Coin survival rate

Is there such a thing as a coin survival calculater?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

Coins survive at a better rate than people do.......

 

I never heard such a thing. There are survival estimates based on researching, for example, the frequency that certain dates and mintmarks appear in auction catalogs.

Coins are struck in different environments. Morgans were struck to use up silver and subsidize silver cronies. Many were simply bagged and stored. That's not the same as striking Seated dollars for actual commerce where they will circulate and wear. Bagged Morgans in vaults are not the same as Seated dollars buried in the ground during the U.S Civil War and rotting away.

 

Coins survive longer than $ 1.00 bills also

 

There are different kinds of survival rates. You have high grade and overall survival. As @longnine009 wrote, research and experience can give you an idea of survival rate. It's really just an estimate though. No one really knows how many there are. Could be a hoard of mint state examples sitting in a vault somewhere unknown to anyone.

 

PCGS has rough survival rates on pcgscoinfacts.com. If I recall correctly they are based on experts' opinions, but there can still be some inaccuracy.

 

It would be an interesting thing to come up with!

 

That's pretty deep, man....

 

I was trying to outlive US coins but they had an almost 150 year head start.

 

From what I can see, the estimates are not particularly accurate.

 

The survival rates of certain coins is very interesting. I recently obtained a few early coins - half dollars and a dollar - and was astounded to discover that the estimated number of surviving coins is ten times or more what I am used to - that is in the 1840 to 1865 issues I'm more familiar with. For example, this 1799 dollar, the one with the highest mintage rate of the early silver dollars, has an estimated surviving population of 8,000 (pcgs estimates)! The 1840 $2.5 (quarter eagle) has an estimated survival rate of about 125! But the 1799 $1 in vf35 is valued at approximately 1.5 times as much as the 1840 quarter eagle in AU50! Wow!

 

Speaking of dollar bills, does anybody have an idea how much revenue a dollar bill generates on average in it's lifetime. Presumably, it gets taxed almost every time it changes ownership.

 

That's a good question, I'd love to know the answer, I know that at any given time the US only has 250 billion dollars in circulation, the rest is in overseas banks or hoarded.

 

And should be valued in that manner--or with an even greater gap. There are several reasons for this. Survivor rates only tell part of the story. Much more important to value is overall consumer demand.

1. The dollar is a larger coin than the gold $2.50 . Bigger is simply better when it comes to collector interest.

2. The dollar has a larger collecting base as a type coin for the series. The Liberty's price is held down due to the fact that the only people who seek it are those trying to put together a series set.

3. It also has that magical "17" in the date--a data point which cannot be denied when discussing collector interest.

4. Most collectors would tend to say that the bust design is better looking than the Liberty.

 

My experience in my local area has "proven" (in quotes because I still believe it even if no one else agrees) to me that there are far more collectable and straight-gradable coins being held long-term "off the market" than there are in the known market. This is why I put zero stock in PCGS and NGC pop. reports. Not only do I not believe that "most coins worthy of slabbing already have been", I don't think the currently slabbed market makes up more than a relatively tiny sliver of the full market of collectable and gradable coins. Why? Because I can go to an auction nearly every weekend within 30 miles of my home and see dozens if not hundreds of them with no problem.

Now, is my area unusual? Probably. Is it unique? I hardly think so. I think it's pretty typical for the east coast especially the remaining rural parts thereof. We're talking homes well over 100 years old, frequently with stashes well hidden during times of economic turmoil.

 

To which coins does your opinion apply? In what price range?

The biggest problem I have with the PCGS estimates is that there is no sanity check applied to them. I have also heard that PCGS uses "experts" in the series for the estimates in Coin Facts but still don't see that many make any sense.

As examples, in another topic on this forum, the '21 and '21-d Mercury dimes supposedly have 2000 and 3500 survivors. This is about the same or even less than the estimates for many early 19th and even late 18th century US issues. It's also potentially about the same or less than the estimates for some of the dates in the pillar 1/2 and one real from Mexico, Peru and maybe Bolivia struck from 1732-1772. Does any one really believe that?

Other inconsistencies I noticed are between draped bust/large eagle and capped bust halves and the 1894 IHC in "UNC". For the halves, most of these estimates are for Red Book varieties but not all. The 1807 DB supposedly has 3000 survivors while the 1835 CB 6000. If the 1807 is ballpark accurate, I'd say the 1835 has at least 50,000, as this would represent a survival rate of about 1% for both. Most likely, the survival rate is much higher on the 1835.

