It’s been awhile since we had cause for a good ‘ol fashioned Friday rant, but yesterday, the Mint gave us plenty to talk about. Since you’re reading this post, you’re likely aware that the U.S. Mint released three special edition coins shaped like the Liberty Bell yesterday. A 1oz silver at $750, a half-ounce gold at $10,050, and a 1oz gold at $19,600. 

The Mint has been a vector in the MS world for virtually as long as MS has been around – the old heads can speak to the legendary $1 coin method (likely one of the few times that NPR wrote an article about MS).

While that method is dead and gone (and would never last in this era of blogs and social media), the Mint remains a useful lever for MSers via these limited releases. There’s generally some level of premium being paid by buying groups, plus the ability to quickly meet SUBs, EC bonuses, or both. 

Mint releases are always a little tricky because most of us aren’t coin collectors and we don’t know the market all that well. Buying groups can work with actual coin dealers to gauge end user demand, but it’s always subject to change once the release actually occurs. 

There’s been plenty of drama over the years when things didn’t shake out as expected, and that even extends to MS via Olivia Rodrigo as this excellent 404 Media article covers (outside of them calling us nerds, of course). Just don’t ask PFS what happened with Travis Scott.

Mint deals are even trickier now, because MSers aren’t the only arbitrageurs interested in an easy profit. The cook groups, sneaker botters and pack openers are on to the hustle now, and it being shared on DoC ensures that an even wider swathe of the hobby is keeping a tab on the release. 

To come back to yesterday’s release, the release sizes were extremely small – 2,026 of each coin to commemorate the semiquincentennial. Demand was expected to be extremely high (especially for the relatively affordable silver variant) even though the retail prices were many multiples over spot, leading some to theorize that the Mint was baking the resale premium into the price. 

As it got closer to release, pretty much all of the usual suspects posted listings that guaranteed some solid profit, and we were all queued up with our add to cart scripts ready to go. As expected, silver sold out virtually instantly, congrats to those of you who hit. The gold variants didn’t immediately sell – if I remember correctly, the 1oz one lasted 20 minutes or so. 

The orderbooks for silver reflected the heavy demand that everyone expected, and those that hit (especially the cook group folks who scored a big haul, no I’m not jealous at all) had an extremely profitable day.

The orderbooks for gold looked very different – the ask side filled up with MSers who were only looking to flip the coin, but the bid side (which had extremely low liquidity to begin with) dropped like a stone.

It became evident fairly quickly that the end user demand for the gold variants was a miniscule fraction of what everyone expected, and the downstream impact was swift. Buying groups had their buyers pull out, so they had to ask their sellers to pull out, so a lot of us spent a lot of time listening to the awful Mint hold music. I hope everyone was kind to the poor CSRs who were also affected – shout out to Amber for making cancellation painless. 

The fallout from this is a pretty big loss of trust across a lot of players. I’d imagine a lot of bridges were burned between coin buyers and buying groups, and I know firsthand that some bridges were burned between buying groups and MSers. 

All I can say is that this could have been so much worse – while the Mint bungled the whole thing by selling at an insane price point, they at least offered a painless way out. 

Depending on which group you chose to lock with, you were either compensated quite well for your time on the phone or compensated quite not well, but to me the major benefit from yesterday’s debacle is some good lessons to keep in mind for the next release:

• Buying precious metals is not a form of risk-free MS – these are volatile assets and the true end user demand isn’t crystallized until you’ve already put money down
• You have a lot of options in who to partner with for arbitrage, and difficult days like this make it easier to choose which one is right for you
• On the flip side, while both the buyers and the Mint are businesses, the folks you had to talk to yesterday are people too. Whether it was a flustered CSR or someone staring down the barrel of losing their business overnight, basic human decency shouldn’t go out the window
• The Mint makes it easy by allowing returns, but similar vendors don’t offer this. If this happens to you and things go pear shaped, don’t panic. This has happened before, and there is a simple way out if needed.

The funny thing is that I originally planned for this post to be a quick hit about how much fun the buildup is to release time and finding out if you scored or not. That levity went out the window ten minutes post-release, the second that the (only?) buyer on the market knocked the 1oz below cost. At least I could keep the post image.

One of my very first posts was about what MSers can learn from gamblers. I think it’s time for the next edition of that series – what MSers can learn from cook groups, because they were the true winners yesterday.

It isn’t all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows in MS, and yesterday was a very good example of that. We can all take a deep breath and relax heading into the weekend knowing we came out relatively unscathed. 

Most of us took a L this time, but there’s another release next week – until next time.

Саламлӑ сӑмахсем!

Pictured: the one 1oz buyer each time they lowered the bid and sent the ask plummeting