Congratulations to the Royal Canadian Mint for its public relations coup in unveiling its $1 million value gold coin that weighs 100 kilograms, or approximately 3,200 troy ounces of gold, worth $2.2 million.

It reminds me of the play on the old saying, “nothing succeeds like excess.” But from a PR vantage point, it should be kudos all around.

Where gold is concerned, though, I feel like I am at the circus watching the high wire act. There is a hush in the crowd. Step by step the performer goes out onto the wire.

What I am watching is the price of gold. Step by step it gets closer to the point of no return. Will it wow us with more exciting aerial stunts as it heads to new highs, or will it disappoint?

If you read my blog Friday, you know that gold is staying just ahead of where it was this time last year. Any day now it might record a closing price that is lower than last year’s price level. Silver has been negative for some days now. Even platinum could briefly go negative in the next few days depending on market movements.

And as I wrote Friday, what will a close that makes the one-year trend negative mean? It might be just an aberration. Surely with the strength shown by copper, nickel and other metals, the factors that make gold go up must still be operative.

I keep telling myself that, but I don’t see many readers clamoring to buy gold lately. Gold bugs seem to have gone quiet. I just talked to the U.S. Mint and they are scrapping plans to sell First Spouse half-ounce gold proof coins in sets of four. Perhaps readers are more concerned with scraping up the money to fill their gasoline tanks.

Could the four-coin set price of $1,675.95 deter too many potential First Spouse buyers? Selling half-ounce coins one at a time for $425 or so will be easier than selling four-coin sets. Not everyone can spring for more than $1,000 at the drop of a hat. Then, of course, there are still one-ounce Buffalo gold proofs to come and gold American Eagles currently on sale. There is a good reason gold was used for centuries as a way of carrying around a large amount of money in small, concealable bits. It is expensive. Average collectors just can’t participate in the gold coin of the week plan. They have to pick one or two and save up for them.

It is too bad I can’t put a drum roll sound effect on this blog, but until gold breaks decisively one way or the other, the sound is rolling in my mind.

And by the way, the $425 number is not an officially announced price, it is just a ballpark guess on my part. The First Spouse coins aren’t due out until June 19.

Looking for another interesting opinion on the Canada $1 million coin? Check out Tom Michael's blog at www.numismaticnews.net/ideas

On Friday the task at hand was updating 41 line graphs that are used in the book, North American Coins and Prices. These will go into the 2008 edition, which is in preparation now. My name is on the cover, so I take a very personal interest in the project.

The line graphs show the price performance of 41 coins or sets that represent a cross section of what collectors over time are interested in. There is no 1913 Liberty Head nickel. There is a 1914-D cent. There isn’t a 1933 Saint-Gaudens $20 gold piece, but there is a 1933 Saint-Gaudens $10, which is not quite as rare, but it has been legal to own it from the start.

There are also various other coins across the denominational range.

What do the charts show? Well, they show that coins have basically gone up in value since 1972. That is good news. The fact that they rise in value means that most collectors won’t have to worry about selling for a loss, but that doesn’t necessarily make them good investments. It must be remembered that prices generally have risen by a factor of 4 since 1972. Coins just to stay even with the cost of living need to quadruple, too. Not all of them do.

The 1914-D cent, which we track in Fine-12 grade, has done well by staying ahead of inflation. What is more, the average collector probably owns it, or at least could have owned it given the widespread popularity of Lincoln cents. The 1914-D price has gone up by almost 8 times, from just under $50 to just under $400. Not bad, the owners have all the collector enjoyment for 35 years and a profit that keeps them ahead of inflation.

An 1856-S Seated Liberty quarter in F-12 did not keep up with inflation. It has risen from just over $40 to $110. It is a good solid collector coin, but the price performance lagged inflation. Still, what amusement can you find that retains so much value after 35 years?

Sure, we have some high priced rarities. There is a 1794 silver dollar in XF-40. This is a good solid, collector coin, but not flashy, liked slabbed MS-67 coins. It has gone up by a factor of 5 just since the year 2000. Currently it is valued at $235,000 in the price guide, but if you own one, don’t take my word for the current price. Get out there and test the waters.

Doing the charts for me is a bit of a distraction from my normal weekly newspaper duties, but it does get me in touch with the basics and it makes me think.

Every collector can name a coin that he has that did particularly well for him. Most can also name a bad purchase, too.

The charts in North American Coins and Prices try to show the good, bad and ugly without skewing results to the point of being totally unrepresentative of the experience of the average collector.

Naturally, I hope you buy the book when it is published at the beginning of the autumn collector season.

Today will be a very important day for gold. The next seven days may be the most important week for gold all year.

Why? Well, until yesterday’s rally, gold was in danger of being down from this time last year.

What? Whoa. How can that be? Gold is in a powerful uptrend. From the April 2, 2001, low of $255.60 a troy ounce until now, gold is up 266 percent.

What about the federal budget deficit, the trade deficit and inflation? Gold can’t go down, can it?

Perhaps it can’t. We’ll see today and in the coming week. Gold’s close on May 4, 2006, was $674.20. Gold’s close May 2, 2007, was $672.30.

Not to worry. Yesterday gold closed at $681.70 after rallying about $9. Whew, that was close. But the threat isn’t over.

