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Baltimore Coin Show Report  November, 2017

The recent Baltimore Whitman expo, held in Baltimore, Maryland November 8-12, was an excellent show—one of our best of the year in fact. There were, relatives speaking, a lot of error collectors in attendance, as well as activity both buying and selling. We sold more than we usually would at a Baltimore show, and were pleased with the total sales for the show. 

Additionally buying was good, with a number of collectors bringing us parts of their collections to sale. As a side note, it’s a good idea to occasionally go through your collections and “weed out” the coins that no longer fit into your set, and sell them so that you can then use that money to buy coins that do fit into your set. Sometimes collectors “keep everything” that they buy, and if that’s what you enjoy doing, then you should collect that way, but if you are building a set which has a specific aim or theme to it (e.g collecting a set of off-center Kennedy halves by date/mint), then having duplicates doesn’t really make sense. But enough of this rabbit trail, and back to the topic of the show!

We did see strong prices in the Auctions as well, and won very little, with some of the coins going to stratospheric prices. Sometimes auctions can be a good place to buy a coin, but at other times prices can go well beyond what they should. It only takes two bidders who don’t know a coin’s value for a mint error to sale for far beyond what it’s worth. Unfortunately, sometimes collectors or dealers will look at that outsider sale, and think that it is comparable for selling their own coin—wrong! That coin should be ignored for all practical purposes, since it is an outsider in terms of a coin’s price average, and shouldn’t be used to price an error coin.

Overall, we can say that we are optimistic about the state of the error market, and although there are soft areas, collectors are active and the market is pretty healthy as a whole.