Nanjing 2013 copper God of Wealth NGC 69 2 coin set for $160 Buy-It-Now with a Best Offer option:
221996670881. From
luckmoneyro. He originally listed this for $140, then raised the price to $160. My conclusion? Offer $140 for the set, of course! What a crazy time we live in, when you can get investment grade coins with a mintage of 299 for $70 each. Other dealers are quite a bit more expensive for these coins.
1983 27 g silver panda sold for the full Buy-It-Now asking price:
121870985608. Is it genuine? I hope so, because the buyer paid $1500 for it.
2014 1 oz silver panda Smithsonian NGC 70 sold in a Best Offer option:
161925371639 (
price reveal).
1986 silver Empress of China sold in a cheap auction:
201503005200. This was a pretty good price considering other sales for 69 grade hover around a price level a bit higher, near $90. Another one sold in a very cheap Buy-It-Now:
151951410181. This is about as low as it gets.
1995 1 oz silver panda Shenyang small date (microdate) NGC 67 sold in a cheap auction:
272103448938. I can't believe how cheap this was. A key 1995 panda! In 69 grade, they peaked at about $3000! I seem to remember selling one of my 67's for more than double this price. Some collector out there has a big smile on his face after bagging this one for peanuts.
With all the hubbub about the debasing of the 2016 pandas, I have been expecting all the extra attention to make pandas fashionable again. ebay is inundated with hundreds and maybe thousands of sales for the 2016 30 g silver pandas each week. I have been trying to form an opinion about how strong the market is. When I look at these older coins that cost practically nothing, I see weakness everywhere. But if I consider the total quantity of money flowing through the market, dominated by the 2016 pandas, I see good market health.
What I think is happening is everyone is buying the 2016 30 g silver pandas because they expect them to be viewed in the future like the 1983 27 g silver pandas - a historic and potentially valuable "first". With so much attention on 2016 pandas, it's difficult to conclude that pandas in general are weak, but seeing such low prices on older and rarer pandas is pretty convincing evidence that they're being ignored a little more than they should be. Smarter buyers like us are having no competition in buying super-rare coins like the
baby pandas, even though prices have gone up from $110 to $180+ for uncertified specimens during the last 6 months or so. Although 1 of the 2 brass baby pandas from
luckmoneyro has sold already, there is still one sitting around waiting for a buyer for nearly an entire week:
221996675154. Why is it still unsold? I think it's because the crowd is grabbing 2016 pandas instead, because they expect them to be the rare ones. In other words, they're buying the wrong coins!
I am not optimistic that the China mint will succeed in keeping people interested in pandas for very long after they have been debased, and I think a lot of other people either agree with that, or they disagree and think they'll be successful and later mintages will be much higher. The truth is probably somewhere in between.
The price is low for the 2016 30 g silver pandas, and people's expectation of rarity appears poised to backfire, if the entire 8 million mintage sells out completely. Instead of being rare, all the misguided buyers are unintentionally positioning the 2016 pandas to be a success. So, what I think is going to happen is the China mint will see encouraging sales results from the debased 2016 pandas, and they will increase mintages for 2017. For a while, the buyers will think they made the right choice to speculate on increased value for the 2016 pandas, but eventually that enthusiasm will fizzle when inflation starts causing rises in precious metals, and the numismatic premium of the 2016 pandas gets erased by the increases in the metal value.
After that happens, people will realize they would have made more money if they had just bought the cheap and dirtiest bullion available, instead of "fancy bullion" like the pandas. So, to fix that mistake, they will try to sell their 2016 pandas...and that's when they will get the bad news that no one wants to buy them for the full bullion value because they're non-standard weights. Disappointment will turn into frustration, and frustration will turn into anger as inflation soars and people start THINKING about what it means for fiat to be debased. Then, that will be the end of debased pandas, and the entire series will be angrily rejected as yet another insulting attempt to exploit people's trust.
2016 30 g gold panda sold for the full Buy-It-Now asking price:
351578255177. We see lots of the 2016 30 g silver pandas selling, but very, very few of the 30 g gold selling. I did a
search for 2016 gold pandas recently sold on ebay, and there are only 54 sales since November 2015 when they first became available to buy. Most of them are the 1 g and 3 g gold pandas. I was only able to find 2 more individual 2016 30 g gold panda sales, both NGC 70:
291637083512 (
price reveal),
111862956906. I also found 3 sets:
252217228090,
301830109608 (
price reveal),
111850458507 (
price reveal).
In contrast, I did another
search for 2016 silver pandas recently sold on ebay, and I found 1267 of them! Wow! That's a huge difference. Why are the 30 g silver pandas selling well, but not the 30 g gold? Is it because there are a few dealers bring large numbers of the silver ones to the market, certified in PCGS and NGC holders? As you can see from the sales above, the 30 g gold sold more often when it was certified. I decided to check how many of each were currently being offered for sale. There are 421 silver listings, and 67 gold. That's a big difference, but it's not as big as the difference in actual sales. That leads to the obvious conclusion that the gold is not selling anywhere near as well as the silver is.
