6/2/08 - because of the unusual situations with both the bullion markets and the USA dollar exchange rate everything (11/16/2008) you should consider ALL of my posted prices to be provisional.  There may be changes in any category.  This notice will be posted on a few other pages but not all.  But this is your official notice. (Renewed 1/4/2010 - this is what low level chaos feels like.)  (6/8/2010 chaos continues to build.  Think before you act.  Think before you think.  Observe before that.  Remember to breathe.) 10/21/2010 so here we are living history.  How long has this crisis been going on?  3 years?  11?  40?  65?
This aviso renewed again 4/10/2011.  It hasn't been this eventful since the 60s.  And again 10/6/2011.  5 years of financial crisis.

A. SELLING:
December pricelist
17,000 other things for sale
New (if the background of this page is a different color than last time you looked there is new stuff) - update 1/14/2012
note on viewing pictures
site search

B. BUYING:
Buying
What's It Worth? - numismatic estate handling for live collectors & executors

C. SERVICES:
Attribution, authentication, grading, and appraisal services
Market research
Subscription

D. INFORMATION
Information
Links - friends, colleagues
Blog

E. OPINIONS & NEWS
12/29/2011
1. MORE DATA (& "data") for this business: I put out 6 printed price lists this year, as opposed to 8 last year & 12 the year before.  Less than 10% of the gross came from printed price list customers.  The biggest increase came in the phone & email sectors.  3 clients accounted for ~30% of the gross.  1 client accounted for 20%.  Gross was down ~15% from last year, but net will probably be about the same.
2. 2011 HAD A boom in Chinese & British Indian coins, one could call it bubbly, the excitement has come & gone, base prices are much higher for good stuff, lot of formerly available items not present in the market.  Booms without busts, the current normal is boom followed by famine.
3. DESPITE FLUCTUATIONS the market continues relatively strong.  There is a general lack of good and medium stuff available, only the purchase of old collections gets anything "good" in.  I bought 5 such collections this year, or parts of them.  Want to sell me some of your stuff?  This year consigned material brought in 35% of the gross.  Of course most of that was the big Chinese silver coins but still, about 5x what it was the year before.  15%, commission, 12% single items getting $1000/+.  Come talk with me.
4. BEYOND electoral politics - all over the world we see manipulation of elections & electorates.  The tendencies are toward election of stupid people by riled minorities yielding stupid governments that do the wrong things badly & the right things seldom.  Something new apparently taking shape in the internet, we don't know what it is yet.  We can see how easy it is to get poll data now, perhaps a different way of making collective decisions devloping.  Harder to get away with really bad stuff now: everything likely to show up on the internet.  New Optimo Principi aborning?
5. BEYOND confrontation - not necessarily reconciliation, more likely grudging grumbly putting up with it.  The neighbor dog barks early Sunday morning.  Put up with it.  For me annoying things remind me to not get annoyed, do something else instead.  Take a deep breath.  Get some exercise.
6. SORRY about all the mistakes I made this year.  I'll keep making them and I'll keep fixing them.
7. I NEVER know, something good might happen.  Keep busy, maybe something will get done.  Health & comfort for you next year.

10/6/2011
1. WHILE I was writing this list silver went from $41 to $28 & back to $32.  All silver prices are guestimates at the moment.  They may be higher or lower.  There is a lag in the drop of dealer prices as the market falls but eventually the loss is buffered by time & new aquisitions at lower price and our prices fall too.  This week a retail gold ounce has a premium of about $100.  If the market stays low prices will adjust.  I will sell many of my bullion-related items at spot more or less through October.  The silver coins 105% of spot will remain available until those coins are gone.
2. DEMOGRAPHIC changes in my clientele: ~2/3 of my gross income this year involved Chinese in some way or other.  90% of the business is done on internet.  98% are male, middle-aged.
3. I BOUGHT my mom a laptop, she'd have a lot of fun but she refuses to learn it.  Thinks it'll be too much effort.  I remember thinking that way.  I still don't have a smart phone.  I don't mind waiting until the technology is mature, then I do not let sentimental memories of the good old days express & I add the layer of complexity.  Like trying to avoid the ocean.
4. ARAB SPRING - I tweeted & facebooked extensively during Egypt, warned about typical revolutionary regression to the mean, a very brief doorway through which a segment of Israel could have walked (Peace Now contingent in Tahrir Square & other such pipe dreams) & now has become apparent that they only had 1/2 of a revolution & suspect they cannot go all the way to takeover.  Watch and learn I told my kid's hipster peacenik friends.  Observe all the many ways to fail.  How do you keep a united purpose without a personal leader or a rigid ideology linked to an authoritarian hierarchy?  We didn't figure it out.  You'll have to do it.  I tell them.

