Which Mints Sets To Break Up Offer Best Average Opportunity?

I'd think the only way to make money would be to search the sets for extraordinarily good examples. Generally the sets that contain higher value coins are also more expensive. My concern would be getting stuck with partial sets.

I think you'd have to do VERY high volume (like davenders on ebay) to come out ahead on that game. Most modern clad coins don't sell for much more than a buck or two even in the mint cellophane. If there was an easy money opportunity, someone would have beat you to it already.

Now days you can make money on almost every date. It's a high volume business that requires a lot of heavy lifting and postage though. You can't get enough sets to make much money but you can take your profits in Gems that are grossly undervalued.

The most attractive date right now is the 1979. You can pick these up pretty easily for about $4 and even as low as about $3.50

The Philly dollar is $1.60 wholesale, the Denver is $1.40. You can get $1 each for the halfs and the rest of the set weighs in at about $1.35 making a total of $6.35. Of course a lot of the Philly half and some Denver halfs are too poor quality to sell as BU so these come out of your profit as you have to just spend them. The postage can add up pretty fast too. You can make money on almost every date like this but some of these coins will prove hard to sell.

The Philly dollar from the 1975 mint set is only good enough to wholesale about 55% of the time. Once in a while you can sell the poor specimens at a premium but buyers are few and far between. '70 half dollars can be a trap since lots of these are tarnished and spotted and many can't be saved. Buyers are wary of advertising for them. Usually after a mint set gets ten or twelve years old it's worth more dead than alive.

I like the older sets most since they are getting to be so few of these surviving.

Whether they are picked over depends on the specific coin and where you buy the sets. For instance most SMS's on the secondary market are picked over for cameos but they aren't picked over for "no-FS's" or rotaions. A lot of the Ike sets are picked over for Ikes but nothing else. Almost all of the '70 sets are picked over for sm dt's.

But if you can get the sets early in the supply chain they aren't picked over as heavily and the incidence of Gems is nearly as high as it was in the 1970's. Even if you buy sets fdrom later in the supply chain they are often picked over by only a single individual who may have missed some important coins.

A lot of people look at the mint sets and think they look like garbage so they must be picked over but the truth is these sets never did look all that hot. It doesn't take too long to learn what the typical set looks like so you can tell the ones picked over. But, you'll find that it works both ways; you'll find a bunch of cherry sets once in a while too. Just avoid buying the picked over ones.