On May 5, 2006, gold closed at $682.20, so gold needs to go up in today’s trading to stay ahead of it. On May 9, 2006, it closed at $699.40. On May 10, 2006, it closed over $700 for the first time in a generation. On May 11, 2006, it peaked at $719.80.

Any day now, gold could post a negative annual return. Silver already has.What would that mean? Will it dent confidence? Is it a sign of worse things to come? At the very least, it might indicate that the easy money in the gold market has all been claimed.

It has been reported that Barrick Gold, a gold mining firm worth $25 billion, finished fulfilling all of its futures delivery commitments earlier this year. This hasn’t been the case for many years because it routinely sold a part of each year’s production in the futures market to nail down prices and lock in profits. What it means is that for the first time in years, Barrick is free to market its output at current market prices. Obviously, the firm thinks it will make more money this way. If Barrick executives fear that the metal might tank, they might just start selling forward again in the futures market, which would help to reinforce any developing downtrend by adding additional supply. If central banks figure gold is going down, they might dump some of their metal holdings, too.

So watch gold trading in the next few days. It might teach us all a lot.

The song says “rainy days and Mondays always get me down.” Not me. I like Mondays. For me Mondays are like opening birthday presents. You never know what might be in the brightly wrapped packages and little card envelopes.

Because I happen to like Mondays doesn't mean that come Friday afternoon I am not quietly muttering TGIF to myself. However, Mondays in the rhythm of this editor’s life are very important.

Take the mail. The stagecoach reaches Iola, Wis., and unloads on Mondays. I probably get more snail mail on Mondays than any two other days combined. At certain times of the month, it is probably closer to any three other days of the week.

It is interesting to skim through the club bulletins, fliers and hard copy letters to the editor that come my way.

Monday morning e-mail is also a treat. Messages have been accumulating since I left the office on Friday. I try not to take my work home with me on weekends. Call me a dinosaur but I still try to maintain some boundaries between work life and home life.

When I am at shows or on vacation, Dave Kranz reads my e-mail and takes action for me. He knows the rules of the publishing road as well as I do and he can act in my place. He can even sign replies “Dave,” and no one would know the difference. We don’t really do that, but if we ever get someone so hot and bothered that they have to have a reply from “Dave” while I am, say, in Central America, Dave Kranz can provide the reply. Fortunately, that necessity almost never happens. Most people are just as happy to deal with Dave Kranz as with Dave Harper. They are glad there are real, live persons on this end of the electronic highway.

Even though the Internet was supposed to make news a 24/7 happening, in real life it doesn’t happen that way. Much like matter in space, news tends to glom together (Yes, I just read a bio of Albert Einstein).

There is the Wednesday effect. That is for phone calls. For some reason, few people seem to want to phone on any other day of the week. While I am trying to lay out Page 1 of Numismatic News, I  get deluged with calls from people who want to find out who wrote a letter that appeared three months ago, or they want to know what MS-65 means in the Coin Market price guide.

Serious people tend not to call on Wednesdays, unless of course, they are returning phone calls from the staff. Why is that? I don’t know. Perhaps there is a self-help book somewhere that says answers are more easily obtained on Wednesdays. Otherwise, why this happens beats me.

But as I said earlier there is a rhythm to the life of an editor. Some of it is imposed by our own internal schedule. However, that schedule was set up in the first place to most nearly reflect the rhythm of the hobby.

Fortunately for me, people still need to eat and sleep at regular times and that means my life is a little more predictable than the 24/7 potential news cycle would imply.

Are you stupid? I don’t think so, but over the years I have made some observations about human behavior.

The new Washington plain-edge dollar error is a wonderful discovery. It gets people looking at the new coins in hopes of making a marketing killing. One fellow has already showed me a check for over $4,100 that he earned by selling a group of plain-edge Washington dollars to a dealer.

That kind of money is enough to gain anyone’s attention – and it has. But that also is a problem.
When a valuable error is discovered, people look at their coins. They then notice other things that are a little odd or different. If a plain-edge coin can be worth so much money, why not the mysterious line on another dollar that kind of looks like a spear? Why not a line caused by a die crack that looks like a crease across the forehead of the first President?

Why not, indeed.

At root is the significance test. Most of these anomalies, which the numismatic hobby calls errors, fail this test, but when coins can be posted in online auctions, a plausible story can earn a profit while actual research or learning is just too much trouble especially when it leads to finding out why a coin has no extra value.

The recent run of postings of so-called upside down edge lettering got so much online momentum despite repeated news stories that they are not errors that the U.S. Mint had to jump in and issue a consumer alert to inform would-be buyers that the lettering is random, with roughly half up and half down.

Are the letter orientations on the Washington coins collectible? Absolutely. The difference is notable. The Professional Coin Grading Service announced today that it is slabbing both and correctly advised collectors that neither is inherently worth any extra money over the other.

For errors in general, keep in mind that most coins have something wrong with them if you look hard enough. They are the products of the Industrial Age and they are prone to industrial quality control problems.

Clever names for errors usually mean that the error is not significant enough to stand on its own. It needs a marketing push. Don’t fall for it.

I ask again, “Are you stupid?” If you are not educating yourself about what makes some errors valuable and most others valueless over time, the answer might be yes. Grading services want to help you. The hobby’s error experts do, too. But you also have to want to help yourself. For more information, visit www.pcgs.com