I was watching the Heritage auction last evening of the Buddy Liles Collection Part 2. Item 93058 was a 1892-O $10 MS-61 CAC with a mintage of 28,688, and hammered for $1800 plus fees. Item 93060 was a 1893-O $10 MS-61 CAC with a mintage of 17,000, and hammered for $1500 plus fees. Both appear very similar with marks, etc. So, as a newbie gold collector, I wonder why would the lower mintage coin hammer for several hundred less. Please make sense of this for me?
With classic coins it's not total mintage that counts; it's total remaining...plus totals in that grade and above. Note: I do not collect gold and have no idea (short of looking it up) how these coins relate to each other.
What @okbustchaser is correct. Survival rates are more important with classic and low mintage coins rather than actual original mintage numbers. Could be many other factors at play. Eye appeal of the coin. Someone willing to pay more than another person. Current demand for either coin. $300 difference isn’t really enough to be a weird occurrence in my opinion. If the 92-O sold for 2x or more than the 93-O then that would be something worth investigating more.
PCGS lists the 92-O at 203 in MS-61 and the 93-O at 148 in MS-61. That's in line with the CAC population report shown below: Fewer 93-Os than 92-Os. Here's the CAC Population/Price reporting on these two coins: Interesting how the price relationship changes position between MS-61 and 62. But for the MS-61s, the pricing is in line with your reported Heritage auction results. So, on the surface, it looks like there's something else going on than just survivor/availability issues. For CAC issues, there aren't very many coins out there of this type so for date/mm collectors of CAC coins, this would be a pretty thinly collected issue. There is also the marquee name issue that could have played a part. Sometimes, the pop reports do not indicate the true rarity of an issue as it is determined by a sophisticated collector community. I've seen this before: For various reasons, some issues are held more tightly in strong hands than others. That might have to do with die variety collecting that doesn't show up in population report statistics. Ultimately, though, I cannot definitively make sense of it either.
Along with other opinions I believe @Publius2 brought the point home @KeviniswhoIam. Thanks for sharing and good luck.
Watching those auctions gets me in trouble, so watch out for that darned "auction bug" that sometimes goes around.
Trust me, when I watch them, I always put "disable Live bidding" on. A slip of the thumb could prove to be expensive! Also, the bidding goes pretty fast, so with the country poor internet connection I have, well, I can't rely on my reflexes there......plus, the fact that I am old and cant see or hear might not help either.
Another very real market dynamic has to do with market makers and auction houses targeting specific dates to stock up on for future promotion. That focus will shift from one date to another when a promotion "runs out of gas", then interest drops, then price drops, and another date supplants that previously promoted. This is not an organic driver of pricing, and results in price fluctuations, but very gradual ones, and should not be confused with "volatility".
I checked into what dealer Jeff Garrett had to say in his U.S. gold coin encyclopedia. For the 1892-O $10 gold, he says that it is easily obtained in grades up to MS-62. After that, it gets tough. For the 1893-O, his first sentence is, “Disregard this seemingly low mintage figure, as the 1893-O eagle is a common coin that can be easily in any grade up though MS-62.” As the others have said, survival numbers are much more important than mintages. There may have been bags containing some of these coins that somehow escaped the great melt of the 1930s. In addition, there aren’t a lot of collectors who are working on date and mint collections of Liberty $10 gold coins. Just a quick peek at the long list of coins in The Red Book will tell you that this would be a very expense set to complete. There are probably far more 1909-S-VDB cents than there are 1892+O and 1893-O eagles, but that are infinitely more collectors who are chasing the cent than the gold pieces.
Another thing that matters is, how many people want it. Bidding wars can get crazy. That alone can make a coin hammer for a lot more even if there are many more.
Yes, having been dumb enough to get caught up in those, I know what you mean. Thank goodness the dumb one I was involved in was a very scarce coin with 80 survivors with the coin I purchased one of the better ones. I am still buried, but I enjoy the coin.
That's why I wait until the last second and drop the max i want to pay. On ebay anyway. I haven't ever bid on anything anywhere else. But the ebay bidders can get crazy.