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It was a busy 5 days of looking at coins, buying and selling—and it was fun! The January FUN show has truly become the biggest and best coin show in the United States. It was packed with over 600 tables, and I believe every table was sold out. There was a continual stream of collectors and dealers walking the aisles, and even on Saturday, the show stayed quite busy (normally, national coin shows area dead by Saturday morning.) When we packed up around 3 PM on Saturday, a decent number of collectors and dealers were actively doing business.

One thing that is true for us at coin shows is that they are largely wholesale events, with most of the business being between dealers or collector-dealers (people who collect, but also flip or sale coins frequently.) Most sales were wholesale, with only a few modest sales to pure collectors. This is because many collectors now buy online, and skip going to shows. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is something that collators are missing out on since there’s a wealth of knowledge available at shows that cannot be found online, and also there’s nothing like seeing a coin in-hand compared to even a high quality photo. However, the quality of images now does make it easier than every to be largely a “online” coin collector.

There was a decent amount of coins offered to us to buy, and we had a nice pile by the end of the show. We weren’t able to buy as much as we wanted, as there is in general not a lot of fresh material on the market, but we picked up some nice coins. Collectors who actively buy from us get first shot at coins on their want lists, and then the coins are listed on the website where subscribers to our email list will get an “alert” saying that we’ve listed fresh inventory—if you are not currently a subscriber to our email list, you can sign up for free on the website. The coins also will show up on eBay, but be aware that the prices are about 8% higher on eBay to account the the fees eBay charges us, so it is always cheaper to buy straight from our website.

Other dealers in U.S. Coins, paper money, and mint errors gave as a whole very good reports, saying they had a busy show with good activity. The coin market is doing well, and the FUN show was a resounding success for attendees.