By Mark Ferguson for CoinWeek – MFrarecoins.com

The coin market is at the leading edge of an emerging trend in coin grading and coin pricing. It started four years ago with the recognition of premium quality coins by CAC, Certified Acceptance Corporation. The founders of CAC recognized that coins just making […]

By Mark Ferguson for CoinWeek – MFrarecoins.com

When most people think of coin collecting, they think of filling albums with coins organized by date of issue and mintmark, or organizing boxes of encapsulated coins in a similar way. But trends of collecting have changed over time. For example, collecting coins by mintmark wasn’t […]

By Mark Ferguson for CoinWeek – MFrarecoins.com

Last week I wrote about “Basic Tools for Buying Rare Coins in Today’s Market.” As I talked about in that article, once you’ve learned the basics of how the rare coin market works, you can start focusing on developing a plan with which to begin building […]

By Mark Ferguson for CoinWeek – MFrarecoins.com

Okay, so you’ve decided that owning rare coins for economic and personal reasons makes sense. Now, how do you get a grip on how the rare coin market works? First of all, take an interest in rare coins. You don’t have to become an expert, just […]

By Mark Ferguson for CoinWeek – MFrarecoins.com

The rare coin market has been building strength since the immediate shock wore off from the financial meltdown that occurred during the fall of 2008. But this took a year to get started. Buyers, in general, finally began feeling comfortable spending money on rare coins during the […]

By Mark Ferguson for CoinWeek – MFrarecoins.com

“They’re just pieces of metal,” Elvira Clain-Stefanelli, the late Curator of the National Numismatic Collection at the Smithsonian, once told me as she showed me a tray containing major U.S. rarities, like a 1913 Liberty nickel and an 1804 silver dollar, among others. I had trouble […]

By Mark Ferguson

I recently completed a coin appraisal in which each coin was worth around $50,000. In the process of performing the appraisal questions came up about liquidation value as compared to replacement value.

First of all, there is not just one price that a rare coin trades for, as price guides suggest. They […]

By Mark Ferguson for CoinWeek – MFrarecoins.com

To see where the coin market is headed into the future it’s often helpful to look back at how it’s evolved over time. When we look back at the coin market over several decades we see distinct market trends that have occurred during various time periods. […]

Quality…high quality, this is the trend toward which the rare coin market is moving. In the long term scheme of things, over decades, as coin prices have moved higher, a lot higher, coin grading has become more critical than when prices were very low, like back in the 1950s and 1960s. As the inflationary 1970s […]

Since the world-wide financial melt down occurred, during September, 2008, people have been trying to protect their savings and investments by diversifying from owning just stocks, bonds and cash, which are the three traditional investment types, into proven investment alternatives such as coins and precious metals. In general, people are concerned with the world-wide debt […]