“Right now, so-called dollars are hot,” he says. “But what’s ‘hot’ comes and goes.”

In the 1980s, gaming chips reigned. So, where are the opportunities today?

“Items they haven’t written books about,” he says. “There are lots of Mardi Gras doubloons that were dumped during the parades in New Orleans, but there isn’t a book about those and you can buy them for perhaps a quarter or so each.”

Holabird says there’s plenty for new medal and token collectors to enjoy.

“There’s so much material out there, meaning you can pick your favorite topics, including sports, history, military – you name it.”

“Most tokens are rare,” confirms Kiser, a 30-something who started collecting tokens when he was seven years old after discovering an old New Mexico token as a metal-detecting find in an early 1900s-era dump in southern New Mexico. “For example, when it comes to New Mexico, there about 2,000 different tokens known from that state, and about 1,000 of those have only one to three pieces known to exist. This makes most tokens far more rare than even the rarest of coins.”

Kiser understands this firsthand, too. He wrote New Mexico Trade Tokens, a reference book and price guide drawing from his nearly lifelong passion for tokens from the state known as the Land of Enchantment.