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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;World Colonial, post: 2476184, member: 78153&quot;]The best sources of data I consider eBay, Heritage and maybe Great Collections.&nbsp; These three seem to be representative of the collector population because most collectors presumably buy from one or more of them.&nbsp; B&amp;M dealers are an additional source but it isn&#039;t necessary to use them to be a collector anymore.&nbsp; Since I resumed collecting in 1998, I haven&#039;t bought from a local dealer even once, because they have nothing I want to buy - EVER.</p><p><br /></p><p>Heritage has hundreds of thousands of registered users and though all of them are not buyers and include collectors of other areas, I suspect (but do not actually know) that most are buying coins from them.&nbsp; On eBay, I suspect that most who are active collectors buy through them,&nbsp; I believe this is a noticeable multiple of the Heritage base.&nbsp; All aren&#039;t active but only eBay knows their activity and to my knowledge, they haven&#039;t provided this data to anyone.</p><p><br /></p><p>Like I said in my initial post on this subject, the primary reason I believe the actual collector base is larger or much larger than what is apparently visible through sources such as that survey is because of the combination of the estimated supply of US coins and price level.&nbsp; Yes, I know that non-collectors own tons of coins they inherited (like my step grandmother who died about 15 years ago who must have had a valuable collection of maybe 10,000) and &quot;investors&quot; own a noticeable percentage of Morgans, generic type gold and maybe even &quot;key dates.</p><p><br /></p><p>But even accounting for that, I don&#039;t believe there are enough hoarders who own large numbers of any number of coins and don&#039;t believe dealers are holding an outsized percentage as inventory either.</p><p><br /></p><p>My number of two million is probably off but if it is much less, it implies two things.</p><p><br /></p><p>First, that any number of coins are owned in common by an outsized percentage of the collector base.&nbsp; I don&#039;t believe this for a minute.</p><p><br /></p><p>Second, as big of a pessimist as I am on the future price level, apparently I am still actually far too positive.&nbsp; If the collector base is really only in the vicinity of 250,000, given the economic train wreck which is in store at some point in the future and almost certainly while most reading this post are still alive, the upcoming price crash should really be a sight to behold because the supply of coins coming out of the &quot;woodwork&quot; by desperate people forced to raise cash will totally overwhelm future buyers.&nbsp; The only reason it did not happen in 2008 is because the financial stress was temporary.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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