cladking

Obviously there are very unsophisticated, barely active, inexperienced, or have very minor collections. These collectors might become bigger in the future but I'm talking about active collectors who have spent at least ten or twenty dollars on premiums in the last couple years. Yes, we all have our own niche in the hobby. And that niche changes over time. I actually agree with WC on some points but don't want to confuse the issue by saying what. Besides agreement makes pretty lousy debate. Frankly I think he generally sees the big picture reasonably well but misses all the nuance.

And you said; "Otherwise though, tons of this coinage dated 1933 and later was saved by the roll in (better) UNC grades;.." This is just as untrue as when you said it in this thread on 4-5. Coins between 1933 and 1964 were heavily saved by any measure. The quality of coinage was higher in this era and few collectors even bothered with getting the nicest coin. They were all nice and Gems by the standards of the day were common enough. Modern coinage was not only not saved but most of it is ugly. Part of the reason it wasn't saved is that it was so ugly.

What defines "modern" is nobody saved them. Millions of '50-D nickels were saved but many modern nickels were saved in much smaller numbers. All pre-1965 coins were saved but after this savings were very spotty. Some Jeffersons were saved in much larger numbers than the '50-D and some were very lightly saved. There has been no market for BU rolls so few were saved. This especially applies to the clads.

The "hobby" as you define it encompasses only those who collect "significant" coins and is tiny; even tinier than ANA membership or subscribers to the coin papers. I'm not talking about this. I'm talking about the entire coin business and aggregate buying and selling of coins at a premium world wide. Typical 1964 half dollars have no premium except as silver. There are millions of rolls and many of the buyers have no interest in paying any premium so they end up with rolls of BU '64 halves. They are not part of the coin business per se because they are only buying silver and when something else comes along they'll sell them at market and buy other silver. Most people who know nothing about coins right now and walk into a coin shop or jewelry store to buy silver will not buy eagles or bars because of huge premiums or sell outs. They walk out with things like '64 halfs. This helps dealers but is not part of the coin market. People who buy '64 halves for their collections are part of the coin market. But still the coin market is huge. Bob Vila sells mint sets!. Many estate sales have things like proof sets and buffalo nickels. There are millions of collectors; hundreds of millions of collectors world wide and the number is growing daily. The aggregat demand of these collectors is simply staggering and you think a few thousand slabbed '71-D halves are sufficient for the potential demand!! There is an apparent supply of about 1 3/4 million but many of these don't really exist because they've been spent or otherwise degraded. Kennedys have never been widely collected before like indian cents of bust halves. What do you suppose would be the effect of these coins becoming widely collected? You don't like inexpensive coins but there are hundreds of millions of collectors who can't plop down thousands or even hundreds of dollars for a coin. Even ten or twenty dollars for a bunch of coins can strain their budgets. In light of the simple fact that many coins are already up hundreds fold it seems entirely possible that the roll price of a '71-D half could go $40 or much higher. We ARE going to go from almost no collectors of '71 Kennedys to a much higher level. I don't know how much higher but it will be higher. Your beliefs about value and availability have no bearing on the facts. Your belief that a 1971 half will never be worth more than $1.15 is simply based on your assumptions. I believe your assumptions are based not on trends or the way things are unfolding but on historic norms. And then you seem to forget that historically every dog has its day and even if you think clads are dogs there will come a time (God knows when) that even these mutts will get attention.

1971 half dollars in chBU are common. By your standards exceedingly common. But the chief reason they are common is that very few people collect clad half dollars. If these were tied up in "old collections" there would be a lot fewer rolls and in 50 years these old collections would be walking into coin shop and constitute "supply" for the markets. Since there are currently no old collections the available supply is chBU rolls. You seem to forget that coin collecting isn't only a hobby it is also a business dependent on both supply and demand. Try to remember this when you slam moderns and grossly exaggerate their availability.

You're just clouding the issue. The point is the old silver coins are worth their silver value and the clad despite the lack of demand is wholesaling at more than double face value which is many multiples of their metal value. The silver despite huge demand has no value beyond the composition and the cu/ n brings a large premium. My forecasts of future value are as irrelevant to the current and future price of any coin as yours are. I am merely saying that in the long run coins of similar scarcity and demand will have similar prices. Old classic coins have far far higher premiums than equally scarce moderns and this is a simple fact. Many can be worth 100X as much or much more. I don't have a problem with this but there is only ONE CAUSE of it; moderns have far far less demand. You can invent words to describe or name anything but the fact is many moderns are going up thousands fold not because they are "popular" like most old coins, but because they are very scarce and are getting attention for the very first time. These are all simple facts, and you can't just destroy facts by taking a different perspective or assigning new words to describe them.

