The worlds largest gold coin, the $1,000,000 Canadian Gold Maple Leaf was sold in Austria’s prestigious Dorotheum  auction house on Friday 25^th June for over 4 times its face value  at  the Friday gold spot price fetching €3.27million (£2.68 or $4.02).  The coin had been on display in a Vienna museum as part of its coin display, lent by an Austrian Investment group AvW who went into insolvency after the owner and CEO was arrested on suspicion of fraud and breaches of trust. The auction was ordered by the administrators and was acquired immediately through a written bid by a Spanish gold trading company Oro Direct based in Madrid. They now join an exclusive club of owners of the five coins produced including Queen Elizabeth, whose face is on the coin, unidentified investors in Dubai and another so reclusive that their whereabouts is unknown.

The coin weighs 100Kg of 99.999 percent pure gold, the purest on the market, and is 53cm (21 Inches) in diameter and 3 cm thick.  The coin was struck by the Royal Canadian Mint to gain entry into the Guinness book of records for the world’s largest gold coin. The record was previously held by the Austrian Mint who produced fifteen €100,000 coins weighing 31.1kg (1000 troy ounces) to celebrate the 15^th anniversary of their world famous Philharmonics coin.

The Royal Canadian Mint says it takes about 6 weeks to make each one of these huge coins, which are made through an extremely high quality casting process. The real reason they made these coins was to draw attention to the new “Five 9s” standard of purity for the regular Maple Leaf issues and the record was secondary The RCM is proud to be able to offer the “finest and purest gold coins in the world.” In fact, it was the RCM that set the “Four 9s” standard back in 1982, which many countries who issue gold bullion coins have caught up with, costing the RCM market share.

Whilst undoubtedly the coins were produced as a form of extremely expensive marketing and spectacle appeal they have been an extremely good investment as when launched in May 2007 the gold spot was around $660 and to day that has risen to around $1250 and as the coin weighs 3215 troy ounces I make that a profit of around £1.9 million in 3 years.  Over a period of financial crisis where the stock market dropped dramatically and  traditional saving cannot beat inflation the coin has done very well indeed, hammering home the message to preserve some of your wealth in gold.

Maurice Hall

Tags: crisis, DOLLAR, Gold coins, Investment, Money

This entry was posted on Monday, June 28th, 2010 at 8:35 am and is filed under Gold, Gold coins, Investment, Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.