Expert: Jim Lawniczak - 6/25/2007

Question
I recently purchased one brick (40 rolls) of the John Adams presidential coin minted in Philadelphia.  From an investment standpoint, is it better to keep the whole brick in tact and sealed, or does that even matter?

Answer
Don, you can go to www.google.com and do a search for Adams dollar and see what people are selling the rolls of the Adams dollar for.  Because you can get them at face value today from banks that have them, the only premium today would be for convenience.  I doubt if any dealer would pay you more than $25 for a roll.

Thinking about the future -- who knows where the value of the Adams roll will go?  That uncertainty is why some people save some items and other people save others.  However, in the future if you can convince an eventual buyer later that no one has looked at the rolls and that they have been stored well, you will get a premium for them, because the buyer will think there is at least a chance there could be some error or other interesting coins in there and that no one has cherrypicked the rolls for the really nice pieces and replaced them with poorer ones.  On the other hand, if you look now at the pieces, maybe you'll find some error pieces yourself.  So, that's also a question for individual taste.  Jim Lawniczak