Imagine that you could have every coin you wanted. What could possibly go wrong?

Charles and Hubert's column Market Whimsy, which originally appeared in the American Numismatic Association (ANA) magazine The Numismatist, won the 2016 Numismatic Literary Guild's award for Best Column, Non-Profit Large Publications.

This article consists of four columns that were first published August-November, 2015: "Making a Monster", "Perfect Knowledge", "Timing Is Everything" and "Mountains of Money", respectively. It has been updated where necessary.

We have to start somewhere. We have to simplify.

The Rational Collector, therefore, is meant to represent any self-interested collector going about the business of collecting coins (or currency, or medals, or casino chips or whatever).

But after analyzing the classic commemorative market for almost a year (for our own amusement-don't judge), the barstool philosophy started to get interesting. What would happen to the market, we wondered, if collectors were unencumbered by the usual limitations?

What if money were no object?

What if collectors had perfect knowledge of the market?

What if they had all the time in the world to see a return on their investments-whether that was their primary goal or not?

We began to jokingly refer to questions like this and the ideas they produced as "Theoretical Numismatics". But they proved too fruitful to dismiss, and soon our speculation culminated in a vision of a collector who did have all the time in the world, who did have perfect knowledge, who had riches beyond imagining.

What would he or she do?

This is why Pogue, Gardner, Eliasberg, Newman and Green are so instructive (we should add King Farouk for good measure). When we started, we looked at these gentlemen as being as close as the real world could get to the RC, nothing more. The first Pogue sale changed that.

The Pogues set out to put together the best collection of early federal coins ever assembled-Q. David Bowers called every coin a masterpiece. But not every coin in the Pogue collection is the best example they could possibly have owned. Even with all of their wealth and more than 40 years of effort the Pogues didn't achieve what the Rational Collector would set out to do.

But it appears that, in the case of some coins, they chose not to. Maybe the price was wrong, or the timing was bad. Maybe they didn't agree with the grades the coins were given. Chalk it up to the eccentricities of a flesh-and-blood person if you like, but we're not so convinced.

To read the complete article, see:
Market Whimsy: The Rational Collector (www.coinweek.com/expert-columns/charles-morgan-and-hubert-walker/market-whimsy-rational-collector-part-1/)