Gold Coins
Samuel Hart
Latest from Samuel Hart
Gold Coins
Are Gold Britannias a Good Investment? A Buyer’s Profile
Most bullion coins ask for a certain amount of trust. You check the weight and the diameter, maybe you know the ring a good coin makes, and past that you are relying on the seal and the person who sold it to you. The Royal Mint decided that was not quite good enough. In the […]
Gold Coins
Are Gold Pandas a Good Investment? A Buyer’s Profile
Every major bullion coin has a face you learn to recognize without thinking. Liberty striding into the sunrise, the springbok in mid-leap, the maple leaf with its fine vein lines. China went the other way in 1982, and it is still the only mint of consequence that does: the panda on the reverse gets redrawn […]
Gold Coins
Are Gold Sovereigns a Good Investment? A Buyer’s Profile
Twenty gold coins, taped flat and threaded into the lining of a pair of trousers. That was the British Ministry of Defence’s answer during the 1991 Gulf War to an old and awkward question: what do you hand a soldier who might end up on the wrong side of a border with no usable currency? […]
Gold Coins
Are Gold Maple Leafs a Good Investment? A Buyer’s Profile
Every bullion coin has an origin story, and the Canadian Gold Maple Leaf’s is unusually specific. By the late 1970s the South African Krugerrand had the private gold market mostly to itself, and then politics caught up with it. Boycotts and sanctions aimed at South Africa’s apartheid government made the Krugerrand awkward to buy through […]
Gold Coins
Are $10 Indian Head Gold Eagles a Good Investment?
Type “gold eagle” into a search box today and you will mostly get the modern one-ounce bullion coin the U.S. Mint has struck since 1986. That is a perfectly good coin, and we have written about it. But the eagle as a denomination is much older. It goes back to 1795, it was worth ten […]
Gold Coins
Are Krugerrands a Good Investment? A Buyer’s Profile
Almost every American who owns gold has handled a Krugerrand at some point, or been offered one, and a fair number are not quite sure what they are holding. The coin carries no dollar figure, no ounce marking that matches its weight on a scale, and a portrait of a nineteenth century Boer statesman most […]
Gold Coins
Are Indian Head Quarter Eagles a Good Investment?
Most pre-1933 United States gold coins wear their designs proudly on the surface, the way a Saint-Gaudens double eagle does. The little $2.50 Indian Head quarter eagle does the opposite. Its portrait and its eagle sit below the field, sunk into the metal rather than raised above it. Hold one at an angle and the […]
Gold Coins
Are Liberty Head Double Eagles a Good Investment?
Before Augustus Saint-Gaudens gave the $20 gold piece its striding Liberty, another double eagle carried American commerce for more than half a century. The Liberty Head double eagle, also called the Coronet type, ran from 1850 to 1907, longer than any other regular gold coin the United States has produced. It was born out of […]
Gold Coins