ATB Five Ounce Silver Coins

Obviously I agree the 25k was better but it's probably hard for the Mint to ignore potentially around $700,000 more in sales

The first years P's are all incidentally the highest mintage for type, all over 26K. I doubt Shenandoah will sell as fast as Smoky Mountains did, unless the subs increased by 10% or 20%. People are saying the design is ok, that if they don't cancel their subs outright, they will subscribe to maybe just one. Only time will tell. It's not the best design of the year, 30,000 really is pushing it. They've got a couple of weeks of sales before the next one to decide if that's going to be 30,000 as well, but personally I doubt they'll get to that mintage by the end of the year, the mint will go cautiously on these as they did for the 2012 and 2013 pucks.

I think it is a valid argument. But like you said, price is also a factor. So is having a subscription - fire and forget. And so is the market / popular opinion. All these things (and many more) have to be taken into account, making it a very complicated forecast model.

At some point it boils down to the unpredictability of human nature and subsequently the markets that we drive, and the mint is continually making best guesses on appropriate mintage #'s. They don't want to sell out too early; that's lost revenue. Nor do they want surplus that they have to melt; that's wasted effort and money.

Hey wait a minute... that sounds like business talk to me.

All makes a lot of sense except for what happened to Hawaii and even Alaska. Those were so abruptly stopped from sale. I realize they were placed for sale late in the year, but so were Gettysburg (I think that was the first for 2011 and for sale in Sept!) etc. Who knows the method or reason, I'm just grateful for silver low price making these quite nice to have and buy as gifts. Plus that discount, at least for me a no brainer.

Anyone know how many coins per die they are getting?

Curious if the later strikes / shipments / non subscriptions will be of lesser detail than the others.

I would think they could do the whole 25K on one die pair unless catastrophic failure.

The subscription for Shenandoah processed this morning, FYI.

I thought the SM puck would have sold out by now the way it took off with the subscriptions, but it doesn't seem like very many people other than the subscribers want the vapor blasted pucks. Now they want to increase the next one to a mintage of 30K. I think they should reconsider that, with the current numbers they should figure it might not sell out or will take a long time to come close. With all of that said I am looking forward to the next puck and hopefully a SM sellout in the near future.

Please fogive my ignorance. I am confused on why this thread has made it out to 126 pages. I don't get into the whole ATB or bullion coin thing. Is there really that much interest by CCF members on the topic? Is this topic controversial in some way? Has it just become the main place to talk about ATB's instead of the Precious Metals and Bullion sub-forum? There's no way I'm reading the entire thread. Just curious on what's going on in here and why the conversation seems to never end.


Again, please forgive my ignorance and laziness. I'm just curious on what this is all about.