It's a wonder it was proposed but may have been crafted primarily to scarce collectors. Enforcement is easy when you have the law on your side. Right now the FED won't allow you to melt your own pennies and nickels with the force of law. They could just as easily force you to dishoard them. Many wouldn't do it but it would drive the markets underground and big players would get charged. They don't need to catch minnows when there are whales and sharks. The effect is the same.

Mebbe I'm just mummifying or am the pretender to the throne. In this country only money talks and the vending machine industry was powerful in 1964 back when you could pump a few coins in a machine and buy just about anything. Now days you'll need a fistful of quarters to buy a candy bar or do a load of laundry so the vending industry is nearly dead. The vending industry insisted that the new coins have the same electronic signature as the silver and the FED was scared of inflation if people perceived the money being debased. cu/ ni clad cu fulfilled both requirements.

Try finding a 1984 cent in MS-65 or better with nice attractive pleasing surfaces. I've looked at thousands including dozens of rolls and have seen "2". Try finding a nice Gem 67 '68 cent. Most have carbon spots. A lot of the zincolns are hard to find nice but come in very very high grade. Some also come so highly PL they are nearly indistinguishable from a proof except for their mint mark. These coins are just evaporating in circulation because they are made of junk metal. Three or four million per day are lost to the ravages of circulation and their remarkable lack of any monetary value.

The mint had no products at all for collectors between about may 1964 and October of 1965. And they had wrecked the products being put into circulation with a date freeze that would give us 1964 coins forever until it was superseded by a new date freeze that would give us 1965 coins forever and no mint marks. They also eliminated proof AND mint sets to discourage collecting but there was a clamor so they invented the hybridized Special Mint Set which almost no one liked. Silver was flying out of circulation and a coin shortage affected all coins but especially silver. Many steps were taken to discourage collectors but most weren't necessary because collectors hated the new coins and the markets had collapsed with the loss of so many collectors and the pall that descended on the entire hobby. Most of these collectors were young so it just sucked the life blood out of the hobby even though more established markets (bust coins) remained relatively unaffected. The price devastation was largely confined to moderns (1934 to 1964) and especially BU rolls and mint sets. There was almost no collecting from circulation between 1964 and 1999. This is the chief route for new collectors to enter the hobby so it languished. By 1995 it looked like the hobby was going the way of stamp collecting. You could buy almost anything except major rarities for a song. This was a dreadful time in the hobby and far worse than even 1965 but it was pulled out by the states quarters. First moderns improved in '96 and then the rest of the market started doing better. These vibrant time now are the result of millions of young people entering the hobby. I expect that over the coming years that many of them will collect the older coins in circulation now. There are no "old collections" of this material so the effects of demand should be most interesting and quite predictable.

We've boiled our differences down to just a couple points. If WC would just quit saying that moderns are common and were set aside in huge numbers we'd have nothing to talk about other than his belief they will forever be ":uncollectible".

Millions of rolls of 1964 silver half dollars were set aside by collectors and the general public. Most of the coins in them still survive with many in pristine condition. You can find BU rolls all day long with no premium to melt. Far fewer 1971 half dollars were produced. The coins were struck to a far lower standard and were far harder to coin because the metal is hard. Most of them looked like garbage and nobody cared about clads anyway. Today there is 100 times more demand for the silver but finding nice attractive rolls of pristine 1971 halfs is an oddity. Despite the lack of demand they wholesale at $23. The hobby hasn't changed that much; people still don't want clad which works out well because there isn't much to be had. '64 Kennedys were common in 1972 and they are still common. Nice rolls of '71 Kennedys were uncommon in 1n 1972 and they are even less common now. At the current time there is only enough demand to support large premiums on the finest couple hundred '71's. What most people don't realize is that by the time you get down to about the 40,000th finest it will look like garbage because there is no depth to the supply. As long as people aren't collecting these the coins in the mint sets are simply corroding away. Low prices do not induce people to store coins properly or to remove them from sets and clean them. WC is certainly right that a coin with a population of 40,000 is unlikely to have a huge premium but there are far scarcer moderns than this. It's also true that collectors might not care if the coin looks nice meaning there are millions and millions of '71 halfs from which to choose. I think collectors do care most of the time.

