BULK COIN MELT-VALUE SPECULATION

 

Adam Youngs is looking to make a lot from truckloads of the little red cent.

His company, Portland Mint, sells old pennies in bulk — 40,000 pounds (18,100 kilograms) at a time — to investors angling to profit on the copper that makes up 95% of the coins minted before 1983. A cache of one-cent pieces from Portland Mint with a face value of roughly $60,000 sells for about $120,000.

The wager is that those older pennies contain copper that would be worth about $180,000 at current prices. One snag: It's illegal to melt a mass of Lincoln cents to harvest the metal. But penny hoarders gained fresh hope that their bets will one day pay off when President Donald Trump said this week that he ordered the Treasury secretary to stop minting the coins.

Perhaps the demise of the humble penny, the thinking goes, will eventually bring an end to the melting ban – positioning owners of the coins to cash in on their mountains of cheap copper.

"You buy at a discount now, things change in the future, then you can actually capture the true value," Youngs said.

"Collectors and investors speculate the value of copper will go up," said Ted Ancher, director of numismatics at Apmex, a precious metals dealer in Oklahoma City that has been selling copper pennies for years. "That is the primary reason they buy copper cents."

Customers favor "the '82 and earlier stuff," said Dennis Steinmetz, founder of Steinmetz Coins & Currency in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The company offers 5,000 pennies – with a $50 face value – for $79.

"As you may know you may not currently melt these," Steinmetz's website says. "However if the government authorizes melting you will be way ahead."

Modern pennies, composed of copper-plated zinc, contain little melt value. So the game for investors is to find the older, mostly copper pieces.

At his warehouse in Oregon, Youngs isolates the more valuable older pennies with 15 industrial sorting machines that can sift through 3,000 coins a minute. Do-it-yourselfers can opt for semi-automatic sorter made by Michigan's Ryedale Enterprises that can work through as many as 300 cents a minute.

Or penny hunters can just buy old coins.

"We've seen a major uptick in the last few weeks with copper prices making headlines and rising again," said Stefan Gleason, chief executive officer of Money Metals Exchange. The firm sells 34-pound bags of copper pennies for $203.66, or about 4 cents a coin.

To read the complete article, see:
Trump Penny-Killing Plan Stirs Hope of Profit, 20 Tons at a Time (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-14/penny-hunters-eye-profit-from-trump-coin-attack-with-melting-bet)

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