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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;cladking, post: 24649145, member: 68&quot;]I have very few sources other than deduction, inference, and mintages.&nbsp; A lot of it is just doing simple proportions.&nbsp; It all should be considered speculative but, I believe, there is some accuracy.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>You can actually see a lot of these processes at work.&nbsp; For instance within weeks after one of the proof set prices would crash you were likely to find that date in circulation.&nbsp; With mint sets you can rarely be sure if the nice AU you see is a straggler or from a recently cut set but with proof sets there is no doubt. </p><p><br /></p><p>Most of the big wholesalers keep (kept) only a few hundred of each set in stock so their actions should have little effect on the coins in circulation but in aggregate dealers and collectors have a lot more of these sets.&nbsp; Of course, dealers rarely have enough stock to make roll sets (200 of a date).&nbsp; You can actually find bag sets of proof coins but I imagine these are not all cut at once.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Relative availability of the coins is easy enough but trying to pin down absolute numbers is trickier and largely experience and intuition.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>In the old days the mint sets were everywhere. Every dealer had shelves full of them they&#039;d ship off to a wholesaler when then price was right.&nbsp; But then there was 25 years of most dealers just cutting up the sets and putting the coins in the till. Now days the sets are much more difficult to find with very very few dealers having more than $1000 worth in stock.&nbsp; These often look a little ratty and most of the older coins (pre1981) are hazed or tarnished. </p><p><br /></p><p>I doubt the wholesalers keep any more sets than they used to but they might since there is some retail demand now days.&nbsp; Most of the sets just flow to coin dealers from heirs and are shipped off.&nbsp; Older sets are drying up because there are not so many older collectors who purchased them from the mint as there were decades ago.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>There are a few other little clues as well like varieties in the mint sets.&nbsp; Unfortunately in most cases it&#039;s hard to quantify their incidence in circulation.&nbsp; Pop reports are interesting since they tend to reflect mostly mint set coins.&nbsp; Deviations imply rolls and bags exist for the date.&nbsp; Then there are varieties that don&#039;t appear in mint sets so their incidence provides clues.&nbsp; Knowing the mintage of something like &#039;82-P souvenir sets and comparing this to varieties that don&#039;t appear in the set provides a range for the absolute number available.&nbsp; For quartiers the implication is ~80,000 though many of these have been lost since the original calculations.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;ve seen surprisingly few coins in circulation with mint set crimping damage.&nbsp; Some of the data you see published is hard numbers I picked up over the years.&nbsp; For instance I saw a newspaper article in 1984 that listed the mintages of the &#039;82 and &#039;83 souvenir sets.&nbsp; Mint sets didn&#039;t get much attention in the hobby press and when they did they usually just printed the highly misleading line from the mint that these coins are just circulation coins.&nbsp; The reality is they were specially made even though it might not have been all THAT special.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>As I often say if you want a Gem look in a mint set but then in most cases there are no other sources anyway.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>I often think I might be overestimating the number of surviving sets and then I see a nice unopened package of 20.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Who knows?[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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