures above. The data for these coins are shown below, including the dates when I purchased the coins as well as the change in the price that I paid for the coin compared to what the coin sold for in the original RLM auction. Other interesting information is also included. Brazil, 1832-R 6400 Reis, gold, NGC 55, NGC census (33 total, 8 in, 24 better) I purchased it in January 2018 for 14% less than the original price. Brazil, 1847-R 10,000 Reis, gold, NGC 53, NGC census (10 total, 1 in, 5 better) I purchased it in January 2018 for 37% less than the original price. Brazil, 1790-B 6400 Reis, Plain Headdress, gold, NGC 55, NGC census (3 total, 3 in, 0 better) I purchased it in August 2021 for 55% less than the original price. Brazil, 1729-B 1600 Reis, gold, NGC 12, First Variety Arms, NGC census (2 total, 1 in, 1 better) I purchased it in August 2022 for 74% less than the original price. This RLM coin is now in a NGC holder with a Petropolis Collection pedigree Brazil, 1731-B 800 Reis, gold, NGC Clipped, the only other coin in NGC census is a MS 62 I purchased it in August 2021 for 52% less than the original price. This RLM coin is now in a NGC holder with a Petropolis Collection pedigree Here are my observations about the three Heritage RLM auctions and the subsequent sales of the RLM pedigree coins. My observations are based on the 11 RLM coins I purchased following the completion of the three Heritage RLM auctions. There was a total of 474 items sold in these three RLM Heritage coin auctions. The 11 RLM coins correspond to a 2.3% sampling, which is low. I focused on buying rare coins, so my observations may not hold for the more common coins that were sold in the RLM auctions. There were many very rare coins in the RLM collection. It looks like many of these coins may have been cracked out and resubmitted to NGC. These resubmitted coins probably no longer have the RLM pedigree on the slab. The NGC census is probably inflated for these rare coins because of these resubmissions. If many RLM coins have been cracked out, then I probably have other RLM coins in my collection and don’t even know it. Many of the really rare Brazilian coins have problems and reside in “details” holders. It seems like the realized prices for the rare Brazilian coins in the three RLM auctions were pretty high and the prices have been falling since that time. Considering that I had just recently started collecting Brazilian coins and the only Brazilian coin that I had was purchased four months before the first RLM auction, I didn’t have a very good understanding about the Brazilian coin market at the time of the RLM auctions. The eleventh RLM coin that I own, which I didn’t have the space to show, was a Brazil 1733-M 800 Reis gold coin that I purchased in June 2016 for a 20% discount from the original purchase price. The only RLM coin that I purchased for a premium (25%) was purchased from a coin dealer shortly after the last RLM coin auction. The other ten RLM coins were purchased at discounted prices from future Heritage auctions. The discounts that I received on my RLM coins tended to increase (i.e., coin prices have fallen) as the amount of time increased from the time when they were originally sold in one of the three RLM auctions. It looks like the three Heritage RLM auctions may have marked a temporary peak in the Brazilian rare coin market. I’m not sure how strong the Brazilian coin market was before these auctions, so it’s possible that these auctions produced prices that were outliers to the upside. If anyone knows about this, I would be curious to know what you think. The prices may be falling because additional rare coins have appeared on the market. Or prices may be falling because people were overly excited about the original RLM auctions and they just bid too high on the coins. There are a number of reasons for the high prices that were realized in the RLM auctions. The most important reason probably is that the RLM collection contained many coins that are very rare and seldom seen, so if you missed the opportunity to get some of these coins then you may have to wait a long time to get another chance to buy them. At the time of the RLM auctions I was very frustrated because I didn’t win any RLM coins. However, in hindsight, things worked out very well for me. This experience reminds me of a song by Garth Brooks called “Unanswered Prayers.” I would love to hear about other people’s experiences with the RLM auctions or prices of Brazilian coins following the three Heritage RLM coin auctions. Also, does anyone think that it’s pretty cool to know that a pedigreed coin was once owned by a great collector?

