Expert: Ronald Fern - 2/23/2011

Question
Sir:

I am thinking of buying a 16 subject sheet of 2004a Atlanta stars.  The sheet is not graded.  It has some decent serials, and the sheet looks great.  Nice crisp corners and so on. Most say there are only 20 or so 16 sub. sheets still intact. The price is just over $4000.

I would not be buying to resell. I am thinking of this as an investment for the future. Maybe selling when I retire in 40 or so years.

Do you think the buying price is reasonable? Is keeping the sheet for that long a good idea?

Answer
Hi Michael:

Thanks for your question.

I had to do a little research on this note and series. This is what I found: The  2004A $10.00 "STAR" notes have an extremely LOW printing of only 9,600 notes and were ONLY issued in un-cut sheets. One auction in Aug. of 2009 estimated the value at: $1000-$1500 for a four piece sheet. One four note uncut sheet sold on eBay for $138.49 in Dec. of 2010. A current eBay listing for a sheet similar to the one you are considering has an opening bid of $3999.99. See: http://cgi.ebay.com/Rare-2004a-10-Atlanta-GF-star-16-subject-sheet-radar-/180630...  Your price of just over $4000 seems to be in line.

With more and more of these sheets being cut-up, full or partial uncut sheets would likely always demand a premium.

All the current BEP produced notes are originally printed in 32-Subject sheets. The 2004A $10 FRN's were brought to a number of coin shows and sold as 4-Subject and 16-Subject sheets (Cut at the BEP). No 8's or 32's were sold. I'm guessing that these in turn were cut and sold as individual specimens, or the 16 sheet cut into four fours and resold for a profit.

I'm not familiar with this specific series of currency, but if you want my opinion, I'd rather see you invest your $4000 in gold, silver, or nice type coins than a modern piece of paper.

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Thank You and Good Luck in your collecting.