Validity Of Population Reports

Good Lord......

 

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I use pop reports as tool to gauge stuff for inventory addition / retail pricing. It’s not an exact thing bc of crackouts etc but my focus big picture overview, markup strategy (minimal, average, or keystone).

Pop data allows me gauge how scarce a coin is and likelihood competition will have in bourse room. I do a lot of single digit pop world coins (many top pop) so this tells me competition unlikely have vs some USA generic dollar with tens of thousands pop. I access pop from PCGS, NGC, or Anacs slab lookup from my phone TPG apps (online, real-time).

 

Yup, that's pretty much what I do. I just figured if I could get my hands on 3-5 population reports I would have a 30,000 foot view of The Big Picture.

I find the Heritage Archvies commentaries to be very useful, too.

Roger Burdette employed an algorithm in his Saint-Gaudens DE book. I believe he haircutted the NGC totals by ~ 40% to eliminate double-counting, re-submissions, etc. I am sure the figure is tweaked depending on the coin, cost, numbers out there, likelihood of crackouts (i.e., much more likely for a 1929 than a 1924), etc.

 

Yup, it appears they stopped about 2010 or so. I thought they were still putting them out.

Did they ever give an official reason for it ? Maybe in the age of the internet, it was redundant. I doubt they really feared people seeing high-grade pops increase over time.

With all the threads and internet discussions about gradeflation, who cares if a few numbers in a database stealthily increase over a few years or a decade, I would think.

 

Well, just read this whole thread and did notice it goes back a while. Interesting discussion. I think what's missing is that there's a broad range of populations and situations to be making blanket statements. I'd say the pop reports will be less skewed over time if only due to the increasing costs of submitting. Like was discussed there will always be some that have that steep jump from one grade to the next where people will play the game, but many coins through many grades don't really have that. And moderns now will have very little attrition from original mintages.
If a coin you have might be worth say 300, even 1000 in the next higher grade, is it worth taking the time to crack it, pay the 50 to 60 bucks, risk shipping it, wait 3 months with fingers crossed and see what happens? Nah. I know it happens out there and some dealers do it for a living. Some have already been inflated to the point there's no way somebody would re-submit them. I just don't think the numbers are as high as people think as far as skewing the numbers to the point of pop reports being "completely worthless."

For lower mintage coins, they're probably fairly valuable. It's the closest thing we have. That IS the ballpark figure somebody was wanting. Can we assume if there's a Morgan worth 5 to 6+ figures in an actual MS66-67 grade it's not going to be residing in a 2x2 or plastic flip?

Another forum member here just posted a MS-64+ capped bust half and I noted that they have only graded 37 higher. Maybe some of those are re-submits? Whether there's only 15 or actually 37 higher graded individual coins, it doesn't make a whole lot of difference. We have figures. This tells me your chances of running into one at a coin show or online anywhere for sale in any of those grades may never happen. We know there are not hundreds of them. For that coin, the pop report I think is valuable. For some Morgan dollars, it's probably not that valuable anymore.

The government mintage numbers and melted numbers for Morgans are fairly valuable for ballpark estimates. Then you can use the pop reports to compare for another ballpark estimate. In the higher grades there may only be a handful. Yeah one resubmit could throw it off but is it enough to matter if say there are 10 or 20? Maybe it shows there's 3 MS 67s and it's the same coin. Well at least we know there IS a MS-67 out there.

I think in an imperfect world of data, we're fortunate to have the data we have, given that it's impossible to gather up every collector in an online townhall to compare notes. As long as everyone realizes those numbers are imperfect and could be skewed 50% or more for some series but may be very accurate for another series/date. You just have to look at the numbers and original mintage and make a judgement call for yourself how much you think you can trust the pop report.

I've got a 1875-CC and 1875-S, 20 cent pieces. The census could have re-submits in it. That's fine. The CC only had 133,000 or so original mintage. NGC census is 1241 total across all grades. PCGS has seen 2324 total. This is a fairly valuable coin. Whether there's actually been 3500 graded or 2000 graded, how much difference would it make value wise?

I'm sure there's plenty of ungraded ones out there but if there was 20k grade worthy examples (pretty much VG and up) I'm sure 10k of them would have been submitted by now. They have not. So that info is interesting. As well as the fact that the census for the CC is about 1/4th the popluation of the S.

I'll go out on a limb and say there's not a lot of 1875-CC 20 cent pieces left out there based on the data. A person could guess high and say there's 10k left in existence of the original 133k mintage, but that's just a wild guess. All we know is the two main TPGs have had 3500 pass through for grading by June 2023 across all grades. It's highly doubtful there'd be 10k left in existence, that are known about, given this info. I couldn't make that guess without the census reports.

 

Very interesting post, Vess.

The reason I wanted to compare Annual Population Reports over time was to see how the totals changed over time for certain popular coins -- Saints, Morgans, Franklins, etc. -- where there are tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands) for certain years -- and see if the absolute numbers (numerator) are decreasing over time (the % has to drop eventually since the denominator is getting bigger).

You would expect the owners of bullion coins (gold, silver) to realize -- or the dealers /LCS they unload the coin to -- that certification even for a non-top grade will add several hundred dollars and more than cover the cost of grading. Even smaller $$$ improvements can be worthwhile for bulk submitters, I would guess.

 

More good information on these types of things can come from the Heritage commentaries that accompany some of the rarer and/or more expensive coins.

 

One thing considered is taking coins pop and putting where it falls on Sheldon scale in spreadsheet next to cost and sell. I like making things easy and on one page. Granted there can be coins that may have been cracked but how many is an unknown. At least I have a parameter for reference / comparing it to other items in inventory.

Game Prep:

Execute methodology - take graded coin (or banknote) TPG pop for current + number graded higher = x. Then use x as basis for number off Sheldon scale. Then this can be applied to big picture overview of rest of inventory / likelihood competition have one in the bourse room plus aid markup strategy mgmt.


Playcall:
Gather data - analyze big pic overview - markup accordingly, but competively - Sell (goal -move it quickly hopefully get best yardage play allows).

 

What makes you say that "most of the coins" have been resubmitted and reslabbed instead of "a great number" ?

Have the TPGs themselves more or less confirmed that ?

I do believe that with "grading events" considered you are probably right but I wanted to see if you had something even harder than that.

 

This is a good observation though impossible to quantify. How many have been sent in just for re-holder with the same serial number re-used? I've done it because I loved the coin but couldn't stand taking the photos through scratches. Edgeview changed the game. I much prefer a new slab over the old ones but if it's still in decent condition I won't get a re-holder just for the sake of it.