Beautiful relief and box
The 2009 Ultra High Relief coin is a truly beautiful piece of art. It is the coin produced as the artist/engraver Gaudens originally intended in 1909. The original $20 gold coin is a highly sought after collectors item and sells for many thousands of dollars. I purchased a 2009 version as soon as they were available at the US Mint.
Now, how does one gauge the value of the coin? Originally released for purchase in early 2009, the Mint limited 1 per household and had trouble filling orders initially because of a problem producing the accompanying book. The book contains a large amount of information regarding the production and history of the coin and design. Due to the early limits placed on the purchase of the coin, there was quite a large premium on the after market pricing. But that analysis is for another post.
To find the value of this coin, and almost any other well circulated coin, I turn to the most liquid marketplace I can find, eBay. eBay’s service sells tens of thousands of coins daily and provide an easily place to find sales data. Of course, going thru their search results page by page is a time consuming endeavor. Alternatively, you can easily use a site called Gold Eagle Values to do your research. I’ll show the steps I took to come up with reasonable numbers for my coin.
The first thing you’ll notice when you land on the above site is the spartan design. It pretty much has a title, a box, and some sales information about a few coins. You should also notice that the 2009 UHR coin is listed on the page already (as 2009 Saint Gaudens). Click on the link and you should see that since April 19th of 2009, there have been over $1.8M in sales for this coin. Now that’s not 100% accurate as you can see the minimum price is listed at $0.99. Now no matter how bad of a description someone wrote, there’s no way that coin could have sold for so little. Since I’m also not interested in the average over this whole year, let’s see if we can get some better numbers.
Since there are plenty of different options, even on this one coin, let’s first focus on getting pricing for a raw ungraded specimen. We can do this by using this search term “2009 Ultra High Relief -(PCGS|NGC|MS70|MS69)“. Click on the Advanced Search link to get to the power search options. We’ll want to restrict the time frame to something more recent. Set the Sold After field to “2009-10-15” or something more recent. Hit “Go” and you should get some results back. Now in my results, I see an average of $1,050 and a minimum sold price of $2.25. Hm.. that still seems off. Looking at the Price Distribution chart near the bottom, I see there were some sales below $1200 and above $1675. Filter those out by clicking Advanced Search again and setting the Priced from field to $1200 and the Priced to field to $1700. Ahh, now we are getting some much nicer numbers. I show an average of $1420 for my ungraded 2009 UHR coin. If you want to verify these numbers, just change the Sold Before field to 2009-11-19.
So what if my coin was graded? Say by PCGS and got a perfect MS70 rating? What if it was also one of the first coins received and got a First Strike label? I only need to modify my query to include the PCGS term and the MS70 grade. Like this, “2009 Ultra High Relief PCGS MS70 First Strike“. Notice, I have removed the date and price restriction. Otherwise we risk ending up not getting any results.
S/B worth at least $1500 or whatever the Mint is selling the coins for. Look for more U.S. Mint price increases as the price of gold continues to climb.