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| Passion Investments: Coins |
Heads or Tales
Catherine Curan
10/01/2005
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An amateur who decides to make an
in-depth, long-term commitment to coins requires an initial investment of at
least $10,000 to fund a collection with a chance of seriously appreciating.
Professionals recommend building a focused collection rather than buying vastly
different individual coins; specialization helps a collector deepen his
knowledge and makes him a savvier competitor in this very broad market.
Investors should also note that some highly personal selections amassed
carefully over decades, such as the coins that belonged to noted collector John
Jay Pittman, have commanded millions at auction in recent years. Pittman, a
chemical engineer for
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CATHERINE CURAN is a New York–based journalist who writes about business,
culture and style.
Photography by Professional Coin Grading
| Eastman Kodak in Rochester, N.Y., began collecting at age
10 and continued until his death in 1996. His collection sold for more than $30
million in a series of three auctions in the late 1990s.
The Web is helping
many collectors enjoy a novel type of competition. They build registry
sets—groups of one kind of coin—register them with Professional Coin Grading
Service or Numismatic Guaranty and display them on their Web sites, often under
pseudonyms, in a public competition for the highest-rated set. As with rare
coins generally, these vary in value depending on the number of specimens
that were minted and their current condition.
A love of the lore and the
quest, more than financial upside, motivate many top-flight collectors,
including the owner of the legendary King of Siam set, today valued at $10
million, who spoke with Worth on condition of anonymity. Assembled in 1834, this
collection was presented to the King of Siam by the U.S. government in 1836 to
help establish trade relations. Anna Leonowens, the woman who inspired The King
and I, is believed to have owned the set, passing it on to her descendants upon
her death in 1915.
The set boasts all the elements a rare-coin collector
thirsts for: uniqueness, rarity, provenance—and a value more than double the
previous purchase price. The set’s current owner, whose holdings are known in
coin circles as the Connoisseur Collection, could quit the game confident in
having achieved the pinnacle of American numismatics. Instead, this collector
still spends about 20 hours a month actively researching new acquisitions; he
recently traveled to Europe in search of Roman coins featuring the image of
Caesar, valued in the neighborhood of $20,000. Certainly it was thrilling to
hold the King of Siam set, scrutinize one of the extremely rare Class 1 1804
silver dollars with a magnifier and examine the hand-tooled leather box before
he clinched the sale in 2001. But since then, the set has mainly sat in a vault,
and it will be sold when the right offer comes along. “For me, the fun has
always been in the hunt,” the collector says. “Once I have it, OK, let’s sell
this and move on to something else.”
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