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 Replies: 29 / Views: 3,085 |
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Pillar of the Community
United States
3843 Posts |
What percentage of coins (with numismatic value) are, at any given time, for sale, sitting in the inventories of coin dealer's? Including not only traditional brick and mortar shops but also coin show circuit dealers, vest-pocket dealers, online dealers, and those who sell through ebay and other similar venues. Looking at ebay alone there is currently for sale; 56,888 Morgan dollars 14, 823 Peace dollars23, 107 Walking Liberty halves4,709 Capped Bust Halves 3,585 Seated Liberty halvesI could go on but you get the point. A few weeks ago there was over 230 1893 Isabella Quarters listed on ebay alone! I find that incredible for a coin with a mintage of only 40,000 coins. Does it seem to you that there are an awful high number of coins on the market at any given time? Just think of all the coins being offered in local B&Ms, at large coin shows with hundreds of dealers, as well as all of the online dealers that have multiplied exponentially in the last decade. What do you think? Are 10% of all coins owned by non-collectors/coin dealers at any given time? Or is the number higher or lower? Just curious and wanted to get the thoughts of the forum ...... Thanks, Joe2007 |
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Pillar of the Community
Canada
5417 Posts |
Depends on which coins you are talking about. For rare coins the number would be lower than say, common date Morgan dollars or Wheat Cents. |
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Valued Member
72 Posts |
if you really want to get into it...Id say 100% are for sale at any given time. Everything has its price
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Pillar of the Community
United States
7375 Posts |
IMO less than 1%.
Edited by edweather
03/06/2014 2:26 pm
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Bedrock of the Community
13014 Posts |
Common stuff its probably higher than 10 percent. Rare stuff though is probably much lower. Theres a lot of things where you one see a handful for sale at a time at best and usually the ones that are for sale are the 5 figure coins with a very small market.
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Pillar of the Community
United States
9792 Posts |
Jabbss beat me to the comment but I'd say 98.5% as there are a few collectors that don't need the money (even at any price) and will never sell.
I was just trying to talk someone into selling me a very rare (around 6-15 known) error coin, he said he will take it to his grave, and since we are both the same age I'll probably never get a shot at his, so still looking going on 25+ years now. Even with all the money you can't always get what you want to paraphrase the Rolling Stones!
The EAC market is interesting in that respect to super rare coins like the Strawberry leaf cents. They have traded hands between several collectors with the promise of the original seller getting the coin back after a year or two, just so someone can complete a life long collection of Sheldon varieties. It's a pretty close knit group in the really specialized areas of certain coins at the ultra high end rarity scale.
"Buy the Book Before You Buy the Coin" - Aaron R. Feldman - "And read it" - Me 2013! ANA Life Member #3288 in good standing since 1981, ANS, Early American Coppers Member (EAC), Colonial Coin Collectors Club member (C4), Conder Token Collector Club member (CTCC), Civil War Token Society (CWTS) member, Liberty Seated Collectors Club (LSCC) & Numismatic Bibliomania Society member (NBS), USMex, Member in good standing, 2˘ variety collector. See my want page: http://goccf.com/t/140440 |
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Moderator
 Australia
16834 Posts |
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if you really want to get into it...Id say 100% are for sale at any given time. Everything has its price Speak for yourself. None of my coins are for sale, I don't care how much money you have.   Part of the problem with answering this question is the uncertainty in exactly how many coins are out there. We know how many were originally made, thanks to mintage figures. But survival rates are usually just a guess, which could be out by several orders of magnitude. I suspect the for-sale percentage for famous rare coins will be higher than that for common coins, since coin dealer like the prestige that having such coins in stock brings them; they are also much more likely to be owned by investors, who do indeed have the attitude Jabbss651 stated - that their coins are always for sale, for the right price. Further skewing the statistics for genuinely rare coins are the numbers held by museums and other permanent collections; such coins will likewise "never be sold". Let's look at one such rare coin for which I have some reliable figures: Australia's "Holey Dollar" of 1813. The official mintage was 39,908. They were officially withdrawn and scrapped a couple of decades after they were made. The number of surviving specimens is known with some certainty, since a peculiarity of this series is that each coin can be identified fairly precisely because very few of the survivors have the same date-mintmark-assayer combination on the host coin. When the definitive catalogue of them came out in 1988, there were 275 known