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 […]
Anyone who has watched a dealer’s order page for a few months has noticed something strange. Spot climbs hard, and the finished coin costs less over metal than it did before. Spot collapses, and the coin stubbornly refuses to get cheap. The metal is doing one thing. The coin is doing something else entirely. That […]
Auction archives are the closest thing the coin market has to a public transaction record. Anyone can look up what a particular date and grade brought last spring, in what holder, and how hard the bidding ran. That transparency is genuinely useful, and it is also easy to misread. The number printed next to a […]
Walk any bullion show or scroll any listing site and you will see the same coin twice. There is the plain American Silver Eagle, sold loose in a plastic flip, priced a hair above the value of its ounce of silver. Then there is the identical year and design sealed in a hard plastic holder, […]
Ask a longtime coin dealer to name the most beautiful silver coin the United States ever put into circulation, and a good many will reach for the Walking Liberty half dollar before you finish the question. Struck from 1916 through 1947, it carries Adolph A. Weinman’s striding Liberty on the obverse and a mountaintop eagle […]
On November 12, 2025, at the Philadelphia Mint, U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach pressed the last circulating one-cent coin the United States will make. It closed a run of 232 years, longer than any other American coin has managed. The penny outlived the half cent, the trime, the twenty-cent piece, and every circulating gold coin, yet […]
A single number, the price of gold, tells you less than it seems. Gold at roughly $4,450 an ounce in early September 2026 sounds like a lot, and it is a record in dollar terms, but a dollar is a moving yardstick. To judge whether metal is dear or cheap against the rest of the […]
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 […]
Buy a one-ounce gold bar and you rarely just get the bar. It arrives sealed inside a credit-card-sized plastic holder printed with numbers and a signature. Buy a tube of silver coins and it comes in a capped plastic cylinder; buy in bulk and the whole thing shows up strapped inside a sealed box the […]
Most buying guides stop at the purchase. You compare premiums, pick a coin, and the story ends when the package arrives. But every ounce you buy is half of a round trip. Sooner or later, you or your heirs will sell, and the form you chose years earlier decides how fast that happens and how […]
