The 'greysheet' price of Uncirculated Peace Medal nickel rolls (vs. the uncirc. rolls of the other three Westward Journey designs) just amazes me.
No one really seems to know
why...
I think it's because someone wrote a guide on
ebay claiming that the Peace Medal nickels were the "key" to the W.J. series...
All the more incentive for me to buy a few more Mint-wrapped rolls of "the other three"....
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The
funny thing is, it's the
Bison that you find the least of in circulation, by far! The only 'nice' Bison nickel that I've found in 2008 was in a casino bucketful, which also yielded a 1943-S wartime nickel. That's pretty bad if your odds of finding a Bison in circulation are now 'equivalent to' finding a wartime nickel in circulation...
The five other Bison I've found from circulation in 2008 look like they've been in circulation for 20-50 years. One of them even had that nasty green surface corrosion that you
usually see only on old corroded pennies....
Compare that to the Peace Medal, just this week I've found four from circulation. Two are AU, with lots of luster and nice cartwheel effect, the other two are VF and are in better shape than all of the Keelboats and Ocean Views that I've seen so far in 2008 circulation.
You would think that if the public is hoarding the Bison the most, that the rolls of the Bisons would be the highest priced of the series in the greysheet - Meanwhile, people are paying a big premium for
rolls of Peace Medal nickels, while leaving
very nice single P.M. nickels in circulation...
This is apparently so that they can hoard Bison nickels from circulation instead, even though BU rolls of those are barely above face value!
(BTW, I've now amassed a roll of very sharp-looking 'AU' Peace Medal nickels from circulation, one at a time, for 5¢ each
)
Yeah yeah, I know, the 'classic' (1938-2003)
Jefferson nickel crowd will say the W.J. series is too "high mintage" to be 'collectible' (even though 2,815,919,922 1964-dated nickels
alone were minted
, and <how many?gt; billions
total of the same obverse/reverse design were made for 65 years straight?!).
It does seem like at least 25%-30% of the Bison mintage has been hoarded. If one-fifth of one-percent of the U.S. population (610,000 people) each had ten 40 ct. rolls of Bison nickels, that would be 244,000,000 coins total, or 26% of the
total mintage (936,000,000)! The amount would be the same if one percent of the U.S. population had two rolls each, for another example...
This forum has a few tales of members looking a long time for 'common-date' high-mintage coins, so high mintage and a recent date of a particular coin is certainly no guarantee that you can actually
find one in circulation (
especially in VF+ condition!).
At least with the Bison, hoarding from circulation is quite evidently the reason why so many people can't 'find' one!
So, I'll keep saving W.J. nickels, even though I don't know
why...
Posted 09/19/2008 6:41 pm
