Bargain Collector: French Rooster Popular Gold Coin
While many people are familiar with the British Sovereign, the French Rooster – a 20-franc gold coin – has a far shorter life span, having been coined from 1899 only until 1914.
In the recent past, the price of gold has once again risen above the $2,000 per troy ounce mark on world markets. Moments like this make many of us wish we had purchased a lot of the yellow metal sometime in the past. Short of making and jumping into a time machine, we will not be able to go back to tell ourselves to buy, so the logical way to look at gold might be to look at gold coins that are still available at a relatively small mark-up beyond the price of the precious metal in each coin. One excellent example of this is what is often called the French Rooster.
Many collectors of world coins, as well as those who keep track of gold, are very familiar with the British Sovereign. This gold coin pretty much qualified as an international currency or bullion coin long before the term came into fashion. The French Rooster – a 20-franc gold coin – has a far shorter life span, having been coined from 1899 only until 1914. And while a 20-franc gold coin was made in France for many years prior to this, the Rooster seems to have quickly taken its place alongside coins like the Sovereign. Even today, over a century beyond the last date of the series, the French Roosters remain a popular gold coin, and a convenient way for just about anyone to own some gold.
As we often do when searching out bargains, we need to establish both a price point and a baseline for what is common. In the case of the French Roosters, the easy part is that “common” base. Virtually all of the Roosters qualify as common. The series is relatively short, and the established tradition of a gold, 20-franc French coin is such that when these did circulate, they must have done so alongside older versions of coins with the same value. As well, several of the dates of the French Roosters have been reprised – if we want to say that using a polite term – and have been produced at times quite a few years later than their dates would suggest.
As far as the general cost, we can start with the amount of gold in each Rooster, namely 0.1867 troy ounces. This is a bit smaller than the 0.2354 ounces in a British Sovereign but not all that much. Doing the basic arithmetic, if gold trades at $2,000 per ounce, it means a coin with 0.1867 ounces of the yellow metal will be worth $373.40. So, that becomes the rock bottom cost we have to expect for a French Rooster. The reality of it is that, yes, dealers have to eat, too, so we will have to expect to pay a bit more. Something like 10 to 15 percent more than the cost of the gold is what might qualify as normal. This in turn means the basic cost of a French Rooster has to be about $410.74 at the very least, unless we have a seller who truly does not know what they are selling.
As far as sellers go, it never hurts to hunt down good-looking coins at a dealer’s shop or at a show, but it can also be convenient to go to the never-closing showplace that is eBay. A look about online indicates that the price range for French Roosters can be all over the place. Some of those that have been certified are far above the $410.74 we just mentioned (more about this in a moment), while some are actually below the price of the gold in them. We’re going to assume those low balls are simply coins that are being bid on, and that a seller can withdraw if the bids don’t get high enough. Overall, though, there are some decent online prices to be had.
When it comes to the availability of French Roosters, there is not too much legwork that has to be done to find them. Perhaps few collectors gravitate to this series as just that – meaning a full series for which they try to assemble a date run. Perhaps more folks try for one date and make this a type of coin in some greater collection of gold pieces. Whatever the case, though, it is never hard to find a gold Rooster. What becomes more of a challenge is finding pieces we might really consider bargains.
Let’s explain that comment a bit. When gold coins from various countries are sold for their gold content, they are often raw – meaning not encapsulated by some third-party grading service – and are all placed together in a dealer’s trays. They tend to sell for that gold price plus a small premium. This then means they probably circulated back in the day and might have picked up some contact marks or some wear. But maybe not. Here is the challenge, then: finding the best French Roosters, possibly ones that still qualify as Mint State, and landing them at the price tags we just mentioned. This type of collecting requires a certain amount of patience, but it can be done.
All things considered; it seems that the gold French Roosters minted at the turn of the 20th century comprise a short series that does have some bargain potential. Coins that have been encapsulated at a specific grade most likely will not be bargains, as the cost associated with each of those will be the cost associated with the grade specific to the slab. But when raw, and when still in good shape, there appear to be some of these gold Roosters that don’t really cost too much. And here is where we find the bargains.
