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Above: The Baltimore coin show bourse floor.

We’re finally catching up after a busy Baltimore coin show last week. The show, located in Baltimore, Maryland, and held 3 times a year, is one of our favorite shows of the years, due to its excellent location, which brings in lots of both customers and dealers from all over.

This year we were wondering how good the show would be, since the coin market as a whole has been lackluster for the last number of years, and the error market has been effected as well. What all has caused a downturn in the coin market is anyone’s guess (and if you ask coin dealers, you will get different answers) and there are many factors which doubtless play a roll. So we were interested to see how this show would be both for us, as well as for the non-error dealers at the show.

Overall, the show was excellent, with most dealers we talked to saying they were having a “good show”, and with other dealers having “their best Baltimore show ever!” There was a good energy at the show, and dealers seemed happy at the amount of selling they were doing. The auctions seemed to do well, with the Pogue sale of high-end coins having lots of excited bidders, and the various errors we saw in auctions went for good prices in our opinion.

Buying and selling were overall good at the show. We bought less than we wanted to, and sold more than we expected, and overall would say that it was an active and good show, and we think the coin market appears to be on the upswing. Of course you cannot judge an entire market by one coin show, and we aren’t. Up till now, we’ve seen prices for error coins holding steady across most types and series, and with some areas being very active, with prices well above that of recent years.

We are excited to see how the rest of the year goes, but things appear to be having an upward momentum for both the error market, and the coin market as a whole.

In our next blog post, we will dive into some areas of the error coin market where prices are low, and therefore would be an excellent area to start a collection (low prices rarely last, and are often opportune times to build collections.)

Happy collecting!