In trying to explain this, I think both the buyers aren't buying, and the sellers aren't selling. The reason that could happen is if the profit margins aren't good enough for the gold, so sellers have too-high prices, and buyers don't want to pay it. Maybe ebay fees are to blame. In both the silver and gold, I noticed that the certified coins were selling better, so that probably improves the profit margin enough for the silver, but it may still be insufficient for the gold. Naturally, the more expensive an item is, the bigger ebay's fees are. I think that might be apparent in the fact that there are a lot of cheap auctions for the silver, but none for gold. Sellers who are worried about profit margins, do not use cheap auctions to sell stuff.
That's all less surprising than I expected. I was hoping to find some clear evidence that nobody wants the 2016 30 g gold pandas, to contrast with the enormous popularity of the silver version, but the tiny sales of the gold are too easy to explain away. So, next I decided to compare them to 2015 pandas, to see if all this is perfectly normal. I found 163 2015 gold panda sales, versus 1309 2015 silver panda sales. So, it looks like a huge disparity in gold and silver sales means nothing.
Although it would seem that I wasted my time doing this research, I did actually learn something from it. Firstly, it appears silver is more popular than gold, which makes sense because more people can afford it. Secondly, high prices are probably discouraged on ebay, and I suspect most sales above $1000 end up completing off-ebay...or just never end up completing, because buyers and sellers don't find each other if they don't use ebay. Furthermore, price barriers are a real thing, and guess what? There are huge price barriers at $1000 and $1500, which is right around the value of 30 grams of gold:
Re: MCC LIST #183: 2014, collectors, pullback 9 reasons, food, coin-medal-whatever, reply #5045.
davidt3251 has complained in the past about the difficulty of selling expensive gold pandas, and I think this research not only confirms it's true, it also telling us there are multiple and completely different reasons for the difficulty. Maybe this is why most of my investments are in silver coins.
291637083512 (
price reveal)
1990 1/4 oz gold panda small date PCGS 68 sold for the full Buy-It-Now asking price:
191510607732.
1991 1 oz silver panda PCGS 69 sold for the full Buy-It-Now asking price:
391235606183.
1991 1 oz gold panda large date plain 1 NGC 67 sold for the full Buy-It-Now asking price:
221989472907.
1987 15 g silver lunar rabbit NGC 64 sold for the full Buy-It-Now asking price:
261822413967.
2005 1 kg silver panda NGC 61 sold in a Best Offer option:
171511746762 (
price reveal). I'm impressed that such a low grade still sold. Every time I see sales like this I think, "The buyer must be a collector". Although prices are low in cheap auctions, I'm seeing plenty of Buy-It-Now and Best Offer option sales, so I think I will just have to conclude that the cheap auctions are still not doing well due to the large volume of fraudulent spam that creates a barrier for potential bidders who can't find stuff they want to bid on. So, instead of waiting for a cheap auction, they're buying in Buy-It-Nows and Best Offer options.
1989 12 oz silver panda NGC 68 sold in a Best Offer option:
351628364163 (
price reveal).
2016 5 oz silver lunar monkey colorized NGC 70 sold in a Best Offer option:
201482458613 (
price reveal).
2016 5 oz silver lunar monkey rectangle NGC 70 sold in a Best Offer option:
201506922138 (
price reveal).
2015 2 oz silver lunar goat panda matte antiqued NGC 67 sold in a Best Offer option:
161891939450 (
price reveal). This was a fantastic price. I paid a lot more for mine, and mine are the same quality, but not even certified.
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I updated my filters to remove some more recent likely-fraudulent, spammy, or suspicious bad sellers crowding out legitimate sellers.
1010 spam listings from bad sellers were removed in this update to help you more easily find genuine coins from honest sellers. The bad-seller listings outnumber legitimate listings 1.09 to 1.
Ask every dealer you buy from if they offer a
lifetime authenticity guarantee, and to publicly state that phrase "lifetime authenticity guarantee" if they do. If a professional dealer can't offer a lifetime authenticity guarantee, then they are in the wrong profession, and you should
buy from someone else who gives you a lifetime authenticity guarantee on all of their coins. Support high standards in the coin market. Reward good sellers with your patronage.
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ebay auctions newly listed. 1935 listings, unfiltered.
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ebay auctions newly listed minus spam from bad sellers. 925 listings, filtered.
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ebay auctions ending soonest minus spam from bad sellers.
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ebay Buy-It-Now newly listed minus spam from bad sellers.
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ebay items newly sold minus spam from bad sellers.
If you find legitimate sellers in the links below that should not be filtered out, please tell me so I can investigate:
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ebay newly listed spam from bad sellers that were filtered in the above links.
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ebay newly sold spam from bad sellers that were filtered in the above links.
Topic: MCC LIST #183, move from LBC and continuation here at the CC forum (Read 1266689 times)