Rare Coin Portfolio Outpaces Stock Performance

For some 30 years, this is the season to look back on a market basket that gave important, symbolic meaning to the rare coin market and set coin investment aside as a growth industry. In the process, it attracted Wall Street to rare coins as an alternative investment vehicle.

Newsflash that a market basket had been established by the white shoe investment banking firm of Salomon Brothers came in 1978. The tip-off came when the economic review publication of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston published an academic article calling attention to an annual study being prepared under the aegis of R.S. Solomon, a managing director of the firm looking for new investment vehicles.

Salomon was looking at stock and bond prices - the Dow Jones industrial average had gone from 831 in 1977 to 816 in 1978, then up to 839 the following year - and sensing that there had to be investment vehicles that made better rates of return than a then-stagnant market.

Rare coins were coming into their own as an investment vehicle; there were . . .

Full story at: Link