Mint Bicentennial

Has anybody ever heard of the Federal Coin Fund?

I recently came to own a nice chunk of bullion and it came with a C.O.A. from a company by the name of Federal Coin Fund. The company is based out of Dover, Delaware and that’s about all I know about them. I attend a coin forum and they told me it was probably a private mint. I googled the name and found some old article from the ’80s that briefly mentioned them. The silver round I have looks like the 1794 “Flowing Hair” silver dollar, it is supposed to be for the bicentennial anniversary for the original coin. I basically just want any kind of info about the company, just out of curiosity.

I’ve never heard of that company. But these private mints come and go all the time. Right now the one you see quite a bit on TV is ‘National Collectors Mint’. They, like most of them, sell grossly overpriced medal items (only legal tender produced by the US Mint, whether people use it for money or not, can be called coins) and the only people who buy them are people who don’t collect coins, often to give as gifts to friends and relatives that do, and they are very disappointing gifts to receive, because the knowledgeable collector knows that the buyer got ripped off. Sometimes people buy it to put away for themselves, thinking it’s a great investment. Most of what these companies sell are medals made from base metals (copper/bronze/aluminum etc) and plated with tiny amounts, pennies worth, of gold or silver.

These are terrible investments. The only privately-minted medals that haven’t been a total loss are those that were made of .999 silver or gold, or sterling silver (.925), though the price of them at the time was quite high, way higher than the value of the metal at the time, and even now, with the very high prices of gold and silver, people that bought and held these items are seeing only a small profit on paper, and when you factor in inflation, they may still be losing money.

The most well-known private mint, the Franklin Mint, is still around, though it’s not really the same company it was in its prime in the 1960s and 1970s. Anyone who bought their silver medals then, when silver was cheap, has done pretty good. Franklin Mint still markets ‘limited edition’ collectibles like plates and dolls and collector cars, but they got out of the minting business.

What you describe is probably a decent item to have. Sounds like a .999 silver round, and you might get a few dollars over spot if you sold it now, but its value will always be tied to whatever the metal is doing. I’m guessing that, even in the 1993-94 period (when this would have been sold if they were trying to cash in on the 1794 bicentennial), these were being sold for many times the price of silver, which started 1993 below $4, traded as high as $5.75 during 1994, and closed that year just below $5. I’m thinking that they were probably selling these for not much less than the current ‘spot’ price.

1976 3-coin S-Mint Autographed Bicentennial Silver Gem B…