Why Are 1992-P Nickels Valuable?

I've seen a few rolls of the '92-P made for circulation. They tend to be OK but dies and strikes are less good than the mint set coins. There might be some unmarked coins in these rolls but my sample size was too small to make the determination. Most roll, almost all rolls, of moderns are assembled from mint sets anyway. Mint set coins are generally very well struck for the '92 by new dies. There are lots of scratches on most specimens however. I'm aware of no varieties in the '92 set and many of the coins often have a very highly lustrous appearance. Gems are quite common in the sets with about 10% being MS-65 or better. True Gems are probably scarce in rolls because of poor strikes and worn dies. You have to look at a lot of coins to get a handle on this and in 1992 I wasn't paying much attention to nickels.

I doubt the high price is caused by variety seekers or by high grade collectors. I would guess it's primarily speculative and caused by a chance shortage as the BU roll market is forming. '92 mint sets are very cheap and readily available but getting enough to make rolls isn't easy. Many of these sets have been cut up already for the half dollars and the rest of the coins spent making it more difficult to assemble rolls.

It's an interesting situation but I'd be a seller rather than a buyer in this instance. If demand ratchets higher then all bets are off, because the coin is still scarcer in Unc than the '50-D was in 1964 when it got up to a few hundred dollars in today's money. There's absolutely no reason to predict the demand could get as high as it was in 1964 but it could possibly get as high as the demand for the '50-D today.

Possibly. It has occurred in moderns before several times.




There has always been a wholesale market in BU rolls. Almost every buyer is using the coins to assemble date/ mm sets for sale to the public at substantial mark-ups. Since most of the coins made for circulation can't be found in rolls the wholesalers and jobbers cut up mint sets to supply the demand. Most of the destroyed mint sets are by collectors but wholesalers and dealers cut up vast numbers as well. They made about two million of each date and there aren't that many around any longer. These are such thin markets that dealers often cut up mint sets to put in the cash register because it's too much work to assemble and ship rolls and postage eats up any profit from shipping intact sets.

Essentially there has been almost no demand for most sets most of the time for the last 60 years so they have been destroyed and scattered. A very significant percentage ends up in circulation and then suffer the same huge attrition all circulating coins experience.

I've been looking through the mint sets for decades seeking Gems and varieties and have been selling for the last few years because of my age and the threats of heirs that they'll take my coins to the bank. It's a big job to do it right and I don't want to leave it to them.

Missed this.

There is no market for singles. Even the expensive coins like the '83-P quarters can't be sold as a single to any wholesaler. A lot of the sets made for sale to the general public use sliders for the '82 and '83 issues.

Now days there are twenty or thirty dealers online that sell singles for two to five dollars and probably fifty more who have them but don't advertise them. In the old days very few dealers stocked these. Many of these sellers are cutting their own mint sets but others do find BU rolls or mint set rolls. Cents are widely available for almost every date but nickels have a very spotty availability with some being common and others being very difficult. Very few clad rolls can be found except those from mint sets.

Thanks for the interest. This was my original intention.

In '70's and '80's I always used to tell people that most moderns were far scarcer than generally presumed and this went many times over for nice attractive and well made specimens. Most people had the idea that there were countless millions of perfect Gems for every date because mintages were astronomical.

But mostly they told me that even if they were as scarce as I claimed that nobody would collect them because there were countless millions in circulation. Since those days attrition has devastated both the small supply of chBU coins and the number of coins in circulation. Not only are the survivors worn and most damaged but these poor specimens can be very hard to find because of attrition.

Still very few people collect these.

More accurately many millions of folders for circulating coins have been sold since 1999 when the general public came on board with collecting states coins in circulation and many of these folders and albums are being worked. There are quite a few (perhaps as many as half a million) people collecting these coins whom mostly are outside the hobby. They buy the folders in book stores or coin shops but have little interest beyond finding a nice 1992 nickel in circulation. It might be these people starting to create a market in BU rolls and singles. They're fast turning into real collectors but are still largely invisible in the hobby.

I don't know. I find this all as surprising as Brandmeister does. But no matter what, this is a most unusual situation where the coins of the last 60 years have been mostly ignored by collectors. This may never change though and the behavior of the '92 nickel a mere aberration.

History didn't stop in 1965 and neither did mint production. I still believe even after all these years that there will be a demand for moderns at some point in the future.

It would be interesting if someone had a couple thousand dollars to waste to just buy every single coin like the '92-P nickel that is advertised on the net. I'm pretty sure it would affect the price temporarily as sellers try to restock where there is no ready supply. Of course it would take a great deal more money to keep the price high because mint sets dismantling would increase. I imagine one would end up with $25 worth of nickels for which he paid $2000.

But if people copycatted the buying then it would be easy to keep the price elevated and increasing.

Yes. I have found it particularly appalling that uncirculated sets for the last 30-40 years don't even have full steps nickels or full torch dimes. How hard would it be to pull the early die state coins for the sets?

You will become a millionaire if you have 20 million 1992-P nickels.

Moderns are so easy to grade I'm surprised this is holding them back but I'm sure it is. I just grade them Unc, chBU, gemmy, and Gem. Uncs are ugly with multiple problems. "chBU" are fully lustrous but have several problems. "Gemmy" are on the scarce side and are fairly well centered and fairly well struck by pretty good dies. They aren't all banged up. "Gemmy" just is the lowest grade most people want clad coins. A few are MS-63 but most are MS-64 or better. "Gem" just means every attribute is superior. Many of the coins the services call MS-65 and a few MS-66 I don't consider fully Gem usually because they aren't well struck by new dies.

Grading isn't much of an issue for moderns because there aren't any "messed with" coins or coins with bad surfaces. Novices certainly shouldn't be paying more than small premiums for Gems until, they get a feel for what's available or buy them graded.

You may well be right that a very inexpensive grading service would help. One of the problems with these markets is that the guides list ridiculously low prices but then they say that coins have to be graded to get these prices. This makes a list price of $10 for a coin a negative valuation in the real world because people think after they spend $20 to grade the coin it's worth only $10.

These markets have been suppressed for many years and some of it is quite intentional. People have the crazy notion that any money spent on a modern comes right out of the value of a bust half dollar. It would never cross their minds that the money for grading coins takes money out of the market but the notion of someone paying ten dollars for a coin worth minus ten dollars is the end of civilization as we know it. And this is exactly why they paint moderns as having less than no value at all. But one of these days some modern will go up and not come back down. The '92-P nickel is scarcer than the '50-D but this can't keep the price up because the guides say they are negatively valued even in nice condition. But the '92-P is not so easy to find without lots of scratches. They come nice quite often but even the nice ones often have a lot of marking. Only about 8 or 10% are nice and gemmy AND have little marking. This makes these tough enough that collectors can stress the supply if many wanted to upgrade the coin in their collection.