00:00 Speaker A

You could take this coin, you could spend this for $50. You’d be crazy to obviously cuz it’s got, you know, almost $5,000 worth of gold in it.

00:11 Speaker B

There’s the past year where gold has been going up and up and up and silver’s been going up and up and up. And then there’s the past month where the gyrations have been crazy. So first, what have you been seeing?

00:20 Speaker A

That increase in value brings out people. They hear something on Yahoo and and they say, ‘Oh wow, you know, gold’s up. Let me go look in the underwear drawer, let me go look in the safe deposit box.’

00:36 Speaker A

That’s a gold coin. It’s got, it’s a $4 gold piece and it’s going to sell for $150,000 or more.

00:43 Speaker A

You could take uh this coin, which is just a one ounce gold coin, that nominally has a denomination of $50. You could spend this for $50. You’d be crazy to obviously because it’s got, you know, almost $5,000 worth of gold in it.

00:54 Speaker A

So this is a St. Goden’s $20 gold piece, same design.

00:58 Speaker B

So how much is that coin worth?

00:59 Speaker A

This has just a little bit less than an ounce of of gold. The gold value is so high and there’s these are common enough as a series that they don’t trade that much above their their gold value.

01:07 Speaker B

So, can I touch one?

01:08 Speaker A

Yeah, absolutely. just by the edges. Can’t hurt it too bad, it’s gold.

01:13 Speaker B

There’s the value of the actual gold or silver or whatever metal these are made of. What else determines the value?

01:18 Speaker A

Sure. For a collectible coin, it’s going to be some of the basic things, supply and demand, quality, and you know, how rare something is.

01:25 Speaker B

So older isn’t necessarily better if there were if there’s still lots of them around.

01:30 Speaker A

Look, we’re in we’re in a time of peak metal values. I mean, with silver having topped $100 and then some, gold well over 5,000. Collecting has morphed and evolved over the last, you know, almost 200 years when the current generation of coin dealers and collectors who are in their, you know, 60s, 70s, 80s today, when they were kids in the in the 50s and 60s, coin collecting was huge because you could still find old cool things, but back then you might have gotten a Indian penny from the 1800s or baseball cards, comic books.

01:52 Speaker A

uh it was just something that they did with their friends. People collect watches, Pokemon cards. I mean, a million dollar Pokemon card, it seems, seems crazy, but, you know, as those kids who collected Pokemon cards, and they make some money later on, they never got the special Pikachu or whatever and and they’ve got money in their pocket and they’re willing to spend on on something that’s truly rare and so you only have so many that are left.

02:08 Speaker B

Um, should I get my stuff to show you?

02:10 Speaker A

Please. Let’s get a fresh tray.

02:13 Speaker A

These are both, you know, silver half dollars. Kennedy half dollar came out in 1964 and only that first year was made out of full silver content basically.

02:22 Speaker A

Today is is worth uh maybe about $25 give or take. With silver so high, that’s what happens sometimes. The silver value or the gold value can overtake any kind of collector value.

02:32 Speaker B

Got it.

02:32 Speaker B

Like even as we’ve been standing here, the doorbell is ringing, there’s been a steady stream of people coming in here. Is it always like that?

02:39 Speaker A

where there’s the profit motive, profit potential. I mean, if you’ve been sitting on something, just to put it in perspective,

02:46 Speaker A

when I first started in this company 26 years ago, gold was under $300 an ounce. It bottomed out at $257 an ounce in 2001. It’s now almost $5,000 an ounce. So, if someone bought one ounce gold coins in 2001, you know, they’re sitting pretty.