9/23/2011 Update of coin, papermoney, exonumia inventories today, but I have not been able to comprehensively review the prices so many of them remain old and mostly too cheap.  More and more my business is becoming commodity related, prices of silver & gold being mostly bullion related and therefore floating these days.
8/11/2011
1. STUFF OF LIFE delayed this offering until now: all sorts of non-trivial but not disastrous things had to be taken care of.
2. IN THAT TIME, June to now, metals peaked, fell back, advanced again, therefore prices of gold & silver items subject to change.  In my business these days there is getting to be a rough head knowledge of the weights of various coins so we sort of quickly calculate in our heads what a coin is worth in metal terms.  Silver dollar 3/4 ounce, sort of.  So in a sense us coin people are doing ancient style money changer business.
3. TWO REGISTERED PARCELS going out of country to different destinations sat in two different airport facilities for 15+ days before going on to destination.  They were not customs issues.  They just sat there.  A domestic parcel insured $300.00 arrived out of package, totally chewed up, merchandise intact, 6 weeks NC to CA.  3 odd events out of 77 parcels sent.  Best freight prices: USPS.
4. POLITICS a very blunt tool with which to attempt to do surgery on human nature.  Ideologies inept attempts at instruction manuals.  Users of those manuals not understanding them anyway, most of those manuals stay there on the shelf, owner thinks: oh, the answer is over there in the manual, I'll look it up some day.  Hire someone else to do it for me.  No wonder so much doesn't get done.  The wonder is that stuff gets done at all.
5. EXCEPT US.  The coin collectors.  We know how things work, right?  Enjoy rest of summer, Europeans on vacation, stay out of the hurricanes southerners.  Avoid spreading zones of anarchy if possible.

5/26/2011 Beware of flaring tempers during hot summer months.

4/10/2011 Still too much going on, no time to write about it.  Aged parents have arrived in town.  I have to help them get settled.  Health issues.

2/24/2011 Too much happening, no time to write about it.  Hope to soon.

1/27/2011 Updated inventories.  Supposedly we will start shifting the inventories to a searchable database this year.  The change will proceed in pieces.  Ancient coins will go first.

12/16/2010
This update and posting has been prepared partially on the road, mistakes will be fixed in a couple of days.

1. ADVICE REPEATED FROM NOVEMBER: GOLD & SILVER continuing to bubble.  Likely that some of the prices in this list will be obsolete before it is printed and mailed, changes in those prices possible.  There: you have been advised.
2. I AM SERIOUSLY NEEDING TO BUY COINS.  Sell me your collection now please.  If you have Chinese now is time to sell some (save some for later).  Indian too.  But its also a good time to sell anything else.  Please send me some stuff.
2. WIKILEAKS demonstrates the generational divide.  Do the numbers: there are too many leakers.  They can't even keep it down in the hard dictatorships.  To restore secrecy we will have to destroy technology.  That may happen anyway but we are not going to DO that.  There is a new way of doing things going on in front of our incomprehending old people eyes.  Vast numbers of educated people for whom national governments mean nothing, no more substantial than breeze on a balmy spring day.
3. THERE IS a large collector community in Indonesia.  They collect NEI mostly, VOC.  They only speak Indonesian.  I bet there are more than a million of them.  I'm facebook friends with some.  They don't have any money but they collect anyway.  There's money in China though.  They bought all my good Chinese, then they bought all the grade B, now they're buying anything good from anywhere.  US silver dollars get more there than here.
4. THE ECONOMICS this year feels like 1981, gold & silver like 1980, the tightness we feel is like what we felt during Vietnam, paying for all that war.  A big difference is that 30 years of neglected infrastructure and resource depletion, the extra people.  Not the new extra ones, the old ones, us.  Luck to all of us in next year.

