Volume 52#20

January 13 – January 26, 2015

Alice Munro recited a passage from The View from Castle Rock at the Royal Canadian Mint’s launch of a silver collector coin celebrating her Nobel Prize in literature.

Record sales, major discoveries kick off 2014

Silver sales, hoards, discoveries, and record sales were the tale of the first half of 2014. A year which also saw the Royal Canadian Mint continue its meteoric rise to a multi-billion dollar business. Silver prices started the year at $19.71 an ounce, about 36 per cent lower than the start of 2013. Even with lower prices, the market was strong, largely fuelled by the speculation that always surrounds silver. Bullion continued strong throughout the first part of the year. Bullion sales, combined with robust demand for collector coins, saw the Mint post higher revenue and profits than in 2013. Continue reading →

Features

Mint sells a million eagles

Page 1

NCLT redemption letter leaked to CCN

Page 6

Beaver theme of latest face value offering

Page 22

Austria takes top coin award

Page 24

Maine scuttled, but the memory lives on

Page 26

Regulars

Focus on Canadian one-cent

Page 10

Are you buying or selling?

Page 30

Check out the shows in your area

Page 33

Editorial

Protect yourself with good information

While generalizations can be both risky and inaccurate, I would say this has been a good year in numismatics. The bullion market has remained a driving factor, while that market has cooled down a bit, the bottom hasn’t fallen out, and trading remains brisk. The lower values means that the RCM probably won’t have the sort of year it had in 2013, but it will still post a profit that is quite large. In fact, the numbers we look at now make it hard to believe that in the 1990s the corporation’s goal was to manage a profit of $10 million. Much of the RCM’s vitality comes from a powerful market for collector and gift coins, which the RCM calls numismatic to distinguish them from circulating coins.

Continue reading →