Buy a one-ounce gold coin and a one-ounce silver coin on the same afternoon, and something odd turns up on the receipt. The gold coin costs a few percent more than the metal inside it. The silver coin can cost fifteen or twenty percent more, and in a busy market a good deal more than […]
Three American Silver Eagles can sit side by side on the same desk, each holding exactly one troy ounce of .999 silver, each struck at a United States Mint facility, and each carrying a very different asking price. The metal in them is identical. What separates them is the finish: how the blank was prepared, […]
Ask a room of coin buyers when American money stopped being silver and you will get three answers, all partly right. The dime and quarter went first, the half dollar hung on five more years in a watered-down form, and the silver dollar had quietly stopped circulating long before either. The line most holders use […]
Somebody hands you a cigar box of dark silver dollars from a grandparent’s dresser, and the impulse arrives before the thought does: make them look like money again. Every coin shop in America has watched that impulse walk through the door about an hour too late. The blunt version is that most cleaning takes value […]
Editor’s Note A gold-colored U.S. dollar just created the kind of collector frenzy that makes headlines, with one small catch: there isn’t any gold in it. That’s not a scandal. But it is a perfect lesson in the difference between collectible value, precious-metal value, and marketing value, three things buyers had better learn not to […]
Walk into any coin shop and ask about the cheapest way to start owning physical silver, and sooner or later someone will slide a bag of worn dimes and quarters across the counter and call it junk. The name is a bad joke. There is nothing junky about it. It just means old United States […]
The coin arrived in a plastic flip stamped with a famous mint’s name, and it weighed almost exactly one troy ounce. Almost. By the time the buyer thought to put it on a scale, the online seller had vanished. Versions of this story circulate through every coin club in the country, and they all end […]
Ask a coin dealer what a bullion piece is worth and the first thing running in the background is a simple sum: how much metal is in the coin, and what that metal fetches on the wholesale market right now. That number is the melt value. It is the floor under any gold or silver […]
Reach into a jar of loose change and there is a fair chance you will find one. For ten years, from 1999 through 2008, the United States Mint released a new quarter every ten weeks or so, each one carrying a different state on its back. Kids filled cardboard folders with them. Parents who had […]
Two gold coins can leave the same mint, in the same year, looking almost identical to the naked eye, and still trade at very different values. A worn silver dollar and a pristine one from the same date can be worlds apart. The difference usually comes down to a single number printed on the holder. […]
