Interesting Study About Sales On Coins(Stamps?)

I browse in the coin forum & I found some interesting charts.I wonder
why there isn't anything comparable for stamps?
http://dzautner.com/on-ebays-imperi...and-history/
https://public.dzautner.com/charts/...ly_sold.html

I would like to know how many are fakes.

You yourself are of course welcome to collect ebay data and present a statistical analysis online. The sample number looks large, but Roman coins are a drop in the bucket against the overall US coin market. The author gives some off-the-wall stats for things that most collectors don't bother with. A breakdown of coins of Trajan by sales to current countries? Maybe that's the author's favorite era. Distribution of prices of coins by emperor is not a very useful or meaningful stat.



For Roman coins, probably far less than you might expect. Anthony's is in the coin business, too, though. There are lots and lots of corroded/badly oxidized coins around, fun to rummage through and try to identify, but worth little. There are fair number of some pretty nice quality ones that are only worth a few dollars. People get excited about Roman gold coins, but the percentage of gold in many of them is relatively low and their prices often just mostly reflect the amount of gold within. In this world, the problems are more about misidentification (easy), overgrading and overpricing (same old thing) and sales of stolen high-end coins.

Two reasons

1) Because it is hell of a job to collect and analyze the data properly.

For example earlier this year I did a small study (with limited data set of ~50 stamps) on how accurate catalog given perforation figures are - collecting the raw dataset alone took six hours (measuring actual stamps accurately and checking them), then I did the cross-comparison and analysis, wrote the study etc. The resulting four page article might not seem much, but all in all I worked a couple of weeks with it.

And the time I analyzed 650,000 records of stamp catalogue data... I spend nearly a year just 'analyzing and understanding' the data. And I've already written a number of studies from that data (and more is to come as I continue to learn/digest all the information).

And the longest (stamp related) studies I've worked have taken nearly twenty years of ongoing data collecting & analysis...



2) If you want something specific, it is usually up to YOU to do the study

What kind of studies we collectors do usually boils down to personal interest.


-k-