If you follow economic news in even the most cursory fashion you are, no doubt, aware of the fact that the news has been pretty grim for the last few days. Lehman Brothers is gone, Merrill Lynch has been sold in a distress situation to Bank of America, AIG is looking perilous and the stock market yesterday had its single worst day since immediately after 9/11. How does this affect the rare coin market?

For those of us who experienced the coin market’s ups and downs in the 1980’s and 1990’s, perhaps the biggest surprise has been the relatively quiet Proof gold market of the past few years. While prices for Proof gold have certainly risen since the beginning of this decade, new collectors don’t seem to regard these coins with the same degree of awe that was seen in the recent past.

The response to the article that I wrote last month on the ten rarest Liberty Head eagles was so overwhelmingly positive that I’ve decided to extend this format to other denominations of Liberty Head gold. This month’s topic: quarter eagles. The Liberty Head quarter eagle series was produced from 1840 through 1907. Unlike the larger denomination issues of this type, quarter eagles were never produced at the Carson City or Denver mints.

Someone recently asked me a question that I thought was interesting and that merited a detailed response. To paraphrase this question, they basically asked me this: can you tell me some ways that I can improve my collection while spending little or no money? Are there any actual ways that you can make your collection better without dropping a lot of coin (bad pun intended)? I believe that there are and here are a few that came to mind: 1.

Coin dealers are an “interesting” (yes, this is an ironic use of quotes) group. If you were to take the top fifty professionals in this field and examine their personalities, I believe that a number of the same traits would be seen in a majority of these individuals. What are some of these traits? And do you have what it takes to be a successful coin dealer?

Lost amid the hoopla of the recent Baltimore ANA and the numerous auctions that accompanied this show was the sale of one of the greatest United States gold coins in existence. Even more remarkable was the fact that in this day of “ho hum, another million dollar coin just sold,” this sale received relatively little publicity and the final price realized was, in retrospect, pretty reasonable, all things considered.