10/22/2010
    Check out Uganda.  Another holocaust brewing.
10/21/2010
    Life has lately given me/us a bigger plate of stuff to do, thus the rather dramatic lateness of this update and pile of unfilled orders.  I attend to your orders directly following posting, and if lessons of history can be applied this time I expect to be up-to-date sometime next week.  Thanks for your patience.
    More patience: we are very close to the searchable database/catalog/inventory I've been talking about for the last 5 years.  Should have something for everyone to play with in another month or two.
10/16/2010
1. GOLD & SILVER looking bubbly again.  Likely that some of the prices in this list will be obsolete before it is published, changes in those prices possible.  There: you have been advised.
2. I SAW a movie last night that a major theme was watching people watching things (sports).  Kind of meta.  This morning I am thinking that I have had several, no, many personal interactions lately in which my perfectly ordinary interlocutors dropped total slogans on me in the midst of ordinary conversation.  There was some purpose to the slogan drop, often political, I was supposed to engage on an agree-disagree axis.  Of late I have confined my engagement on that level to an observation of the derivative nature of the phrase, to please explain in partner's own words so I can respond from my own experience, OK?  Because everything's complicated and all I know is what I know.
3. SO HERE in Raleigh Republican insurgents took over the county school board last year with 4.5% of the vote (9% turnout), abolished the previous integration policy, have not managed to put a replacement in place, they ran their meetings with major drama, now they are fighting with themselves, the main thing getting done is nothing.  I kind of think Raleigh is a vanguard city, it happens here first.
     The little picture is that the big money is effectively neutralizing about 55% of the population most of the time over time, getting us to waste the bulk of our spare time with consumption of commodities and photons while they do what they like to do, which is make/take money.  The medium picture is that nobody knows what to do but the thieves so ephemeral "movements" arise, population shifts around like the water in the bathtub with the kid and the boats, occasionally the agitation spills over makes a mess on the floor, parent has to clean up.  But we are also the parent.
     So many people, all wanting things.

9/10/2010
1. TENDENCIES: to imagine that because people don't know what i know they don't know anything at all, to look at an aspect and ignore the matrix, to play the game of making pseudo-logical if/then constructions in "my" "mind" aka jump to conclusions, to think that i know things, to think that i'm "right," to get excited by stuff, to seek to get excited...
2. LAYERS: layers of things arrayed in space, particular viewpoint (aka "me") moving through the array, layers of atmosphere, water, rock, life, culture flowing through each other, layers of intent, denial, hope, fear, etc. like rime on our activities, layers displaying other sides of things, obscuring and thereby demonstrating layers beyond, shreds of wisdom perhaps occasionally encountered while blundering through the layers.
    Apply these principles if you wish to your electoral activity this fall.  Haha.  My response perhaps to the GlennBeckathon.
2. THE ANSWER LIES within, it doesn't lie without.
3. PAKISTAN - I give to UNICEF - 100% put-through.  The thing is though that this kind of major disaster stuff will be happening more and more as the population gets thicker and the resources get thinner.  One does what one can, feelsless worse, can't catch them all.  I imagine we humans will experience movements of 10s of millions of people in next few years, deaths of millions, the rest of us will feel bad and go about our business what else are we going to do?  Wasn't us this time.
4. IN RECOGNITION of the probably imminent deflation of non-essential commodities and concomitant inflation of things like food every order made in September will get extra free gift stuff of greater than no value at all.
5. AROUND the middle of September I'll probably sell off all of my silver, so if you want some buy it now.  I have some nice-ish stuff in the melt box.

7/27/22010
1. MAKE NO MISTAKE - in the next 3 months there will be a lot of blather followed by the election by us USA-ians of various public servants.  About 60-70% of the voters know what they're going to do about that, something between ~20-~70% of us will vote - these are uncertain times.  I seem unable to refrain from giving advice, so here are my recommendations for those who are not committed to an electoral plan:
     -reduce or eliminate TV as your news source.  The visuals get in the way of conceptual thought.  Find other ways to get your news.
     -sample the propaganda of your ideological enemies regularly.  You will always find that they have some good points to make, most of the idealogizing is empty but if there was truly nothing there no one would be interested.
     -get your sample ballot from the Board of Elections & research the candidates.  That's easy to do on the internet, if you don't do computers someone you know does.
         I've been working in elections for 5 years now.  The opposite of elections is dictatorship of some sort.  I like elections.
2. MY LEAST FAVORITE WORD: "just" - Just do this, everything will be fine.  I've always found that to be not true.
3. MY PARENTS - are moving down here in September and I will be involved in the logistics.  We can imagine that this will have some impact on the schedule of the next pricelist, well, we'll see what happens.
4. PEOPLE WANTED me to comment on the oil leak, now its capped, everyone's going to loose interest if it stays capped.  Like what happened to Haiti?  Congo?  Darfur?  I think in Darfur they said they killed all the people they wanted to so its "calmer" now.  Gotta take the long view on these things.  The human layer for future geologists will be the one with the chlorinated hydrocarbons in it.  Keep going.  What's the alternative?
5. NOW I'm on facebook where I make cryptic comments and a blog where I blather.

