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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;GDJMSP, post: 1979735, member: 112&quot;]First of all let&#039;s make sure what we are talking about here. I am talking about original Mint &amp; Proof sets that are still in original mint packaging - and only those. And since you said silver Proof sets, I assumed you were talking about sets minted prior to 1965 - and only those.</p><p><br /></p><p>Secondly, with those sets value is never, ever, established or determined based on the mintage of the sets. Value is based on how hard or how easy it is to find such a set - scarcity in other words - and the quality of the coins in the set.</p><p><br /></p><p>And when I&#039;m talking about values I am most definitely <u>not</u> talking about Red Book values. Red Book values, for anything, are worse than worthless. The coin market is what establishes values, for any coin, for all coins ! </p><p><br /></p><p>Now I suppose we need to define what the coin market actually is. The coin market, for the most part, is composed of dealers and the electronic dealer networks. And these dealers are all over the country and in some cases all over the world. And they buy and sell from each other all day every day. Those dealers define what the price of any coin is, and they define how the price changes, meaning whether it goes up or down and how much. And those prices and changes are reported every week in the CDN. That establishes the base line for all coin values.</p><p><br /></p><p>I say base line because price can and will also vary somewhat based on quality because no two coins of the same grade are ever equal. So some will sell above the base line and some below it. But the base line remains.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now some are going to ask - what about collectors, don&#039;t we matter or have a say in this ? Well, to a large degree, no we don&#039;t. And that is because 80% or more of all coins sold every day are sold from one dealer to another dealer. And that is the coin market.</p><p><br /></p><p>But we as collectors do have an impact on the coin market for we are the end users. And what we are willing to pay, or not pay, helps determine what those dealers will ask or bid in the days and weeks following. But it still goes through the coin dealers.</p><p><br /></p><p>Yeah sure, there are collectors who sell directly to another collector. But in point of fact this happens so seldom and so little that it has almost no effect on the coin market. And in reality there is no way it could for those sales are not recorded or reported. In other words nobody even knows they happened so there&#039;s no way they can effect anything.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now when it comes to original Mint and Proof sets nobody can or will ever know how many of those sets were ever broken up. Yeah they know how many were minted, but that doesn&#039;t have anything to do with it because the number minted does not tell you how many still exist. Nothing will ever tell you how many still exist. But the current asking price for a given set tells you how hard or easy it is to find one of those sets. The higher the price, the harder it is to find one. The lower the price, the easier it is to find one. And of course the harder it is to find one is because there are fewer of them that still exist.</p><p><br /></p><p>No you still don&#039;t know the actual numbers, but you do know which ones are the hardest to find because their prices are the highest.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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