When Hunter Hicks first took a serious interest in collecting rare coins, his parents grew concerned. Their son’s hobby didn’t exactly match that of other preteen boys.
“Oh,” they’d ask him, “you’d rather go hang out at a convention center with old people rather than, like, play soccer?”
At his office desk, Hicks focuses on an item in his rare coin collection. His company, Hicks Coins, generated more than $960,000 in revenue in 2024. (Photo by Matt Riley, University Communications)
As he did when he was 10, Hicks, now 21, is happy to respond to all inquiries regarding his unique passion. The University of Virginia fourth-year student runs a lucrative rare coin collecting business – Hicks Coins generated more than $960,000 in revenue in 2024 alone – in addition to studying at UVA’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy.
“Sometimes I look at the history of a coin,” Hicks said, “and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a silver dollar from 1857.’ I don’t know how to describe the appeal to me, but it’s just so cool to have this item of value that so many hands have touched and appreciated along the way.
“There’s this history and anthropological component to it all.”
It’s an obsession, Hicks admits, he shares with an elderly crowd – “Most of my peers are in their 60s or 70s,” he said – but he wouldn’t have it any other way. He’s been hooked since discovering a 1943 Lincoln steel cent at an antique store in Northern Virginia as a boy.
The find sparked his interest in how the world has long interacted with money.
“What other things do we have now from 1943 that are preserved like this?” he recalled thinking at the time.
Curiosity turned into a hobby. Then it became a business.
The Falls Church City native learned more about the industry through local clubs in Alexandria and Fairfax, as well as summer excursions to Colorado and California for coin seminars. In high school, Hicks began working for coin wholesalers and coin shops. He established Hicks Coins in February of his senior year in high school.
“I realized I could have this business model with a very lean operation, without a big office and without someone working there 40 hours a week in person,” said Hicks, who operates out of a low-rent office space and doesn’t have full-time assistants. “I’ve built a fairly robust system of wholesaling. I do a ton of business on eBay. I do a ton of business at shows. It’s just kind of finding the right place to sell this stuff.”
Hicks attended Stanford University for a year before making a coin-motivated decision to transfer to UVA. With his experience collecting in Virginia, Hicks was in a better position to take advantage of the “old money” in his home state on the East Coast.
“It’s necessary for there to be (coin) collections that people are inheriting,” he said. “In Palo Alto, there’s just not the same frequency of old family collections.”
