Cita: Walder CoinsI have read about people who collect along this line before just collecting one year of a coin in order to inflate the price and then they can dump a lot on the market and make a killing. I struggle to see how that legal in most countries if the same was done with shares it would be seen as market manipulation which is illegal and taken very seriously.
It's been tried by many people, from small scale collectors and dealers to the massive manipulation of the world silver market by the Hunt brothers back in the 70's. It never works because of simple market dynamics. If you choose a coin with a mintage of say 10,000 from the inter-war period and assume that 5,000 have survived it might seem a simple idea to buy up all 5,000 then wait for the price to go up. However, in any given year maybe only 5% of the examples will come onto the market so it would take you 20 years to buy them all. Even worse, after ten years, the very fact that you have bought every single item that came up for sale, pretty much means that no other collector has been able to buy one, and they will start to bid more aggressively. The coins you were buying for $100 are now costing you $500.
At this point the would-be speculator realises that the next ten years are going to be even more expensive, and dumps his entire hoard of 2,500 coins onto the market, expecting to get $500 each - which he will do for about an hour until the market reacts and the price drops to $1.
It's much easier to do this with shares and commodity futures, pumping and dumping. It's how the big banks and hedge funds make such obscene profits and pay such outrageous bonuses to their executives. Of course when someone makes a dollar, someone else loses one, and that is always the small investor or the taxpayer.
Non illegitimis carborundum est. Excellent advice for all coins.
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