Van Simmons

Van Simmons is the President and co-founder of David Hall Rare Coins, one of the most prominent firms in the rare coin and collectibles market. He is also a co-founder of the Professional Coin Grading Service (PCGS), the organization that standardized third-party coin authentication and grading in the United States. For resource investors, Simmons represents expertise in tangible physical assets — gold and silver coins specifically — and the market dynamics that drive hard asset premiums.

Simmons has been a rare coin dealer since 1979 and a collector since age 12. He co-founded PCGS with David Hall in 1986, transforming a market that had long suffered from inconsistent grading and trust problems into one with standardized, third-party certification. PCGS-graded coins now trade in a global marketplace with far greater liquidity and price transparency than was possible before the service existed. He has served as President of David Hall Rare Coins for over four decades, building the firm into a leading dealer of high-end numismatic (coin collecting) and collectible assets.

His expertise sits at the intersection of precious metals and collectibles. Simmons understands how gold and silver move not just as commodities but as physical, store-of-value assets that carry premiums based on scarcity, condition, and demand. For an investor evaluating exposure to physical metals versus mining equities, his perspective on how tangible assets behave during inflation, monetary uncertainty, and market stress is directly relevant. He evaluates coins and collectibles based on rarity, condition, market timing, and the spread between bid and ask prices — the same attention to value margins that applies to any resource investment.

Simmons serves as a Director at MarketWise, the financial publishing company, and is a featured speaker at the Rule Symposium, where he speaks to natural resource and precious metals investors about the role of physical assets in a portfolio. Following his work gives commodity investors a grounded view of the physical metals market — the end product that many mining companies ultimately produce.