I don't doubt it but in modern times there aren't many cases where the reverse die wasn't swapped out at the beginning of the year. I'd guess they changed this policy at some point. There are numerous mismatched dies in clad quarters and some could have been caused by this process in 1965 but after this it is at the very least uncommon. There would be dozens of mules and hundreds of thousand, millions of coins. There are just repeated changes to reverses. While most of these changes are very subtle from year to year there are also several quite dramatic changes. Back in the day I could tell the date and mint mark from the reverse with a better than 60% accuracy. Very very few coins stood out as real anomalies.

The mint might not have hated us as much as the federal government but there was certainly animosity. Collectors were blamed for the coin shortage and were being punished with a series of laws and procedural changes. These laws crashed the coin hobby in 1965 and drove millions away from coin collecting. Then the direct fallout of lack of valuable coins or silver in circulation drove millions more from the hobby. There was even a bill (Bible bill) before Congress that would effectively illegalize all coin collecting other than valuable old US coins and foreign coins.

I don't have time now to address everyone's points but; It always comes full circle; you start and stop by saying all moderns are common and were saved in large numbers. Neither statement is true. Even if either were true in point of fact quality tends to be horrendous so high grades would still be elusive. You believe moderns are unimportant and insignificant but you don't speak for every coin buyer. Many people find some or all moderns to be exciting and significant. If I were a young man I'd be buying instead of selling. If my heirs knew how to liquidate them I'd leave the coins for them. It's a far better time to buy than sell. Such is life.

Back in the day if you didn't find these reverses within a few years of issue it was extremely difficult to locate nice examples. Herb Hicks had a few articles published in the coin papers but I missed the most important one since it was before I was a regular subscriber. I wager there will be a few more found over the years. I believe mint personnel were not fastidious about changing the reverse dies at the beginning of the year. If it was in good shape they either chose not to change it or overlooked changing it and there are several pretty big reverse die changes over the years. I found a lot of the ones I had set aside and didn't find anything important but I still have a bunch of undisturbed safety deposit boxes I'm emptying for sale.

Moderns are doing pretty well in several countries including the US. Modern collectors are still rare but they outnumber many of the coins.

You and tens of millions of other collectors stepped out when clads were introduced. The mint and federal government hated coin collectors and did everything possible to discourage it. They didn't really need the date freezes and other contrivances because just debasing the currency was sufficient for most collectors. Millions got out and the ones who didn't had no interest in setting aside rolls of clad coinage. This is one of the things World colonial simply can't grasp. In his defense he believes that if there are more than a few hundred of a coin then it is "insignificant" and will never be collected and there are a lot more of most moderns than this. And to cap off this belief he also believes that varieties and high grade coins don't count even if they are scarce. I take no offence because I probably hated clad as much as anyone. It wasn't just how it wrecked collecting from change "forever" but the metal itself was junk and was supposed to keep the same date forever and not even a mintmark to tell them apart. I suppose it might be a small part of the reason I sold my buffalo nickel collection in 1968 but the principle reason was I needed the cash. I didn't return to collecting until the coins in circulation were starting to get interesting again in 1972 and I had read an article in the paper that said the FED was going to start rotating their coin stocks. Before this it was quite common to get rolls of clad all the way back to 1965 so there was no point in collecting moderns. Now there are hundreds of different issues in circulation (thousands if you count varieties) and most of them are actually tough in high grade because the FED keeps all the coins in circulation all the time and have for half a century next year. But there still aren't large numbers of BU rolls as WC continues to intimate. There are lots of moderns which are probably wholly non-existent in BU rolls because they are very scarce and there are so few rolls.

Certainly there are still 65 million 1969 quarters in circulation but most are culls and the rest are VG/ F.

What part of "virtually no original rolls" are you missing? This doesn't matter so much for '69 quarters but rolls of '71-D are fairly elusive as well and these are the only source for the type "h". I just don't understand why you believe all moderns are common except in high grade and why you consider condition scarcity to not matter. You are apparently wrong across the board or moderns wouldn't be doing so well.