survivors - That's about a 0.6% survival rate. I think another half-dozen or so may have surfaced in the couple of decades since the catalogue came out. Of these 275 coins, 96 of them are in institutional collections around the world, so that leaves a theoretical maximum of about 185 coins. So, how many are for sale right now? There's only one up for sale in the next Nobles auction - there's usually at least one at each sale there - and the one for sale happens to be one of the newly discovered, "unlisted" coins (ie. not in the 1988 catalogue). There's probably another 3 or 4 sitting around in coin dealers vaults, waiting for an offer (or the chance to hit it on to an auction), and another dozen or so owned by investors/portfolio-holders waiting for either the price to rise enough or for the need for cash to be great enough for a sale. On that basis, I'd guess around 8% of the available-to-collectors coins are "for sale right now". Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
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Bedrock of the Community
United States
20753 Posts |
There are so many things that make a real reply almost impossible. One thing is that for some coins there are more on the market being sold than there were originally made. For example possibly 10 times more 1916D Mercury dimes are for sale than were ever made. Same for Morgan dollars, 1909S VDB Cents, etc. There are even more slabbed coins out there than the TPGS's made. Any one of us could have some of those. And as Sap pointed out, there are those, myself too, that would never sell our coins. And possibly some of ours are in the realm of really great ones. Many are in the catagory of your question. And just how many collectors are there like this? As with the coins, no one knows. A real problem is when you look at everything people do with and to coins, I sometimes wonder why there are any left at all. Not long ago there wws a post on all the things people do to and with coins. Always wondered how many of those were ones I needed. Your question is sort of like asking how many grains of sand are on Earth. Any guess is just a guess. |
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Moderator
United States
188770 Posts |
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Speak for yourself. None of my coins are for sale, I don't care how much money you have. I agree.  |
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Valued Member
United States
217 Posts |
Hmmm, I agree with a lot of the analysis here: it is all going to depend on the rarity of the coin as well as, I would say, the market demand for them. And I mean, just doing the math on your example of the Isabella Quarter, which you seemed to suggest was high for a rare coin, it amounts to .575% of the total mintage. Not really a huge percentage then when you think about it. My guess would be that around 5% of coins are in dealers inventories/actively being offered for sale. The real question, to me, is how many coins are being left "idle" that is, they aren't being actively offered for sale or aren't in the collection of an active collector (think sitting around in an attic or forgotten in a closet or a basement.) Those coins should be on the market, in the general sense, but because they aren't they affect availability and prices in the current market. |
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Valued Member
United States
331 Posts |
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jbuck Posted - Today 3 Hrs 51 Min ago
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Speak for yourself. None of my coins are for sale, I don't care how much money you have.
I agree. Yes you are correct. I dont see how you can call yourself a collector. If you sell coins.  |
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Pillar of the Community
United States
8137 Posts |
If you are like me, I call myself a collector and a flipper. Some things I buy to resell and most things I buy for my collection.
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Moderator
United States
188770 Posts |
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I dont see how you can call yourself a collector. If you sell coins Well, I can understand it if you do upgrades, but I do not do upgrades.  |
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Pillar of the Community
United States
656 Posts |
Interesting subject. About 10% of my collection are duplicates and will be sold or traded one day. Hopefully I will not need to part with the rest of my collection.
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Pillar of the Community
United Kingdom
4208 Posts |
Id estimate 0.0001% at any one time. also, 'only 40,000'? For some series thats a massive mintage - yet you can still find many of the coins on ebay. |
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Bedrock of the Community
United Kingdom
17949 Posts |
I think it's also worth pointing out that a coin like the Isabella Quarter would have been saved at the time with relatively few getting lost or melted, so would have a much higher survival rate than a comparable rare 'definitive' coin such as the 1916 Standing Liberty quarter. I'm always surprised at how often the British George V Wreath Crowns of 1927-36 seem to turn up for sale, despite their low mintages. |
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Replies: 29 / Views: 3,085 |
Posted 03/05/2014 11:24 pm
