Editor's Message (CPG Coin & Currency Market Review: Jan-Feb-Mar 2021)

For this first issue of the CPG® Coin & Currency Market Review for the new year, I wanted to share with readers some of the new and ongoing projects that we’ve been working on at CDN and recap some ones we have already completed. It is remarkable that we are already into the fourth year of this particular publication, which was conceived and produced expressly for the use of collectors. While these 100-plus pages are packed with pricing, we have even more to offer. Our recently-redesigned online price guide contains many thousands of prices that we are not able to print here. This includes previously unpriced areas such as California Fractional gold coinage, Cameo and Deep Cameo proof silver and gold type coins, and modern proof series such as Roosevelt dimes and Jefferson nickels. The website redesign was inspired by the design of the brand-new mobile application that will be rolled out in the very near future. We are hopeful that this app will be extremely user-friendly and feature rapid response times.

We have also been slowly but surely expanding into other coin and currency categories. The tremendous amount of growth in the world coin and world paper money categories mean that most existing price guides are no longer up to date, and in our desire to best serve our dealer subscribers to the Monthly Greysheet we are adding pricing on items they are most likely to come across through the course of their business. The first step of this process began back in 2016, with the publication of the Goldsheet which contained pricing for many modern Chinese coinage. We have now added pricing to many dates and denominations of Canadian coinage.

While it is more difficult to get up-to-the-minute data on some of these areas, we have built our internal systems to the point where we can collect enough to make reasonably accurate pricing. The primary issue with existing world coin catalogs and price guides is that they do not take into account certification and its impact on prices. Just as with U.S. coins two decades ago, we have seen prices explode for scarce world coin types in high grades as the market matures. Here at CDN, we attempt to price world coins in as many grades as we do United States coins, so the condition-to-value ratio can be better understood. Collectors benefit from this information because any place we have Greysheet wholesale pricing, CPG® pricing will also exist. All of this is accessible in the aforementioned online price guide. We have also added many United States paper money prices, primarily in the non-Federal areas such as Colonials and Southern States, and we are looking at various options to price certain popular areas of world paper money. In all, we look forward to 2021 as a year we can expand the pricing data CDN has been known for 50 years to serve the hobby even greater.