Determining surviving populations

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Thanks for the info! I never knew that about coin facts, but I just checked it out. Wow, I still have a LOT to learn!

 

Excellent topic! I just posted another thread today in US Coin forum about how PCGS comes up with their survival estimates. I'm looking at an early branch mint dime that NGC has graded a total of 47 in all grades and PCGS has graded a total of 183 in all grades. The original mintage was 1.17 million but PCGS estimates that only 300 survive in any grade! Given the fact that 230 have been graded by the big two alone, I'd say there's way more than 300 available out there but no way to know. Most are very worn. Only around 15 MS examples are known to exist. Anyway...

As far as trying to compare how many are submitted vs. minted for moderns to come up with useful percentages, the info is probably not worth using. Waaaay too many factors.

Lets look at the recently minted 2016 Anniversary 24k gold quarters. (I submitted one myself and I know someone else who did as well.) It's probably safe to assume every single one they made is safely stashed somewhere. (I got a SP70 but it doesn't even raise the value that much. They just have neat slab labels for them).

So the total mintage for these special gold quarters was 91,752. Between NGC and PCGS, 22.6% of the total mintage has been submitted to them for grading!

Now we look at your 1889-CC Morgan. 350k minted. Highly desirable and a very valuable Morgan so there's a major incentive to get them graded. Far more incentive than 2016 Anniversary quarters.

Between PCGS and NGC, counting PLs, only 4% of the mintage has been submitted and surely some were cracked and re-sent in. That's a little over 14k of them. Who knows how many were melted and lost for all time? Now there's a lot of people who think grading is a rip off and will never submit them but value wise it seems to be the smartest thing to do for this coin. So it's just an educated guess how many more loose ones may be floating around out there. Maybe 2x? Maybe 3x the number submitted? 10x? Maybe a third of them are still floating around. That'd be believable but I doubt many collectors fully realize this.

As time goes on, somehow a lot gets lost. Some of it melted. Some stuff has gotten so bad it should be melted. Some of it shipped over-seas. Lost in the ground. Thrown away. Morgans circulated more out west so there's a good chance all those were sent out into circulation compared to later issues. I'd guess a huge amount of the 1921 Morgans were probably melted to be turned into 1921 Peace dollars. I think the Pittman Act was even melting them to produce bullion to ship to Europe to help re-build after the war. As someone else said they believe the later years of the Morgan mintages took the biggest hit but no ledger was kept so bags of anything could have been melted. It was over half the total mintage of the Morgans as I believe you stated. Just no way to know which ones took the biggest hit. I was pondering this 10 years ago.

 

I’d think that unique Auction appearances would be a better metric than attempting to estimate remaining samples of a given date and type.

 

Thank you so much again, I have uploaded photos of the no date SLQ, unfortunately, unless I'm understanding wrong, this is a 1917 version. Let me know if you agree, but those guidelines you posted were very helpful.

This is the coin that got me started as a collector. I've had it since 1969 when I was a kid. I had a great uncle who was a collector and he took some of his culls and gave it to me to go through, along with a price guide and I've been hooked since then.

Because it wasn't dated, as a young man I thought I had a treasure. I knew it was a type 1 and back then, if it were a 1916, it was a $12 coin! A lot of money to me at that age. I use to assume the best back in those days, now I've become more of a realist. Anyway, 50 years later you have solved the mystery and I am very grateful. Thank you again for sharing your knowledge.

 

That was a great post Doug. I didn't even know the websites allowed you to go back in time to study population numbers.

One could argue that it may have taken some time for the TPGs to catch on. I mean, it probably took till the early to mid 2000s for most homes to even have internet. Much more information began being exchanged after the internet became common place in households so maybe it could account for a surge of submissions in the 2000s. I'd probably argue more than re-submits. Regardless, can't argue that there's surely many re-submits in their population numbers. For high value examples they may be re-submitted many, many times.

For the $1k or less examples, I'd think unless it came under new ownership, it wouldn't be cost effective to submit them too many times without the failures cutting into the profit to where it wasn't worth the hassle. IME and others, it seems they are pretty consistent on re-grades. While were speculating you could speculate the lower end ones are probably closer to their actual populations than the ones near the large price jump grades. And you can probably assume that most of the ones that are at a major price jump level, if it levels out some, are probably close to actual numbers as it gets more difficult to achieve a higher grade. This coin has so many price jumps, my theory doesn't work well for it. XF to AU50 is a major price jump but theres only like 400 pop in xf and 200 some in AU50.

 

NONE of the 21 Morgans were melted down to make Peace dollars. Why would they? They were making the Morgans to replace the dollars melted by the Pitman Act. There would be no reason to melt them down just to strike them again. And if you add up the mintage figures for the 21 Morgans and all the Peace dollars through 1928 they add up to the number of dollars melted under Pitman. If they melted 21 morgans and made Peace dollars then the total mintage would be too high because some of the coins would then be being counted twice.

And no I don't believe they publish the pop reports in a printed form any more. They stopped that years ago. (Unfortunately. Having printed records are a great way to go back and study how things changed over time.)

 

Ok, wow, my mistake. It's been a while since I looked into the Pittman act. So that's a large mintage that condenses down what could have been melted, a little further.

Yeah, it's too bad they don't have the printed material anymore. Just going to have to make screenshots to keep track of whatever you want and keep your own records I guess. The old books will still be valuable to compare to the current numbers though.

 

Just for clarity, the 1921 Morgan issue was not included in my writeup as it was subsequent to the Pittman melt.

 

Wonderful Thread. Thank you.