Year after year the mint distributes coins into circulation. Without fail, rolls and bags of these newly issued coins are taken from banks before the coins ever reach circulation. These uncirculated bags/rolls of coins are then offered for sale. Inevitably, people buy too many of these rolls and bags and end up losing a great deal of money. In this article, I want to explain why coins dealers for the most part aren’t interested in purchasing these coins.
The first major issue when buying large amounts of bags/rolls is how can I sell them when the time comes? I will use the example of a jumbo bag of 50c coins throughout this article. A 50c jumbo bag contains 20 bags each with 20 coins in it for a total of 400 coins or $200 in face value.
Unless this jumbo bag contains a particularly desirable issue, it will take a great deal of time to sell all these coins on and will tie up money that could be put to better uses.
Secondly, when new coins are released, it’s impossible to know what the mintage will be on these coins. Even if very few are found on the initial release, there is no proof that there will not be more released over the upcoming months and years. All the risk is with the buyer who must wait anxiously for numerous mintage reports which have so far never led to a decimal coin when all is said and done having a lower mintage than 500,000.
Thirdly, the value of these coins is most often established by a fear of missing out. No better example is required than the 2019 JC 50 cent coin. This coin had a stated mintage of 70,000 on the Royal Australian Mint website. However, after the 2020/21 Mint Report, it was found out that the overall mintage was closer to 1,000,000. The big winners here were those who sold coins when the mintage was stated to be 70,000. Those who bought the coins and took all the risk were the ones who ended up out of pocket significantly.
For all the reasons above, coin dealers who understand the nature of mintage reports will not give you anything like the market value on your newly found bags or rolls. We know through experience that it exposes our businesses to a lot of risks with little upside, historically. Prices will most likely drop as will demand once the final mintage is known. Unless you can get them close to face value, the risk is just far too high and the discounts in buying in bulk are just not attractive enough. For those who have invested in bulk rolls or bags of new releases or are thinking of doing it, I implore you to consider the above.
Robbie.