Courtesy of Heritage Galleries & Auctioneers, Dallas, Texas.

By Jim Halperin

After two decades of dramatic false starts and long, slow price declines, we may be on the verge of a real bull market in coins. Demographics and simple logic suggest that the next quarter-century will witness the greatest long-term rare coin boom in history. That boom should begin in less than ten years, and perhaps as soon as next year. For the subsequent 75 years, prediction becomes far more difficult, and I'll save my limited musings on that period for the final paragraph of this column.
To illustrate the factors that cause me to predict a coin boom through at least 2025, let's take a look at my own checkered numismatic history.

When I was ten, my next-door neighbor taught me how to collect coins, and I became immediately and temporarily spellbound, thinking of little else. With free access to numerous penny jars from cooperative neighbors and relatives, I nearly filled my Lincoln cent book in just a few weeks. Nickels, dimes, and quarters immediately followed suit. I lost interest after a few months, but about five years later the flame rekindled when in 1968 at the age of fifteen, I opened a stamp and coin shop a couple miles from my house. That summer project would evolve into my life's career.

My story is fairly typical. From the 1950s until as recently as the late 1960s, premium coinage could routinely be plucked from pocket change. Many numismatists from my generation discovered we could buy bags of coins from a local bank, pick through them in the course of an evening, and exchange the common coins for new ones the next day. Frankly, it was the combination of gambling instinct and profit motive that kept most of us involved. We loved knowing that the next bag of pennies, or the next day's pocket change, might contain an S-VDB or a '50-D nickel. Some became dealers while others of us lost interest, many making fortunes in other fields and returning to numismatics as collectors. Throughout the booming 1960s and 1970s, we drove the coin market to record levels.

But by 1980, premium coinage had been all but purged from circulation, and ever since, coin dealers have fretted over what would create the next generation of customers. Recently, Beanie Babies and Pokémon cards have become what I call "the gambling medium of choice" for both schoolchildren and the eBay set.

Not to worry. New coin collectors are now, finally, being created by the tens of millions.

I knew we had a winner two months ago when I brought home for my two young sons (age 4 and 8) a couple of State Quarter albums, each containing three different coins. Ever since, they've been diligently inspecting change to attempt to fill those empty holes. Dave, our eight-year-old, is as obsessed as I was at ten, and says he actually prefers the quarter collection to his Pokémon cards! I can assure you my son is no nonconformist, and would only say such a thing if the majority of his pals at school felt the same way. Furthermore, several of their parents and other family friends who used to collect Beanie Babies have sold them and are now collecting State Quarters. Dallas is by no means unique in its collecting tastes.

In fact, one major marketer alone has reportedly sold between one and two million State Quarter boards, and I've heard that the number sold nationwide now exceeds fifteen million. If only 2% of those buyers become interested enough in coins to subscribe to Coin World, this newspaper's circulation would quintuple. (To do our part, Heritage recently purchased 10,000 quarter boards. We've been giving them free of charge to the parents, grandparents, and teachers of local schoolchildren.)

The other important demographic, of course, is income. To collect the kind of rare coins that drive the Coin Universe Market Index, you have to have a lot of disposable wealth.

Of all generations, these days it's the twentysomethings who seem to find it easiest to become dotcom zillionaires. They've grown up with computers and, on average, discovered the Internet long before we boomers did. And let's face it, they can work longer hours with less sleep. Furthermore, their brain wiring is more adaptable than ours. (This mental capacity, known as plasticity, provably diminishes with age.) Over the next ten years, as biotech, nanotech, and who-knows-what-other-tech get added to the mix, the ideal age to acquire IPO megabucks may well drop to the mid-teens.

Which is fine with me, since my own two sons will fall into just the right age group not only to support their adoring and grateful parents, but also to return to their childhood love of numismatics!

I only hope it will be as easy to interest my grandchildren in coin collecting. After all, by the time they're my sons' ages, perhaps in 2030 or so, technology will likely halt any need for circulating coins or currency, which as I've stated in a previous column, are also a vector for disease. Therefore, "antique money," i.e. the non-electronic kind, will be much less familiar to that generation -- and to those that follow. Will such lack of familiarity make coins more noteworthy and hence more valuable, or render them less nostalgic and thus less desirable? I suspect and hope more the former than the latter, but only time will tell.

Copyright 2000, published by permission from the May 15 issue of Coin World.