The 1894 IHC supposedly has 150 MS-60+ and only 5000 in all grades, even though it's part of one of the most popular series, it isn't a key date (that I have ever heard) and it's price is not that high. If those numbers were remotely accurate, its price would be much higher.

 

I think both PCGS and NGC, but especially PCGS, has so fallen in rapturous love with its own work, and its own submitter base, combined with the facts created by cracking out and resubmitting so much material at the drop of a hat, that they have reasonably assumed since they've been seeing the same coins over and over again (they have to know this) that they think they're seeing all that's out there. Trust me, they're not.

Yes, in the world of collectors who will only collect PCGS slabbed coins (What snobs!) there only is what PCGS says there is. Here's the bottom line - coins are not ephemeral, they're durable goods. They don't disappear, except during times and circumstances of big actual melts, which aren't that big or that often. Domestic U.S. classic gold coins are the exception. Most of them are gone gone, melted into the bars that sit in Ft. Knox and the basement vaults at the New York Federal Reserve. Most pre-1933 U.S. Gold we see today has been repatriated, mostly from Europe but worldwide, since the 1974 lifting of the gold ownership ban. They survived the furnaces because they weren't here, by and large.

By far most silver coins, whether from the 1980 boom, or the 2011 one, that were surrendered "at melt" weren't actually melted - they merely found hoarders who were "true believers". I know some actual large scale silver refiners. They report some coin shipments, but not that many. Scrapped radiographs, medical and industrial (remember the weld radiographs in the movie The China Syndrome ?) Those and other old film negatives, plus silver-bearing liquids from photo processes are still the primary source, and were right through the 2011 peak. Silver halide print-making is still quite big, even though the exposing method is different. Instead of shining colored light through a negative, the scanner either creates a digital file on the fly or the customer's own digital file is "painted" stripe by stripe either with lasers or tiny LED's onto photosensitive papers, primarily from Japan and China, not so much Rochester, NY any more.

Point is - silver coin survival rates are bigger than most care to believe, and copper, aside from its reactivity and corrosion issues, is even bigger. I live where people are generations deep in being exceptionally, (let's call a spade a spade), cheap! They don't care that a slabbed coin is more liquid in the market - they'll die before they sell any coin! They view spending money on certification as a pure cost and a waste of money that could go to buying another coin. They view attending shows out-of-town the same way. ANA 2018 will be less than 50 miles away and almost no collectors around here will even go. Too much to pay for parking.

Price range? Anything $100 and up. It's absolutely common to see 4-figure and even occasionally 5-figure coins in private no-Internet auction sales that no previous owner ever even thought about spending money to have them slabbed. I saw the best 1916-D dime I ever saw, slabbed or unslabbed, picture or in the hand, last March at a local coin club coin show 20 miles from where I sit. It was in a cardboard 2x2. Several people examined it, including a Farran Zerbe Award winner. It was real, and it was sweet. The lowest grade it was was a MS-65!!! I'll bet it's in plastic today, but it wasn't then. The dealer had at least two other 5-figure coins in cardboard 2x2's, too. That's life in south-central Pennsylvania.

 

I have read from a few internet articles (for whatever that's worth), that the avg. coin circulates for 30 years, however I have found 2 coins in circ over the past 3 years that have been over 100 years old. Obviously the survival rate for key dates and silver is very minimal. Personally, I have only FOUND 4 silver coins in my 3 years of collecting, and only one of those was from circ, the other 3 came from coinstar reject trays.

 

The survival rate for many of the most widely collected US "key" dates is not that low. Where the mintage is "low", it is almost certainly above average. Examples include the 1893-S Morgan and 1909-S VDB. For more recent coins when US collecting became widespread starting in the 1930's, "low" mintage dates such as 55 quarters and halves and 50-D nickels likely have much higher survival rates than average because they were widely hoarded when issued.

The other point which is probably most relevant is not the number of survivors but the survival rate in a quality collectors actually want. As an example, Bolivian pillar minors were struck from 1767-1770 but apparently circulated until silver coinage was discontinued in 1909. So though the survival rate might be a low but noticeable percentage (probably still less than 5%), it doesn't really matter because most of them are damaged or so worn that few or no collectors want it. They aren't even nearly as nice as Fair-2 or AG-3 early US coinage which may sell for thousands.

 

The example you have demonstrated is a good one of supply vs demand, obviously the demand for the 1799 $1 is high, I have one in VF-35. The demand for the much lower mintage and surviving example of $2.50 is fairly low because frankly not as many people go and collect quarter eagles as they do dollars.