Validity Of Population Reports

There are frequent discussions here about cracking and resubmitting coins in hopes of a better grade. Knowing that this isn’t an uncommon occurrence, wouldn’t that render the TPG population reports somewhat useless?

 

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Not many people bother to return the labels and that's especially true for the TPG haters that crack everything out. They're just a tool to get an idea of what grades and dates get scare by comparison. They shouldn't be viewed as an absolute though

 

It largely depends on the coin in question, but it absolutely can render them meaningless, yes. Towards the end of my involvement I handled a coin that had a total pop of 5, yet the one example had been cracked and resubmitted (without returning the labels) to the point it represented 4 of the supposed 5 examples known to NGC. Exceedingly stupid, but so much in life today is.

 

Yes, you're right and I should have clarified the fact it is an extreme example. Thanks for doing so.

 

Population reports will forever be unreliable because from the outset the TPGs have been inconsistent in their grading (and for that matter attribution whether it be year or denomination). Their inconsistency is the main motivation for cracking out and resubmitting - hence the oxymoron of adherents to slabbing sending in their coins to be 'accurately' graded in the hope that they are graded differently to last time. Until the sacred cows up their game and grade consistently, the issue will remain. Crossing over to the collector's preferred TPG label compounds the problem.

Whilst I am not a lover of slabbed coins, I have still acquired about 100 down the years, but 20% of those were purchased on the basis of incorrect attribution or undergrading.

For a practical example of erroneous population reports, the coin below was NGC's '1673' halfpenny slabbed 65. Ok, except that it wasn't 1673, rather it is 1675 over 3 over 2, and for a 65, the wear to Britannia said to me it wasn't uncirculated. Apart from that I didn't have a problem. Although overgraded IMO and the wrong date, I bought it as I could see it was obviously 1675/3 even without magnification. It is no longer in a slab as I bought it to replace one of PCGS's '1673' 64s, which was also a 5/3, but considerably more overgraded and struggled past EF in my view. These two plus another couple graded 63 or 64 are now no longer in plastic. i.e. the population of MS coins for this series is thus reduced by around 1/3, though it is possible that someone might have resubmitted them in the past after I disposed of them. This situation must be replicated many times across the world's coinage.

I am also of the view that for a common coin, the numbers available dwarf any resubmitted duplicates, but clearly at the rarer end, there potentially is a really large discrepancy in absolute numbers vs pop reports. It's a lottery.

 

Well said @ToughCOINS! I've often wondered about that with the 1932D Washington Quarter population numbers as it relates to Randy's question. Good thread.....

 

Any coin for which there is a significant price differential between 2 adjacent grades is going to have a large number of crack out and resubmits... and so the population report will be distorted.

Populations are also distorted on the other end, For example if If it's a $1 or $2 coin or even older $20 coin, nobody bothers to submit one so the population report would seem to indicate it's rare when it isn't.

 

I thought about this from the time I first heard of TPG grading companies way back. It's why I have never put ANY stock in TPG pop reports. I find them utterly useless. There is the crackout problem, and then the VAST numbers of similar coins out there that have never been submitted to any TPG. Again, I find them utterly useless.

Just this past Saturday, I was at an auction where MANY MANY utterly slab-worthy coins were sold raw, and I DO have 50 years experience and a good glass with which to make that judgment. There were some problem coins, yes, but they were the tiny minority.

The bad news was there were too many well-heeled bidders, so bargains were in short supply. I snagged a few commems from the 1920's series.

 

You've just added to you store of facts that everyone figures out eventually.

And it has been discussed as being a problem since shortly after they published their first pop report back around 1988.

 

At that time, I lacked a forum for discussion of such topics. That was my "figure things out for yourself" phase.

 

When silver prices were high many silver coins were melted so this must have affected population numbers significantly

 

For the most part the pop reports serve their purpose, but in the case of extremely rare coins, availability is an important factor as there are likely only a few known examples anyway. Distorted figures usually are compensated for in the market.

 

@GDJMSP has offered a highly nuanced view. For most readers, not able to apply the adjusments, they are little better than garbage.

If you insist... based on price

* for anything expensive, with a big jump at the next grade, or one grade below the top population - assume # is overstated

* for anything cheap, assume understated

 

Yup. But you said it so pleasantly and politely.

Like calling a dumpster fire a refuse conflagration...

 

TPG Pop reports are more useful as a relative tool than an absolute. I can look at the FBL population for a 1960 Franklin and see that it is relatively much scarcer than 48D - but the actual number they say is pretty useless.

 

How would I find the PCGS and/or NGC Population Reports for a particular set of years -- say, 1995....2000....2010.....2022 ?

I want to see how the Pop numbers increased for particular coins over time.

I know GDJMSP has shown some interesting stuff over time with the annuals.

 

The older printed PCGS reports are sometimes offered for sale. You might check if the individual pages of the online reports are captured at the Internet Archive.