And you still can't come up with an original roll of 1969 quarters in any condition at all. Most moderns were very lightly saved in BU rolls and the '69 25c is the posterchild. The coins were poorly made, ugly, and perceived to be extremely common so they were not saved. 1938-D nickels were saved.

This is true but highly misleading. Millions of '55-D dimes and '50-D nickels were saved in rolls but virtually no 1969 quarters at all. Very few moderns were saved except cents and most nickels.

Way cool! How do you differentiate between the the 1980 RDV-11's and 12's? I have noticed a lower relief but I've seen no pick up points. Are there any other pick up points than you list above? Is either tough? I might add that in almost every single case that only one of the reverses shows up in mint sets and since almost all clads originated in mint sets this means the other reverses will be very scarce in high grade no matter the mintage. The only exception that I know of is the 1981-P appears as the RDV-11 and type "d" in mint sets. About 1 in 175 mint sets has the type "d".

Many collectors who are interested in moderns think it's a numismatic sin to bust up mint and proof sets. Of course there also exists demand for each coin in these sets that has nothing to do with owners or potential owners of sets. There are other reasons that people avoid busting up sets such as some of them require skill or knowledge to open and a different set of skill to dispose of the unwanted coins in them. People generally aren't aware that there will be a few coins in these sets that EACH sell for more than the cost of the set. These factors lead to a massive wholesale market for singles. All through the modern age this market has existed and countless millions of sets have been destroyed to supply it. Many coins in these sets are substandard and can't be used by the wholesaler and most will wind up in circulation. Then to really complicate matters large percentages of the coins and sets are tarnishing. Coins like PR 1985 half dollars are often discolored. 1975 UNC dollars were substandard more than a thirds of the time and now the majority of the few survivors in mint sets are tarnished. This coin wholesales for $4 now and isn't often seen for sale. But you can buy a mint set containing the coin for $4. It's likely 60% of the old PR sets and 90% of the old mint sets are gone now. 20% of the proof coins surviving in sets are tarnished and 80% of (some date) mint sets are tarnished. Some people will also buy sets to simply acquire better coins. How many tarnished 1968 half dollars will someone look at in mint sets before he just buys one. It's a simple $5 coin so why run around looking?

The hobby is more vibrant than I've seen it since the first crash in 1964. There were actually two crashes for the coin market in the transition to clad. The first was the BU roll/ mint set/ proof set/ modern coin market in early 1964. This crash was severe but was mostly contained to speculative coins "investments" and was caused by the announcement that a transition to base metal was coming because of the coin shortage. The second was more drawn out and encompassed much more of the hobby. It was brutal, drawn out, and disheartening. It began with the announcement of the date freeze and worsened as new bad news came out culminating with the Bible Bill that would have outlawed all modern coin collecting. Modern coin collecting proved so uniquely unpopular that the bill was deemed unnecessary and then the mint spent two years unsuccessfully trying to get people to collect clads. The number of collectors simply began to shrink in 1964 and only returned to that level in ~2015 and now far surpasses even the number in 1963. The population hit it's lowest point in 1998 when states coins went into production. The funny thing about the future is no one sees it coming and don't even notice when it gets here since it comes in in tiny bounds and leaps. We don't notice changes until they accumulate. Well, the new collectors have accumulated. We shaped this future over the last twenty years by our posts and our actions. 13 year olds don't want to be mauled and they don't need condescension which is why they generally prefer to hang out with one another and they are scarcer here. The markets are going to continue to evolve to reflect the desires of those who are ACTIVE in them. Much of this activity will be net selling by older collectors and net buying by younger collectors. Nothing will prevent this because it is analogous to the tide coming in. Like most all of history there are patterns and cycles that are highly predictable even where details of the present are not always clear. The demand from new collectors is also highly predictable though the exact way it unfolds is to remain unknown and be caused by events that haven't happened yet. They will be acquiring more expensive coins and more will collect $6000 quarters. I believe the future is bright for all coins for at least the next quarter century. There will be ups and downs and unexpected twists but the demand from this generation and the next is likely to be more eclectic and widely based. Even the most obscure coins, tokens, and medals are likely to enjoy a market. Coins that are more popular (like US coins) will have very strong and spirited interest,. I would predict that these markets will develop over the next 20 years and those who are around to see it won't even see it coming because it's going to sneak up on them.