Rare Peace Dollars

Here's an article that I read recently that should it explain it well:

http://www.coinworld.com/news/012808/BW_0128.asp

Another example is two different CC Morgan dollars:

1889 CC's are extremely expensive with a mintage at 350,000 while the 1885 CC is "relatively" affordable with a mintage of 228,000

according to pcgs

1934 s
good $32
fine $90
ef $210
au $625

1934 p
good $21
fine $26
ef $28
au $52

1926 p (mintage is about 600,000 more than the 1883 cc Morgan dollar, or about 900,000 more than the 1934 s)
good $18
fine $21
ef $23
au $28


it seems like the 1926 p and 1934 p are eventually going to go up in value a lot in all grades. Any other US silver dollar with those mintages are considered key dates.

the 1934 s is valuable in all conditions.

This is just a minor nit, but as numismatists we should be more judicious in the use of the term "RARE". There are whole threads on this term in other forums. Perhaps I'll start one here soon. However, other than possible some 1921 variant, I know of no rare Peace dollars. All of them are very available and in most grades up through Choice MS. Now, higher MS grades might be a different story and I'll leave that to the Peace dollar experts.

For me the rare Peace dollars are the ones that are hard to afford in EF-AU (my budget range). So my list of "rare" Peace dollars is 1921, 1924s, 1927, 1927s, 1927d, 1928 (which I will probably never own), 1928s, 1934s and 1935s. Try finding these in decent shape <$100 and it is a challenge (and just about impossible for the 1928).

I agree with Prethen that the term "rare" is very much overused - like "scare", "key" and even "nice" (check some of the listings on ebay at what some call "nice"). My experience with collecting Peace dollars has been if you have $100 to spend on each coin you can make a decent collection, and if you have $1,000 to spend on each coin you'll find none of the years or mintmarks are really rare.

My collection was built on a "what can I assemble for <$50 a coin" challenge (except for the 1921, on which I splurged and the 1928 which I skipped). Good luck with yours, there's lots of good hunting in this series!