My regular readers know that one of the fundamental points I try to get across to novice coin collectors is that they must understand the difference between a coin's price, and the coin's value. What it basically boils down to is that you cannot use mainstream coin price guides (such as the Red Book to appraise your collection for selling purposes, because these are retail price guides.Wholesale coin value guides that are useful to the average coin collector are very hard to find. Although there is an excellent dealer-to-dealer wholesale price guide, called the Coin Dealer Newsletter (or CDN for short, also known as the "greysheet,") these values don't apply to the novice because the CDN prices assume a quick transaction between professional coin dealers. So how is the average coin collector supposed to discover how much his collection is worth?
As a public service to the coin collecting community, I have undertaken to provide realistic coin value guides. These guides contain actual prices that coin dealers will pay the average (non-expert) collector for his coins. Although there are plenty of retail coin pricing guides popping up on the internet, as far as I know, my guides are the only reliable wholesale coin value guides available anywhere for free.
I am currently going through my coin value guides and doing major updates and revisions to them. This is a time consuming and exacting process, but these coin value guides are some of the most popular features on my site, so I know my time isn't for naught. If you have wheat pennies, and have checked them against my Wheat Pennies Value Guide in the past, you might want to look them up again because they're worth more now! Because the bullion value of copper has held steady at (or above) 3 cents per coin for copper pennies for numerous months now, I have updated all of the prices in my wheat penny guide to reflect this. Dealers are paying a solid 3.5 cents per penny for common later date mid-grade wheats, but since my price guides assume "average circulated grades" to make things easy, I set the floor at 3 cents. (Also, I don't use tenths of a cent; I had to choose beyween 3 or 4 cents, so I went with 3 cents for most common Philadelphia later dates, and 4 cents for many of the lower-mintage later date branch mints (D and S mint marks.))
Probably the biggest news on the wheat penny value front is that the wheat penny key date coins have steadily risen in value, and my updated value guide reflects this. Semi-keys also saw good increases over the past few months.
If you have any suggestions for improving my coin value guides, or would like to see a certain coin type featured, let me know! You can find a directory of my coin value guides, or go straight to the updated wheat penny values.
Stay informed when I make major updates to my coin value guides and cover other important coin collecting topics by subscribing to my free weekly About Coins newsletter.
Photo of the reverse of a 1914-D Wheat Penny courtesy of Harlan J. Berk, Ltd.
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