Return on Collectible U.S. Coins

Are collectible (mint state, brilliant uncirculated or proof) U.S. coins attractive to investors as an alternative asset class? In their October 2019 paper entitled “U.S. Coins Market: Historical Performance and Anomalies”, Khaled Obaid, Kuntara Pukthuanthong and David Maslar measure historical returns within the multi-billion dollar collectible U. S. coins market and determine what investors should require and avoid when selecting coins. They also examine whether collectible coins are effective diversifiers of conventional asset classes and are useful as an inflation hedge. They construct their sample manually from bid and ask prices of U.S. penny, nickel, dime, quarter, half dollar and dollar coins as listed in the first CDN Publishing Greysheet of each calendar year. They assume that the average of bid and ask for a coin is a sale price. Using price data for 2,063 coins during 1967 through 2015, they find that:

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