You can't always trust Charlton.
You can't trust the Charlton
Guide any more than you can trust
a tour guide to give you the authoritative tour of Venice or other exotic locales. Its unfair to say that you can't turst a
guide...when a
guide is only a "guide" to infrom you of
what the highest price may be paid for an item a collector is seeking to add to his/her collection. This is really important (a key concept) to keep in mind when collecting, and for some reason it is lost on so many collectors. We often hear about the "book" price of items...when in fact there's no such thing! Book prices will only be very accurate (or less) when certain items are "hot" or in high demand by collectors (eg: 1935 $50 or the 1937 Osborne $50). And in these rare cases the book is a bit out of date. These examples are certainly not a popular denomination colllected...but there are enough veteran collectors who appreciate exactly how scarce it is to come accross the said notes...so they may in fact trade at higher prices than the book suggests.
I know we've gone over this before... but no guide could possibly reflect the current market conditions. We'll see prices continually fluctuate between what the book predicts and what is actually in demand.
I got burned by buying a few AU G/R's for $80-$90 ea, only to find out days later that a whole bundle had been discovered and were selling for half that.
Yes this occasionally does happen...But what a lot of people don't understand is that large numbers that do emerge often get sold at a discount. Sometimes this is an investment opportunity.
What a lot of people don't understand is that
when you spend a little more -get a consecutive run on a rarer issue/prefix-- you usually end up doing better in the long run Naturally, there are no guarantees in this hobby....but a general rule of spending more (for higher conditions or scarcer prefixes) generally works in favour of those who put out the money. All of this naturally depends on whether the market remains status quo.
Even if there's a temporary saturation of the market in a scarcer prefix...prices/demand tends to go in cycles....so the bottom line remains that a good investment for notes are seldom seen auctioned, or notes seen in runs, or simultaneously auctioned (to appear common) when in fact they're anything but, and when they can be purchased at a slight discount (esp when they're a short prefix) and a few buyers panic by selling them around the same time...it may in fact be a good time to buy these scarcer prefixes.
However, I'm not suggesting the non-test $2.00 G/R & E/R are indeed as rare as the book price suggests. I don't see them auctioned a lot (the non test G/R a little more often) though this might change in the future. I remember I used to think that the !954 $1 M/P was overpriced when I saw many come to auction...but this also may be the fact that collectors/dealers "panicked" and just wanted to dump them before they got too low in price. Only time can tell whether a so-called "dumping" does indeed have a lasting impact on the price of a certain kind of note.
Canadian Paper Money
