Collecting with no outlay!

[Andrew Cassells]

I am new to collecting and have witnessed the joy of buying and cleaning ancients to collect and learn. I have decided i wish to cllect by buying wisely and trading for profit and hence purchasing more coins. I plan to begin by buying uncleans and cleaning and keeping the finer coins and re-selling the lesser coins to make profit and hence buy more coins. it seems reasonably possible, or am i foolishly naive?

[areich]

The latter. There is no profit to be made in cleaning and selling coins, unless you're an expert cleaner and buy really high end coins, i.e. no late roman bronzes.

Andreas

[Heliodromus]

I agree - and you're not going to have access to those valuable uncleaned coins unless you have contacts at the source. If you're buying uncleaned coins, it should really be because you enjoy coin cleaning, not because you hope to make a profit. I'm not even convinced that buying uncleaned is a cheaper way to collect than buying cleaned coins (you're going to get lots of duplicates of the common types, and probably find that at $2 each you're spending more buying uncleaned hoping to find some particular type than if you had just bought that type cleaned in the first place!).

You could make the hobby partly self-financing by buying and selling the occasional coin when you see the opportunity, but more than that would really require that you become a dealer ... willing to keep an inventory of coins that you bought cheap and can afford to hold until they sell at what you know they can bring. I hate to think how much inventory you need to keep to be able to make enough regular sales to have much appreciable profit!

Best bet is just do the hobby for fun, and realize that it costs like anything else!

Ben

[Andrew Cassells]

I wish to clarify, my intent is not to make profit, primarily i wish to enjoy my new hobby. Any coins i sell would be in the hope that new ones would be purchased from the money made and hence improve my collection over time with minimal outlay. If it isn't possible then i guess it was wishfull thinking!

[Bacchus]

Plus you are likely to have selling fees to account for in the equation.  I suspect that if it were that easy, everyone would be doing it. 

I 'sort of' tried it with bags of Ayyubid coppers era coppers - ie just identifying them and selling them on - but there is just not that competing demand needed to give a reasonable return.

MAlcolm

[areich]

That's like working for $2/hour. Cleaning, attribution and putting it on Ebay. Packaging and shipping.