Master Jmd

It was a PSA 10 copy of a 397/SM-P Extra Battle Day Lillie. Back when I was contemplating buying a copy at $400 it was only believed that a maximum of 100 existed, but now it's generally believed there were probably more than 1,000 distributed, which makes the sale even more absurd. The card was listed on Japanese store Card Rush's website and sold in 17 minutes for 17,800,000 JPY: https://www.cardrush-pokemon.jp/phone/product/38932. From what I've been told from a few people I know with decent connections in Japan, it was bought by a "popular Japanese investor", but I don't know any more details than that. Nice to see someone collecting sealed Japanese product - one of the rarest items in my Pokémon collection is a Japanese 2001 Pokémon Center Company reprint Base Set booster pack. If you're on Instagram/Twitter I'd love to check out your collection. 😊 Edit: I've also just noticed that my post before mentioned that I was wanting to buy that Lillie in early 2019. The card didn't release until October/November 2019 so it would have actually been early 2020 I was interested. $400 to $102,800 in just over 3 years!

I'm loosely back to collecting coins thanks to the hobby I moved onto when I left here back in 2008: Pokémon cards. The amount of money that has found its way into Pokémon "investing" in the past 4 or 5 years is absurd. There are a lot of different cards which were difficult to sell for much more than £10 back in 2018 which are now easily selling above £1k. I'm laughing at myself at the moment because a PSA 10 copy of a Pokémon card I decided not to buy for $400 back in early 2019 sold in Japan last week for the equivalent of $102,800 just 17 minutes after being listed. It's completely bonkers. In early 2020 covid was keeping everyone at home, and a lot of late-20 to mid-30 year olds found themselves with nothing to do. Pokémon was something we played during our childhood, and nostalgia bought a lot of people back, then adults collecting Pokémon cards started making headlines around April 2020 ultimately attracting more and more people into the hobby. Thanks to the addition in the US of stimulus checks giving everyone free money, prices of pretty much every card ever made quadrupled between January 2020 and June 2020. Your typical readily-available £5 card was suddenly £20 and where demand was so high a lot had very low supply. A lot of us that had been in the hobby for several years beforehand thought it was a fleeting bubble, myself included. I personally stopped buying any Pokémon cards around August 2020, expecting prices to plummet by the end of the year. Prices did level out for a little while, but fast forward to January 2021 and the introduction of the second stimulus check only caused prices to go up even further. Those typical £5 cards that were £20 in June were now breaking the £50 barrier - a 10x increase in just over a year. But this was just the start... Minor celebrities with large social media followings started getting in on the action. Around April 2021 a friend of mine sold a PSA 9 "Pokémon Illustrator" card they'd bought in 2019 for $70,000 to a Dubai collector for $900,000, setting what was then the record for the most an individual Pokémon card had ever sold for. For over 5 years at this point I had been collecting cards in PSA 10 grade, and despite thinking I'd never sell any of my cards I made the decision to begin downgrading my collection in mid-2021. The gap in value between PSA 9 and PSA 10 was silly at this point. I sold a PSA 10 card for almost five figures and the very same day picked up a PSA 9 replacement for just over £100. In late 2021 a scummy influencer broke the $900,000 record my friend set a few months prior by purchasing a PSA 10 copy of the same card for $4,000,000 plus over $900,000 worth of trade value. Despite being a PSA 10, the card was well known in the community to have been crossed from a PSA 8 several years prior and it was later revealed that the $4,000,000 he spent was profit from some cryptocurrency scam he operated. Regardless, this made headlines around the world when he showed up to a boxing match wearing the card dangling from a necklace... as any normal person would. Despite Pokémon card values already being significantly higher than they'd ever been at this point, the trend didn't slow down there. China's economic uncertainty bought a lot of wealthy Chinese investors into the hobby, buying cards for far more than they'd ever been sold before. If a card sold for over $1k in a popular auction house like Heritage or PWCC it almost guaranteed that every other copy of that card would be subsequently bought out from eBay and other stores - sometimes these would sell over 5 times higher than the auction copy.This trend continued throughout 2022 and into this year. We're now seeing Japan go through a similar Pokémon card boom. Prices on Japanese cards - which were already greatly inflated from their 2019 values - now had significant interest from wealthy Japanese investors. That $102,800 card I mentioned earlier was a sale between a Japanese card shop and Japanese investor. It's one of 167 PSA 10 copies of the same card, and is a 3x increase in value since the beginning of the year. The downgrading of my collection I began in 2021 has now turned into me auctioning off all of my remaining PSA 10 cards. I don't value them anywhere near as much as people are paying for them, and whilst the income is something I welcome I'm quite sad that what used to bring myself and a lot of others great enjoyment has been transformed from a bit of fun into a serious investment. Very few people collect Pokémon cards for enjoyment any more, and demand is so high that it's almost impossible to find new product on shelves. I still very much believe Pokémon is going through a bubble, but it's been going on for so long now that I don't know when or if it'll ever burst. Sorry for writing a slightly off-topic essay. I mostly wanted to say that I'm enjoying being able to pick up farthings for not all that much higher than I was paying 15 years ago. It's refreshing.

I've been thinking about this coin a lot recently, so I'm going to up my offer to £2,000. If anyone would be able to put me in touch with the winner of that lot I'd be happy to throw in a finders fee of £100 if it leads to a successful purchase.

