Master Jmd

I made the decision a couple of months ago to focus on bulking out my wren farthing collection before going after older dates. To my surprise, a 1949 proof, 1956 proof and 1951 matte proof all appeared for sale in the space of 5 weeks. My phone camera is far from the best, so here are the scans: Whilst I'd love to see more dates appear, for the sake of my wallet I hope none do until after Christmas!

I can also highly recommend Wise. I've been using it for a couple of years now and it's saved me a small fortune in conversion fees. It effectively gives you a local bank account for whichever currency you're looking to spend. In your case rather than transferring USD from your US bank account to a UK bank (incurring a wire fee), you'd instead convert your USD to GBP, then send that GBP locally to the UK bank. Their conversion fees are also very competitive. Makes PayPal look like a bit of a joke. Right now if you were to convert $1k USD to GBP Wise would give you £800.38 whilst PayPal would only give you £769.15.

Apologies for the delay - did you have any luck finding this? There are a handful of catalogues uploaded in full on Archive.org. It's a long shot but I don't suppose you'd have any interest in uploading this there if it's now out of print? 😊

It's such a beautiful coin. I don't know if I would have been able to win this one, but I'm gutted I missed out on the chance to participate by just 3 weeks. 😅 It's not too bad looking back on things which have sold 2 or 3 years ago that came and went before I rekindled my appreciation for coins, but this very much feels like one which has slipped through my fingers. Hopefully one day I'll get another chance!

I'm sad that I missed this one. Not only does it look like it'd have been a fantastic auction to watch, I've dreamed of owning one of these 1601 patterns since first seeing them in The Alderly Collection which Colin Cooke sold back in 2006-7.

After 8 months of waiting Waterstones have cancelled my order for the 2016 updated version of The Bronze Coinage of Great Britain (cc @Chris Perkins - not sure if you no longer supply these to Waterstones?) Multiple new copies of the 2006 hardcover version are up on Amazon for £25, but the 2016 version is nowhere to be found. I'd be happy to pay £30 for a new/close to new copy of the book if anyone here has a copy?

Figured this is worth sharing here. This is up on St James' June auction block: https://bsjauctions.auctionmobility.com/lots/view/1-7LEF1R/british-coins

If you do consider selling yours I'd definitely be interested. Do let me know if you have a price in mind.

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.