Like most people who collect ancient coins, I’ve never thought of my collection as a
financial investment.
Here, for example, I have a tetradrachm of Athens, from the fourth century BC.
It’s not a great specimen.
The flan was too small, so it’s not highly priced.
But for me, it’s a wonderful evocation of the city of Demosthenes and Plato.
Or take, for example, this drachma of Alexander – quite worn, and correspondingly cheap
on the market, but all that wear and tear helps me visualize the brave new world of
Alexander’s empire.
Or take, finally, this sestertius of Hadrian.
The edges are chipped, and the reverse is a minefield.
But the portrait, with its thoughtful gaze, is for me a wonderful – masterpiece in miniature,
a bit of classical art I can own, a glimpse into the world of Hadrian, the restless emperor.
For me, in short, a coin’s price is a very small part of its value, and that’s true
of many collectors.
Recently, however, thanks to raging inflation, an erratic stock market, and a number of high-profile
auctions, there’s been a surge of interest in ancient coins as an investment.
So I decided to visit Harlan J. Berk coins here in Chicago, and ask manager Aaron Berk
to explain how the ancient coin market works.
Just in case it isn’t clear from what follows, nothing in this video is intended to serve
as investment advice.
How has the market for ancient coins changed over the past, say, 20 years?
And how has it changed since the pandemic?
It really comes down to one thing: the internet.
The internet has changed everything, in all our lives, and especially in ancient coins,
because now we have – as in any collectible – transparency.
You know, back in the day, to be a good researcher of ancient coins, you had to get a lot of
books, a lot of catalogues, and you had to do a lot of research to figure out pricing.
Now you can go online; there’s a couple great websites like coin archives, AC search,
where you can go in and look at every auction, worldwide, and see what the current market
is, and see how it’s fluctuating month to month.
And so that’s one huge change that we never had.
Obviously we’re getting much more exposure to ancient coins through the internet than
we ever had before, though it’s still a very undervalued market, since a lot of people
still – the general public still – doesn’t realize that you can buy ancient coins for
a reasonable price.
But it’s definitely taken off in the last few years.
As for COVID, our market has exploded, and part of that is because people were home,
they were bored, and they were looking for things to do.
Hobbies became something that really exploded during the pandemic, and so we saw our numbers
explode during the pandemic, and collecting go way up.
What are the “blue chip” ancient coins, the ones that always seem to have value?
It comes down to whether you want to collect Greek or Roman, typically (you have Byzantine,
but that’s really just late Romans) – but it comes down to Greek or Roman.
In Greek coins you have Syracuse – any of the Syracuse material, any coins from Sicily
in silver always have high demand, because it’s the highest quality of art.
In Sicilian coinage you have the decadrachms, you have the tetradrachms.
In Italian, you have Tarentum, you have – you know, I think there’s definitely type sets
when it comes to Greek; a lot of people will collect coins of Aegina, which has the turtle
– they like animals – or Pegasus, so they’ll do Corinth, or one of those types, one of
those city types.
You’ll do Metapontum, because of the wheat.
You’ll do Poseidonia because of the style of the strike, and the way that it’s an
incuse, as opposed to the way the rest of the coins are made.
Which Roman coins are in highest demand?
I would say the Twelve Caesars is definitely the most popular of all the areas.
Everyone’s heard of the Twelve Caesars, and so it’s definitely collected ferociously.
And then I would say some of the more popular coins are Augustus with the comet – it’s
a very popular one – biblical coins are extremely popular, whether it’s any of the
JUDAEA CAPTA coins of Vespasian.
And then there’s the famous coins, like the Titus Colosseum and of course the EID
MAR.
This is probably the first time you’ll ever see a gold and silver EID MAR together, both
with holes.
You would think in general that holes destroy the value of coins, but in this case, these
coins are so sought-after and so rare that they still hold their value pretty well.
As far as the gold goes, there are only three in existence.
This was issued between 43 and 42 BC, and this one has a rich history.
It’s gone up in value from 120,000 to 400,000 to now – all in, with commissions – 2.6
million dollars.
As for the one on the left, the silver EID MAR, this actually has a rich history as well.
It was found at Joppa in early 1900’s or late 1800’s.
It was then published in 1948 by the Leeds Museum.
It was then published by the English Numismatic Society – or the British Society – in
1955, and then in the Spink circular of 1982.
The bracelet was all found together – the coins were found together and then put into
a bracelet.
As for the value of the silver one here on the left, it maybe would have sold for only
two or three thousand dollars thirty years ago, and now we’re asking 115,000, based
on the fact that true EID MARs in silver without holes are bringing between 300,000 and 500,000
dollars – and most don’t have a pedigree before 1970, where this one does.
The gold one, here on the right, also has a pedigree before 1970 – which obviously
helps with the value of these things as well.
I still think that, overall, because these things are selling at a huge premium, they’re
going to hold their value because they are coins that people will always desire and want
to own.
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Back to our interview.
Are there cycles in the prices of ancient coins?
And how closely tied are the prices of ancient coins to the economy as a whole?
There are certainly cycles.
It usually goes between Greek and Roman, and then some subcategories.
Especially at the higher end, the upper 5% of the market, if a couple billionaires – or
more – decide that they want to collect Greek coins, and they fight over it, they
pretty much knock everybody else out of that market.