6/8/2010
1. SO, what's the Gulf disaster like?  Maybe like the destruction by the Soviets of the Aral Sea.  That was when they drained about 60% of it to grow cotton and the rest of it is evaporating leaving a gigantic toxic dustbowl.  Also maybe West Virginia-Kentucky coal country, hundreds of square miles mashed up and remade into truncated pyramids.  This is about lack of attention.  People more interested in what they are thinking than in what they are doing.  I see my son do that.  He's got a thing in his hand, a spoon, when he's done with the spoon he puts it down, before it gets where he's putting it he's turned his head away, on to the next thing.  What do I want to do?  Now what?  Now what?  Uh, oh.  Now what do I want to do?
     Every functionary in the front lines is working under extreme scrutiny, all are excruciatingly human with the usual bunch of mediocrities and redeeming features, they're doing what they think they can (though the thing about not giving the brave fishermen any respirators and moon suits and just letting them go out there and "do stuff" is probably going to end up being one of the criminal negligence aspects that will get them in the end.  The oil is in the gulf stream with that carburetor cleaner stuff they dumped to "disperse" it.  Well, it did indeed disperse it.  Some of it will end up in Europe.  There will be international litigation, BP may die.
    If you are feeling like "doing something" and not that people are rushing down there to help, except for some people from Alaska who are advising in reference to their experience with their disaster, you will undoubtedly find a little miniature environmental disaster probably within walking distance of wherever you are, probably that  rates moonsuit cleanup.  Start working on that.  What can you do?  If its non-hazardous you clean it up yourself or organize a cleanup party.  If its ongoing or hazardous you start a campaign by writing letters to the editor in local paper, calling local authorities about it, etc.  Start a journal on the project, keep records, etc.  Your own little personal environmental campaign.  That's what you can do.
    And you can fund your favorite charity and legal fund.  You fight those me-first-walk-away-from-the-problem guys with money.

3. STAY CALM.  Think things through.  Just because there are excited people all around you doesn't mean you have to get excited.  Look for the exits.

4. OBAMA'S PROBLEM is that he and his wife are young and credulous.  They are impressed with nice clothes, luxurious surroundings, "experts."  There are hints of possible greatness, but some very heavy lifting possibly necessary for him to break through that surface fascination thing.  Time is short, reality is making extraordinary demands.  I have no idea if he will rise to the occasion.  Still waiting.

5. THE SPREADING UNEASE IN THE essentially stagnant "markets" seems to be that there is no new money being made so everyone is being extremely careful with static (ie dwindling) funds.  A bright side view: "we" are "realizing" that we can't call unnecessary production and consumption of junk "growth."  A new paradigm: build to last forever, struggling to be born.

6. GOLD going toward a dollar record, silver stagnating, more or less.  Still doesn't seem like a surge to me.  Is the flow from the public dwindling?  Somebody tell me.  If it blows past $1300 I'll change my mind: China and India will have started serious buying again.

7. WHAT THE OPPOSING "SIDES" have in common: axiomatic thinking, incompetent execution.  Measurement of performance on the defeat-triumph axis.  Tribalism.  One should talk with one's "enemies" at every opportunity.

Mullah retread:
    In Mullah Nasiruddin's home town they did some construction work, the financing of which, and the way the contract was awarded not being the subjects of this story. When the work was done there was a big pile of dirt left over. Inexplicably, it was not removed, and the builders turned out to be out-of-towners who could not be located. Discussions undertaken by the neighborhood association, the permit agencies, and eventually the city council produced no result. The dirt pile remained.
    During the normal drought that summer the dirt blew all over the place. People complained.
    Eventually Mullah decided to take matters into his own hands. Early one morning he showed up at the dirt pile with a shovel and started digging a hole next to it. Operating with his usual trance-like intensity, he soon had a pretty darn big hole. And, not too many days later, his hole was deeper than the pile of dirt next to it.
    Mullah next attacked the pile, enthusiastically shovelling the dirt into the adjacent hole. How a person of that certain age accomplished this without wrecking the back I do not understand.
    But a certain child, idly observing the show, asked one of those setup questions that are constant elements of these stories, to wit:
    "Mullah, what are you going to do with the pile of dirt that you dug out of the hole after you fill up the hole with the old pile of dirt?"
    "Do I have to think of everything?", shouted Nasruddin.

More opinions - 100s of thousands of words!

reisbiz@earthlink.net
phone: (919) 787-0881
mail: Bob Reis, POB 26303, Raleigh NC 27611, USA