I've noodled my 25 thousand 50 cent coins for the year and here are the stats.
As expected no 1966 round 50 cents this year, but surprisingly also no 2000 incused millenniums (I usually find 4-6 per year).
Note: these figures only include noodled coins. Any full mint bags or rolls of "uncirculated" coins I received from the banks are not included because they never really made it into circulation. In effect I just bought them at face value and did not noodle them.
The final column (% of expected) is a very good indicator of the extent to which coins have been hoarded. For example I found 79% of the number of 1969 coins you would expect to find if all coins were equally distributed and still in circulation. (I found 275 when you would expect to find 347). Compare that to 23% for 1970 Captain Cook coins. If all things were equal I should have found 410 instead of 96.
The most heavily hoarded coin is therefore the 1991 Rams head 50 cent. If they were all still in circulation I would expect to find 10 times as many as what I actually found.
The coin I found way more than expected is the 2019 JC (14 times as many as you would expect). Yes they are a recent coin so probably not as hoarded as some others but I've seen a heck of a lot of full $200 mint bags on
ebay which obviously never made it into circulation.
As for varieties, the stats show that 5.35% of 2000 millennium coins have "fat letters". This is almost on par with the 1994 year of the family coin where 5.87% are the wide date variety. I think a lot of people haven't found any "fat letters" coins because you really need to view them under magnification to notice the fat letters.
Of the 11 foreign coins I found masquerading as Australian 50 cent coins, 9 were Fiji 50 cents and the other 2 were from New Zealand - a large 50 cent coin and surprisingly a 1949 half crown.
The 2 mint set only coins were 1989 and 1992, and the only NCLT 50 cent coin I found this year was a 2018 United newspaper coin.
Happy noodling everyone.
Posted 12/01/2021 3:40 pm
