19th Century Sleeper Coins

A lot of Seated dollars are very scarce....

The only strategy I can think of for identifying any coin type as a sleeper,
is to look at current price trends, and research why a particular type date/mm has a current market value lower than it should be.
You then focus on that particular coin, and search for the best price vs condition.

That is how you cherry pick on-line.
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Just a reminder:-
When buying on ebay, don't forget the factor of buying and shipping fess, and always make sure there is proper return policy, to ensure that you can closely examine in hand what you have paid for and return it, if you feel that your purchase has turned out to not be good value for money.

If buying slabbed coins, the extra implied value, and costs must also be considered.

It is essential that you do all of your research first.

mintage is only one component when looking for coins that are underpriced. demand is as important. you can have a coin that has a mintage of 1000 but no one is purchasing them you are not going to see the appreciation that the mintage is hinting at.

one coin I think is underpriced is the 09VDB. a high percentage of collectors start out collecting Lincoln cents as most of the coins are readily available but filling that last slot is critical in completing the collection. I know everyone when I started collecting wanted that coin and I see it as a strong candidate. many of them are no longer available because they are in collections reducing the number available and those who have them are not readily willing to give them up.

one other candidate are pretty much any of the CC silver dollars in MS condition which are always in demand and have recently been increasing in value. circulated CC dollars have been increasing even faster and very affordable.

There are many low-mintage dates among Liberty half and quarter eagles. They are all very expensive in high grade but the prices tend to plummet for worn examples. In some cases very scarce dates can be purchased for a relatively small premium over bullion value.

This is a great discussion topic. I think mintage numbers are a basic outline, but there are many other factors that make a coin rare and valuable. Many coins have been melted, lost, buried, etc. that mintage is not the only factor to a rarity. I think a sleeper coin has to have a low mintage number, and also be low in demand. This doesn't mean the coin has to increase in value over time, but it has the greatest room for potential growth in value.

Sadly a lot of the 19th Century sleepers are now woke jimbucks.

Jaobler, those circulated rare half eagles and eagles selling near melt have disappeared, and the slightly less rare quarter eagles have gone way up in price. My last bargain was a VG-F 1880-CC half eagle, only because the dealer hadn't kept his prices up to date. And even without regard to prices, what used to be easy to find has completely disappeared. For instance, Northern Nevada had a dozen 1891-CC eagles a year ago and now has one. It says a lot about demand when a CC specialist can't keep them in stock.

If there's anything that's still slightly sleepy it might be slabbed AU and MS gold. The truly rare dates have disappeared, but there's still not much premium for 1890's O and S mint Liberties compared to the bullion dates.

Sometimes, a more sophisticated form of price research may need to be done to identify sleeper coins.
If you have a suspicion that a particular coin may be underpriced, perhaps a graph on price history of that coin type could be done, and compare that to price history graphs of other coins.

It is the graph price history that is often referred to for tracking stock market statistics and bullion prices.