Those people end up with nothing to collect at the high end, and so they up moving to
other markets, typically, because they still are hardcore collectors.
One example of that is when the Sheik of Qatar was buying in 2010/09 and 2011/12 period – he
was driving out all other people from Greek coins.
So we saw a big surge in Roman gold, and some of the Republican / Imperatorial areas as
well.
And then when he passed away, and got out of the market, we saw another surge back to
Greek coins.
Now Greek coins are very, very strong, and I see some of the Roman gold coming down in
price.
It also comes down to how clients have been satisfied.
If they fill their collections and they’re done collecting, you’re waiting for the
next cycle of collectors to come through who need to buy those coins.
Also, when those collectors who bought those coins decide to sell their collections, that
obviously stimulates the market, because you’re going to have a lot more supply of those types
of coins on the market.
And as for the larger economy – is it closely tied to economic cycles, as far as you can
tell?
I would say that at the high end, it’s not; I would say that in the middle and low end,
it is, for sure.
For most dealers like myself, we’re happy to serve all clients, whether they’re spending
fifty dollars or they’re spending a million dollars.
I would say that a lot of our bread and butter sales are people that spend under two thousand
dollars, and a lot of those people end up going away when the economy is in trouble.
Then you’re focused on your higher-end clients, and it’s never good to focus just on high-end
clients, because that doesn’t help you build your business.
Ultimately, the wealthy always get wealthier during hard times; the middle and low-end,
they get poorer, or they have less disposable income to work with.
So we definitely see those cycles and feel those cycles.
How much does provenance affect value?
Anything before 1970 – there’s a UNESCO treaty that says that museums and institutions
cannot buy anything that does not show proof of ownership outside of the source country
before 1970 – they can’t purchase those to keep them from buying looted material.
So anything pre-1970, you can figure a 20-40% increase in price, sometimes even higher,
depending on the collection and the rarity of the coin.
To date, it is not illegal to own any ancient coins in any country.
What is regulated is what can move in and out of countries.
For instance, nothing is supposed to be allowed to leave source countries; it’s illegal
to take anything out.
In Germany, there’s a law now that states that if it doesn’t have a 20-year pedigree,
it can’t leave Germany.
It can be sold in Germany, it can be owned in Germany, but it can’t leave Germany without
that early pedigree.
In the United States, there are no laws on the books that say that we can’t own any
coins.
But people collect pre-1970 coins because they’re problem-free for moving in and out
of countries around the world, and they can also be donated to museums down the road,
and that is a huge advantage to the high-end collector.
Have any recent discoveries changed the value of an important class of coins?
Groups of coins come on the market – again, it comes down to supply and demand.
There was a large group of Athens tetradrachms – some say it was 30,000 coins, some say
it was 80,000 coins – nobody really knows.
One way you know that there’s a large group – either it’s a collection or a new hoard
that was found, and sometimes we don’t know which one it is – you’ll see every single
coin dealer, every single auction house have multiple types of the same coinage.
How does the market for ancient coins compare to the market for, say, American coins?
It really comes down to simple economics – supply and demand.
The demand for classic US coins is extremely high, while in ancient coins, we only have
broken the million-dollar mark five or seven times, and most of that happened in the last
two to three years.
In US coins, it happens constantly – it isn’t unusual for a coin to sell for millions
of dollars.
The highest price ever paid for an ancient coin is the second EID MAR, which sold at
Roma in 2020 for 4.2 million dollars all in, while there was a US coin – the 1933 Gold
Eagle – that sold for 18 million just a couple summers ago.
So really there is no comparison between the two – it’s vast.
If you talk to most people, they have someone in their family tree that’s collected US
coins, a grandma or grandpa who put US coins away that were found in circulation.
Ancient coins, as a whole, are a newer phenomenon in the United States – not so much in Europe,
because that was their heritage, in some cases – but here in the United States it’s definitely
much newer.
My father, who started in 1964, was one of the earlier pioneers of ancient coins here
in the United States, and they were really – as he would put it – riding on the coattails
of the Europeans.
Now we’re definitely more in line with them, as far as our academia goes and in our collecting
enjoyment of the hobby.
Coins have always been a good investment, but I don’t sell them as investments.
I sell them for the love and the passion of the collecting, of the hobby.
Because I can’t, as a dealer, tell you whether a coin is going to go up or down in value.
I sell at market price.
So, when collecting coins, if somebody tells you “this is a great investment” – run!
Because that’s not good advice, and they’re probably ripping you off.
I think that if you buy properly, if you use a dealer that’s reputable, and you follow
their lead, and you know that they’re not blowing smoke, then you’re probably going
to do good over the long haul.
If you find a dealer that has a really good eye for aesthetics, and you listen to them,
and you learn from them, you will end up building yourself a beautiful collection that will
hopefully garner some value down the road.
Thanks again to Aaron Berk for sharing his expertise.
As I hope this video has made clear, the market for ancient coins is complicated.
Unless you know that market very well, and even if you do, any investment is risky.
Spend time before you spend money.
If nothing else, you’ll learn more about ancient history than you ever thought possible
– and that sort of investment, in this ancient historian’s opinion, always pays dividends.
If you enjoyed this video, please consider supporting toldinstone on Patreon.
You might also enjoy my book, Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants.
Thanks for watching.