Last year i decided to invest in gold to help diversify my investments. at the time gold was below 1000. it was sitting at 1940. With with some help i invested in a 1910 (p mint no mint mark) indian pcgs 62. the p mint only minted about 300K of them in 1910. the denver minted 2m i do believe and the S mint less than p. with a low mintage from the p mint i am wondering why it is not worth more than it currently is.
Kind of says it all. All coin prices are really more due to popularity rather than the amount minted. Or even the face value of the metal a coin is made from. If a coin, any coin, is made really popular, the price goes up. A buick auto is usually more expensive than a Chevy. Yet many of the parts are the same. And some are exactly from the same place and are the same. So why is the Buick so much more? More popular probably as far as it is supposed to be more expensive so it is.
There's also the matter of supply. A high mintage in and of itself means nothing in series that have had a lot of examples melted. What is far more important is how many of them are still around. An extreme example of this in the Indian eagle series is the 1933; almost as many of those were made as the 1910. But because almost all the 1933s were melted, those sell for six figures, while there are plenty of 1910s around. This effect is commonly seen in late date gold coins, as well as Morgan dollars to an extent. There is actually no detectable relationship between mintage and price on Carson City Morgans; some of the lowest mintage pieces are downright common.
Speaking of Morgans, it's likely that anyone who has not read up on any coinage history, may not even know about the most obvious major melt down that was the Pittman Act of 1918. We know that 270,232,722 silver dollars were melted and made into new 1921 Morgans and Peace dollars. But the official mintage figures remain the same and nobody knows what all of those Morgans were that were melted. Most people probably do not take the Morgan mintage figures with that grain of salt. If we actually knew what they all were, it might affect prices drastically, for many of them. And that's just the official 'big melt' that we know of. Every time silver gets high, more and more worn out (some unworn) examples are sent to the melting pots. I don't think we'll ever run out but there aren't as many left as most people would think. FWIW, IF those silver dollars melted during the Pittman Act alone, were all Morgans, that would have been the equivalent to wiping out the entire mintage of 1889s through 1904s, from ALL mints, plus a few million extra. To put it in perspective. That's 16 years worth that could have all theoretically been melted. Then we don't know how many have been melted down since then, lost over-seas, buried, or just plain lost in general. The unseen, generally unknown factors can help you and hurt you when buying.
