Categories: General Market Commentary / Precious Metals
Topics: General Market Commentary / General Precious Metals

Feature Interview: Coin & Collectible Expert Van Simmons of David Hall Rare Coins

Feature Interview: Coin & Collectible Expert Van Simmons of David Hall Rare Coins
Written by Gerardo Del Real

 

Publisher's Note: We had the recent pleasure of sitting down with Van Simmons of David Hall Rare Coins. As a founder of Professional Coin Grading Service (PSGC), Van literally wrote the book on rare coins. He's also an expert on many collectibles, including sports memorabelia, art, taxidermy and more. Van is a friend of the publication and, as Gerardo reiterates in the interview, there's no one we trust more in the business. You'll see why below.

To your wealth,

Nick Hodge
Publisher, Outsider Club


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Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Outsider Club. Joining me today is Van Simmons, partner and president of David Hall Rare Coins, one of the largest and most respected rare coin companies in the country. Van specializes in portfolio construction, set building, and helping clients acquire the world's finest rare coins and collectibles. Van has been a rare coin collector since age twelve, and a rare coin dealer since 1979. As one of the founders of Professional Coin Grading Service, PCGS, the largest rare coin grading service in the world, he has helped revolutionize the rare coin market. Van has over 1,350 dealers that sell his product. PCGS has graded and certified over 30 million coins over the last 30 years.

Van has also won acclaim as a collectibles dealer in sports cards and memorabilia, rare firearms, western memorabilia, and collectible knives. In addition, Van was also a co-founder and holds a seat on the board of directors of Collectors Universe, (NASDAQ: CLCT), a publicly traded company which trades on the NASDAQ Exchange. Collectors Universe has several different companies that it owns along with PCGS. They also own PSA, Professional Sports Authority. PSA grades and authenticates sports cards and currently has over 1,200 authorized dealers within its network. I could go on but hopefully you get the picture. The bottom line is, there is nobody in the coin and collectibles universe that I trust more than Van Simmons and David Hall Rare Coins. Van, thanks for bearing with me through that. I'm excited to have you on, and thank you for joining me today.

Van Simmons David Hall Rare CoinsVan Simmons: Thank you.

Gerardo Del Real: Now, Van, in the intro, I mentioned that you've been a rare coin collector since age twelve. Can you share with us how you got involved with rare coins and why coins resonate with you the way that they do?

Van Simmons: You know, when I was a kid, one of my friends handed me a Standing Liberty quarter, and it was all worn out and beat up and everything, but I thought it was so great, I had taken it to a coin store and I sold it for forty-five cents, and I thought, man- This is back on the late '50s, early '60s. It started making sense to me that these things had value. Then I started looking into designs of the Walking Liberty half-dollars and things like that, and even as a kid, I looked at them and thought, "Man, these are great pieces of art."

The honest truth is, when president Roosevelt came into office, he wanted the most beautiful coins on Earth to be designed for our country. So, starting in 1907, they came up with the $20 St. Gaudens and the $10 Indian and stuff like that. It's always been, coins are sort of the supreme act of sovereignty, sitting there saying, "We're our own free nation, making our own gold coins and silver coins." The first gold coin was made in 1795, the 1795 small, legal $5 gold piece. That's one of the reasons I liked them; there was so much history attached to them. Every coin design and every change in a coin pretty much resonates with some change in American policy or something that was going on in the United States. Just a lot of history built into each coin.

Gerardo Del Real: Very interesting. Now, I also mentioned you were one of the founders of PCGS, the largest coin grading service in the world. How did that come about?

To continue reading please click link http://www.outsiderclub.com/feature-interview-coin-collectible-expert-van-simmons-of-david-hall-rare-coins/2067