Owner Comments:
S-3875, Marsh 161
Acquired from: Spink, London
Means: 2024 COINEX auction, Lot 646
Date: 26 September 2024
Critique: Lustrous example of this final year of Victoria Veiled Head gold sovereigns. It's not very difficult to locate decent looking 1901 sovs minted in Australia, since this was the last year of Queen Vic's reign, and apparently many coins were put away as souvenirs and saw no circulation. Although this is not a very high grade at all, apparently the coins were not handled well, since as of Oct 2024 only two examples are graded higher than MS63 by NGC.
A review of the top 50 sets registered in the Aussie Victoria category shows that only a few others contain one of these, all of them in mint state. Apparently this particular coin is only collected by those foolish enough to try to complete the set, and is not of any interest to anybody simply looking for a type coin.
Although this coin is so relatively common in mint state, since it's very nearly Top Pop I assumed that it would sell for a premium at auction. Fortunately this proved not to be the case and I was able to win it for a modest price. But due to the current weakness of the dollar and the unusually high Buyer's Extortion of this auction house, the final total was somewhat more than it would have cost in a US auction. It's interesting to note that the price was only about 1/3 of that listed in the NGC World Coin Price Guide, which shows how desperately out-of-touch with reality that listing is for Vic Veiled Head sovs!
This is the first time that I've purchased a coin from this particular company, and honestly it was not a good experience. Although my understanding is that this is the oldest coin auction company in the UK, it's quite disappointing how poor their technology is. Instead of using your email address to log in with (easily remembered), they force you to use their assigned eight-digit client number (impossible to remember). Once the auction is ended, they erase your list of watched lots, so there's no way to check in quickly to see the results of the coins you were interested in. Worst of all are the rather disgraceful images of the coins which they post, which look nothing at all like the NGC images or the actual coin in your hand. Fortunately they also show copies of the images from the NGC website. Many times the NGC images are rather poor quality, and in those cases you'd simply have to ignore that particular lot. For a company that charges the highest buyer's fee in the industry, i would expect the absolute highest degree of service, and they fall woefully short on every level. Personally, I will avoid their auctions in the future.