1983 Kennedy Half Price

I suspect Unc prices on these might be a little overpriced. There are probably more '82 and '83 coins in MS-60 to MS-62 than most dates in the whole series. It's not a wide margin though.

Nice choice specimens of the '82 and '83 are elusive because there were no mint sets. Collectors trying to locate such coins might receive a few dogs first and keep trying. This "extra" demand bouys the price of the low grade coins.

The '86's are high because mint set production was very low. Very few rolls exist because most people always preferred mint set coins but then there was a snafu that caused most mint set buyers to never get the form to order them.

The '86's are both tough but the '82 and '83 are mostly tough only in chBU and better. They're all better dates.

Apparently 1985 rolls were lightly saved.

A lot of the moderns have very spotty availability. Very few people set any of these aside at all but when they did they tended to save large quantities. Some years attracted interest of those saving them and are relatively available and some years attracted almost no interest and rolls simply don't exist. Remember that most surviving examples of most moderns come from mint sets and most of the mint sets have been destroyed over the years. Despite the very low supply of most of these it's invisible because the demand is even smaller.

Few dealers stock anything like 1986 half dollars because there's no demand so all the demand manifests at the big retailers (like Littleton, Silvertowne, Jakes) and they have some difficulty finding the supply and have to bid up prices to get them.

Most people would be pretty surprised at how smallthese markets are. The low mark-ups and low prices tend to discourage most wouldbe sellers. The wholesale prices is only about $2.60 on the '86-P so you have to sell a lot at five or six dollars to make it worthwhile and demand is so low that it's hard to sell many.

I presume they get a lot of lists from people filling albums who need ten or twelve dates and the '86 is on a lot of the lists.