After my mother-in-law got me an MS70 2013 Koala, that got me looking at the set again. My wife got me the 2014 and 2016 in MS70 coins as part of my anniversary present a couple of weeks ago. Around the same time I scored pretty good deals on the 2019 and 2022 coins... As a funny aside, entered in the 2022 coin this morning, and I saw the pictures entered in the data base for the coin... that... doesn't quite look right... So that leaves me just needing to get the 2015, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2023, and (soon) 2024 to bring that set back up to being 100% complete for the first time in years. I started the set back in 2008 and 2009 and won "Best in Category" in it for those years (along with a bunch of other people), but I haven't had the set caught up and complete in... 15 years. Wow. Time has flown... But I'm having fun just making some low-effort pick-ups when I find one at a reasonable deal. I think I'll keep looking and slowly trying to get the remaining coins over the next 9 months or so as I find them at attractive prices. "Low-effort" might seem kind of blah / harsh but... when you compare buying large lots of raw coins, searching through them, and submitting yourself to just picking up pre-graded MS70s for barely more than the price of the silver + grading... it's a different process. No dig to those that do this most of the time or exclusively in their collecting, but it's a different process and... it's just easier. On another front, because my collecting efforts haven't been very cost-heavy the last year or so - in part because past major award wins have subsidized the grading and building of some of my last few project sets - I'm sitting on more hobby money than I've had in a while - pushing $2,000 - and I'm seriously considering continuing to hoard some cash until I have the ~$2500 I'd need to buy an MS65 1924 Double Eagle. It'd be a large gold coin - the largest I'd own by a wide margin - and it's a Double Eagle, which I think is one of those "must haves" if you collect US coins. And 1924 would be for my grandmother's birth year. If I ever went for a 2nd one, I'd go for a 1920 - grandpa's birth year, my namesake. At the same time, not winning a major award this year and not having a $500 use-it-or-lose-it credit takes off the pressure to find / have things to submit and also frees me up to change my effort or where I spend my energy. I've been somewhat avoiding spending my time and budget on pre-graded stuff the last couple of years specifically because it doesn't help me with the goal of using / burning that credit. But I will probably be submitting something, because I'll get the $150 credit when my membership renews, and that will probably go towards some turtle coins. My step-father has discussed in the past the possibility of getting a non-1932 double eagle just to have one, just because neither of us see that 1932 double eagle in the cards. As part of this I'm realizing that a gift card that my brother-in-law gave me for my birthday has a slightly higher balance than I'd anticipated, and I'm discussing / considering with my wife spending that on more household expenses and rolling the equivalent cash into my budget fun / hobby money to get closer to that $2,500. Another one of the big ticket items that's kind of a soft-entry in my list of wants would be buying a new camera body - a mirrorless one this time - to replace my D600/D610. I've discussed / joked in the past that a double eagle could be my wife's 10th anniversary present to me. Maybe if I buy the coin, she could do that herself in 10 years. I guess we'll see how it all works out.

So I'm probably going to come off like a bit of a "super judger" (as my wife puts it) while also preaching to the choir a bit, but I wanted to post about the work I've been doing on my Half Cent set recently. I said recently that my wife gave me a 1955 Rhodesian Half Cent, following up on the 1957 and 1958 she'd given me at Christmas, buying things I'd put on my watch list. Putting this coin in my set put it in the #1 spot in the category. And so, it was a #1 ranked set for me - with none of my own photos, just NGC photos, no set banner image, no set description and no coin descriptions. This happened in large part because I hadn't been focusing on this - I'd been focusing on buying and working on coins for another set that I'm also researching at the moment and I'm going to build it out as a phase 3 to what I've done with Zimbabwe and Venezuela. But then this new set snuck up on me, going from 20% complete and rank 5 to 80% complete and rank 1, driven completely by my wife, who knew I liked them and had heard me talking about them. But once it was #1, I really felt a need to table some of the other stuff for a while, get pictures of these, and build out a presentation for the set. Because - I really think, if you made a #1 ranked set, you should make it worth looking at and fun to look at if you're at all able too - no shade intended at those that can't get a good photo of a coin, perhaps just because they don't have the equipment. But it is just so much nicer to click on a #1 ranked, 100% complete set and see gorgeous, lustrous, detailed, close-up photos. And I love that NGC made it easy to pop-in their verification photos... but that's photos are just not as good as what many of us can produce and they often do not do a good job of showing off the coin. Those photos are produced in a quick, generic, assembly line kind of way and you're not going to get the best images of a particular coin unless you're taking your time with each coin - something NGC just can't afford to do unless you're paying them an extra fee for their high-end photos. And so, that's what I've done and built and at this point the set presentation is more or less finished and built. I have at least 1 more coin description to get to, as I'm about to get to. Getting the 1955 meant I only had one more coin - the 1956 - left to get to complete the set. So getting that coin moved up my priority list in a big way after the 14th of last month. As I started looking into building a presentation for the set, one of the things I like to look at and reference is the mintage for each year. And that brought something to my attention - the 1956, the only coin I hadn't acquired, the only coin I hadn't even really seen for sale, is also the lowest mintage year with only 480,000 made that year. The next lowest had 720,000 made - 50% more - and all the other years were in the 1-2.5 million range. And, coincidentally, as I was looking at all of this and figuring all this out, a seller I've bought several of these Rhodesian coins from listed a 1956 in MS65RB. For reference, there are no coins at MS66 or above presently, there's a single MS65RD graded by NGC and only about 3 MS65RBs. So, this was one of the better NGC-graded examples. So I immediately wanted that coin, and I have some hobby money saved up and I was ready to bid aggressively to get it, since it was an auction. Because, I'm not sure how long I might have to wait to see another one this good - maybe not long, maybe quite a while. Turns out I didn't need to worry - no one else bid and no one fought me for it. But the set is now complete. I won the coin last weekend, and it arrived on Wednesday. I took some time last night to get pictures taken and edited to go with the pictures I took of the others last week. And so, here it is. I just need to get that last description finished. And so the next post will probably focus on what I've been working on now that this is done.