Centennial Precious Metals, Inc: Serving Gold Coin & Bullion Investors Since 1973

An Introduction to Collecting Historic European and Latin American Gold Coins for Fun and Profit

by Michael J. Kosares
Author: "The ABCs of Gold Investing - How to Protect and Build Your Wealth with Gold"

Historic European and Latin American gold coins from the mid-19th to early 20th century offer a rich vein of opportunity for the individual interested in combining gold ownership with numismatic potential. This potential is not too different from the one presented by U.S. $20 gold pieces and silver dollars in the 1950s and 1960s when early accumulators were able to acquire quality specimens in bulk at slight premiums over the bullion price. They then put those acquisitions away and waited for the market to come to them. Those investors experienced multiple returns later (during the gold bull market in the 1970s and 1980s) when scarcity and quality began to play role in the pricing. Bags of uncirculated silver dollars and rolls of $20 pieces then became eligible for culling and selling at premium prices by grade, date and mintmark. There is no way of knowing with certainty whether or not a similar situation will develop with the pre-1933 European and Latin American gold coins, but the opportunity presents little or no additional risk for those with an interest in owning gold anyway.

As it was with the American coins at mid-century, grading is virtually a non-issue for the more common date items - or at least not the issue it would become later with the advent of grading services, encased coins and hundreds even thousands of dollars of price difference from one grade to the next. Pre-1933 European and Latin American gold coins generally come forgivingly in two grades -- circulated and uncirculated. Having sold thousands of these items at USAGOLD - Centennial Precious Metals over the past decade, I have had the opportunity to personally inspect a wide variety of national design types and mintages and marveled at the quality state of preservation on a large cross-section of items.

These circumstances present today's investors with an extraordinary opportunity worth exploiting.

Historic European and Latin American gold coins offer, in my mind, one of the great, largely untouched and potentially lucrative opportunities in the field of gold investing today. If you have been looking for a new interest, I think you will find this area worth your attention.

Collecting strategies

To understand how vast the selection of European and Latin American gold coins, all one has to do is review The Krause Standard Catalogue of World Gold Coins - a tome comprised of 1100 pages and 50,000 individual listings. Disciplining such a formidable array of possibilities into anything resembling a logical collection appears daunting at first blush. The marketplace, though, has already done the job for us to a large extent by presenting investors and collectors with a nice selection of commonly available items representing both the various nations and the monarchies over the period.

Between the period 1850 and 1933, eleven nations in Europe (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Netherlands, Russia, Sweden and Switzerland) and six Latin American nations (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Mexico and Uruguay) minted gold coins in sufficient quantities and with enough consistency to insure their survival to the present. In each nation, over the period there was at least one, if not two or three, coin type[s] that would make sense in a representative collection. The most logical approach would be to assemble this grouping - an 18 coin country collection by type and denomination. Items from these countries are generally available with some persistence on the part of the collector/investor.

A more aggressive, though sensible approach would be to assemble a roll set - 50 coins each of the items catalogued herein - or a double roll set. Such a collection would open the door to further culling down the road should the market begin breaking out the coins by date, mintmark and grade - as it did with U.S. $20 gold pieces and silver dollars in the 1970s and 1980s.

Another alternative would be to concentrate your purchases in target areas which you believe to have more potential than the others, the result of your own research. None of these approaches, of course, precludes you from pursuing a strategy of your own.

Many of our clients have been satisfied to simply acquire what comes along according to their means and available capital. After all, you can't go wrong. At the very least, you can count on the bullion value no matter what happens in the numismatic market.

To learn more about the advantages of pre-1933 gold coin ownership, please contact your USAGOLD-Centennial Precious Metals representative.

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Mr. Kosares has over 30 years in the gold business as the founder and CEO of Centennial Precious Metals, Inc. and is a highly-respected member of the gold fraternity internationally and a well-known expert in the field of gold. He is the author of the widely read book, The ABCs of Gold Investing: How to Protect and Build Your Wealth With Gold; and has contributed articles to, and has been interviewed for a wide assortment of financial publications including the Wall Street Journal, USAToday and Barron's.