@myt that list is fantastic. I've just finished looking through everything. There are a lot of really great websites here that I've never seen before and I'll definitely be checking back frequently. Some on the other hand are very difficult to use - either they've not been updated in 20+ years; they list sold coins alongside available ones without any distinction until you click into them; or they make it as hard as they possibly can to search their inventory. 😅

Edit: Looks like the auction pages are working fine on the Easy Live Auctions website itself: https://www.easyliveauction.com/catalogue/894f5a1449590e6a02a2a453b39ca4d8/0af8d24542e81eb9357e7ef448a6646f/lockdales-coins-collectables-auction-229/ --- A lot of files from the provider they're using, Easy Live Auctions, is timing out. The page seems to be set up so that it has to wait until all of the requested files timeout before anything is able to display on the page, and after that the pagination doesn't work because the required JavaScript has not loaded properly. I imagine they've had too many visitors and have used up their quota with the provider or something. Trying again tomorrow would probably be the best bet.

My new circulation 1953 2+A farthing arrived. It's been a very long time since I added a new farthing to my collection, that's for sure. Many thanks again to @PWA 1967 for pointing me in the direction of this one.

Despite thinking it was a long shot, thanks to @PWA 1967 I was able to source a high grade 2+A 1953 farthing a lot sooner than I was expecting - I'll share some images over in the coin acquisition of the week thread when it arrives. So here's an even greater long shot... Last March this CGS 85 ex J.B. de Loynes 1953 VIP proof farthing sold through Noonans for £280: This sale came before it was known that some VIP sets contain a previously undiscovered 1953 variant (discussed in this thread) where the 'F' in 'FARTHING' points to a gap and the 'I' points to a bead. From doing a small amount of research it seems like a 50:50 split whether a VIP set contained this variant or the more documented 1 + A variant. I'd like to offer £560 for this coin pictured (double the hammer price), something around that amount for a similar grade, or £250 for a lower grade example which is clearly this variant.

I'm not sure if they made a regular 1 + A proof outside of the VIP sets. Wow! You're lucky to have one of the matte versions. Seems like they're probably the hardest to track down. Maybe one day if you feel like selling I may be a potential buyer. 😉

Interesting. From my notes I now have the following variants for the 1953 farthings: 1 + A 1 + A VIP proof 1 + A matte proof 1 + B 2 + A 2 + A proof 2 + B 2 + B proof 2 + B matte proof 2 + ? VIP proof (the variant from this thread) The £6,500 listing you mention supposedly included a 2 + B VIP proof, but I'm not sure if there are any features of the coin which would make it differ in any way from the usual 2 + B proof, so I'm not including that on the list above. I don't know if matte proof variants exist for 1 + B and 2 + A. The 1 + A and 2 + B both sold through Heritage (https://www.ha.com/c/search-results.zx?N=790+231&Nty=1&Ntt=farthing+1953+matte+proof&ic10=ArchiveTab-071515). Looks like I'm going to have my work cut out if I want to acquire all of these variants. 😧

Thanks for all the responses so far. I've not had much of a chance to look through all of them yet but I must say the back catalogue on Noonans is spectacular. I was hoping I'd be able to update the list in my first post but it seems I'm unable to do that.

This is a great discovery, thanks for sharing! In terms of the farthings, are there any differences between the regular 1953 proof sets and the VIP sets (without this particular example) aside from provenance? I'm trying to put together a list of post-1900 farthings I need to be on the look out for and I'm not sure if the regular VIP set example is something I should include.

I've been collecting Pokémon cards for a long time now and know of all of the big name auction houses for those, but for coins I'm mostly in the dark at the moment. I'd love to find out what places I should be keeping my eye on - even if it's just to drool at listings which are way beyond my budget. I'm hoping a list already exists (I couldn't find one when searching), but if not for the sake of this post I may as well list what I'm already aware of. For auction houses, I'm aware of: Spink (https://www.spink.com) London Coins (https://www.londoncoins.co.uk) Heritage Auctions (https://coins.ha.com) Noble Numismatics (https://www.noble.com.au) Baldwin's Auctions (https://auctions.baldwin.co.uk) For reputable shops, I'm aware of: Predecimal (https://www.predecimal.com) Colin Cooke Coins (https://www.colincooke.com) R. Ingram Coins (https://www.ringramcoins.com) I'm sure there are a lot more I'm missing, and would love to find out about them!

Well I tried to fight the urge to pick up some more farthings, but their siren song is hard to ignore. ☹️ I'm interested in acquiring a circulation (not the proof version) 1953 2+A farthing. Ideally I'd like as close to flawless as possible, but I appreciate that's probably a tough ask. I'd stick an offer amount here but I'm completely out of the loop when it comes to coin values. That said, I'm expecting to pay upwards of £75 for the condition I'm after.

Hoping my grandkids will one day appreciate them, so definitely not parting with them if I don't have to. 🙂 After a bit of digging I think I've found the coin I bought from Colin's collection, this BMC 70 James I Lennox Farthing (#991 on the collection website): Do please let me know if those aren't the same, but I'm fairly certain they are. Unfortunately despite having extensive documentation of all my 2004 and 2005 purchases, I appear to have nothing from 2006. I'd completely forgotten I had this coin altogether. I guess 1613 (James I - although I'm aware this post-1613) and 1673 are similar enough numbers and in my head at some point I started associating the 1673 farthing with Colin's collection instead of this one. I should probably try to source a tighter capsule for it so it doesn't shake around as much.

I've just done some digging and it turns out you're both correct! Colin's collection didn't go on sale until February 2006. All this time I've believed that my coin was the one from his collection, and even that I chose the coin specifically out of his collection, and yet I acquired the coin almost 2 years prior to his collection going up for sale. It's interesting then that the Colin Cooke collection page mentions one example of the coin being sold by Colin Cooke in 1999, but not this one from 2004. I guess perhaps those were from Colin's own notes and the entry for this coin hadn't been updated. Well this is embarrassing and confusing, but thank you for pointing this out! I definitely did buy something from his collection, but it obviously wasn't this! I assume < £200 is a more accurate valuation in this case?