Mercury Dimes advice?

I was going to make a post about trying to get my "investment" back after 20 years of golf club memberships, golf equipment and green fees. But I think you got the point

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

PS It is cold and snowy here in Missouri today. Great day to get out the coins and play on ebay awhile. Just sayin.

 

Coin collecting is all about the enjoyment of the hobby.
Collect as long as you still enjoy doing it.


notice my avatar ?

 

Assuming no wear, a Mercury dime has .0723 oz of silver in it. Worn to VF, a tiny bit less. You might be able to get circulated common dates for .075 * spot (assuming you buy a small pile at once), and sell them at .069 * spot. Whatever you lose monetarily when you sell will be the cost of enjoying the hobby. If silver goes up a bunch, then you'll make money, which will be a nice bonus. For buying, try local coin shops, CA$$$$H FOR GOOOLLLDDD!!!111 places, and jewelry shops that take in silver and are only interested in moving it as silver. It might take a few visits and purchases before they know that you're a regular that they should set stuff aside for. Onesy-twosy purchases on eBay will tend to make the post office a lot of money at your expense. There are several people selling mixed dates by the roll there for close to spot (currently $62.18/roll), and this is what I'd start with. Do not be conned by people selling "cheap" rolls that show a Mercury dime on one end, however. They're full of clad Roosevelts or cents.

 

The 5000 figure for 1927 10C survivors is from the PCGS CoinFacts site, under the Rarity heading. I agree that it sounds iffy. Sometimes the total number of submissions for grading of a given date/mm outnumbers their survival estimate, so it's not airtight by any means. I heard from a veteran seller who I buy from that this fellow David Hall of PCGS, was under a severe deadline to construct this database, so he may well have been throwing numbers around to get it done.
But in this case the PCGS Price/Pop lists an aggregate of less than 300 of 1927's being submitted for grading. That is likey what the 5000 estimate is derived from, at least in part.
How anyone could hope to know is another question. I for one prefer to think that there are still plenty of hoards to be discovered in great-grandma's houses and in forgotten attics. But in reality I suspect that these pros and veterans have a fairly good handle on survival numbers.

 

Thanks for the correction, you are right that the U.S. mint lists the dime weight at 2.268 grams not the 2.5 grams I grabbed off Google.
I know that the OP is mainly interested in hole filling for fun, but he also commented on not wanting to lose money, so I thought recommending trying for better grades overall made sense.
I don't have much time to haunt those types of shops, but it sounds interesting. About how long does it take to keep that up, say in hours per week on average?

 

I'm reminded of the many coins I bought as a kid. I look back at some of them and wonder, "why on earth did I buy that!?" But I also remember I had much more fun going to the local LCS back then. It's good to remind yourself you aren't in this for the money, even though it takes quite a bit of it.

 

I'm pretty sure the weight for silver dimes is 2.5 grams, minus whatever wears off in circulation. Did you maybe look up the weight for clad dimes?

 

The weight is 2.5. But they are 90% silver, which puts the silver at 2.25 grams.

 

Ah, yes. The same one that estimates the survival of 1916-D dimes at 10,000.

I'm betting that a single dedicated (and very wealthy) collector could round up 10,000 1916-D dimes over the space of a year or two without critically depleting the market.

Now, they're claiming that there are fewer 1927-P dimes available?

The lesson I've taken away from this is "PCGS survival estimates need more salt."

 

Yes, of course. But 2.268 grams apparently is the nominal weight for clad dime planchets.

 

Yes that was the confusion in these recent posts. I did use 2.5 grams and multiplied by the .90 silver content on the initial post, so that calculation of a $1.36 melt value was right after all. Apparently I was incorrectly corrected by messydesk. Maybe we're using different conversion factors of grams to ounces.

 

Are 1916-D's really that common to find for sale? Right now eBay only lists 241 pieces and there are 31 on Collectors Corner. In 50 states that PCGS estimate of 10,000 would suggest there are about 195 existing in the collections and coin shops of each state, which sounds plausible.

 

Aha! A troy ounce is 31.1 grams, an avoirdupois ounce is 28.35 grams.

 

A Troy ounce is 31.1 grams, not 28.35 - those are Avoirdupois ounces they measure lead and feathers in.

 

I'll bet that's it.

 

Yep thanks. I stand corrected after all.
The main thread was about future value though. I was only trying to show that it is worthwhile to collect toward the higher grades.

 

2.268 is close to the ASW of 2.25 grams.

 

I honestly don't know.

The low mintage was well-known from the beginning, so they were widely saved, and I'd expect more survivors proportionately than other dates. But I think it's, well, goofy to suppose that there are more of them around than the 1927 dime -- I see that date plenty in random lots of Mercs, along with 1926 and 1928, which have the same survival estimate as 1927. They're all surely less common than the 1940s dates -- those were minted in huge numbers, and didn't circulate as long -- but they're still common, a LOT more common than "100 available per state".

I doubt many of them get submitted for grading at PCGS, though, just because they're common and not worth slabbing. But I would've hoped that PCGS would have the common sense to factor that into their survival calculation!

Edit: having had a look in the Red Book Guide to Mercury Dimes (and whatever else they crammed into the same volume), I think I was overstating the survivorship of 1916-D dimes. According to that reference, they weren't saved from the beginning, partly because few collectors cared about mint marks at that time. Supporting evidence: there are lots and lots of 1916-D dimes in very low grades, indicating that they circulated a long time before anyone picked them.

 

And I'm pretty sure that's a coincidence, due strictly to alloy density and the fact that they wanted clad coins to keep the same dimensions as silver.