cladking

@Just Bob is very knowledgeable and I had to go back and edit. But the point is that the vast majority of baby boomers have little or no use for clads and a few generations of collectors have followed in their foot steps until this latest one who are much more striking out on their own. This is in part caused by the total lack of encouragement they get for the "treasures" they find in circulation. And, no, I'm not talking road kill that sells for hundreds on eBay but interesting or desirable coins they get in the bank, find in change, or spot in a mint set. Most people who have historically paid much money for price guides have little use for moderns. Of course now Redbook probably sells a lot more issues to modern collectors than to old time collectors. Still (I haven't seen the '25 yet) prices for moderns are unrealistically low. I'm sure there are many reasons for this including lack of interest by the publishers and readers and markets that are very difficult to measure. But the fact is collecting moderns is still like the wild west. There are no maps and danger and opportunity abound. There is very little competition for even the most desirable coins. Over the years I've spoken or corresponded with many of the publishers and I've probably had some effect even though I'm not certain that effect has always been beneficial. Just reporting a bunch of higher prices is problematical in many ways. There are numerous benchmarks that can be used to see where the problems lie since most nice moderns come from mint sets so prices should usually correlate to the availability in those sets. The bottom line is these markets can be efficient until the pricing is accurate and the pricing can't be accurate until there are more collectors allowing price discovery. I can't help but feel this will move more quickly going forward.

It looks like a lightly tarnished mint set coin whose appearance would be improved with a soak in acetone. As such it is only slightly better than average in most regards. If it cleans up OK there are still several hundred thousand better looking 1972 cents.

It wasn't so much "withheld" as it is a simple matter that "moderns" are not really even considered a part of the numismatic hobby to most dealers, collectors, and numismatists. Until the mid-'90's stores and Madison Avenue depicted coins as 1964 and earlier. Moderns didn't even appear in price guides until the mid-'70's. Redbook lists prices only up through MS-65 with no mention of the fact that higher grades can be worth considerably more. Most of the very worst pricing issues have been resolved over the years. Back in the mid-'90's they listed something like a '24-D cent in VF ~$30 IMS. At that time you couldn't give these away. A retail customer might pay so much but there were no retail customers. If you actually wanted to sell one you better discount it to only a few dollars. At that time I could actually sell many moderns for for three or times the Redbook price. Another problem hinges on definitions. Moderns are graded to the same standards as classics by the standards of the services and this creates some ugly coins in high grade holders as well as some nice Gems in lower grade holders. Then you have interpretation of the meaning of the prices. Some guides actually state that in order to bring the lofty price of $1 in MS-63 a 1977 quarter must be in a TPG holder! This is ludicrous on many levels not least of which is that one of the best attributes of moderns is they don't need to be graded because if they look Unc they are in virtually every single case. The trick isn't to find an example that's actually Unc with no cabinet friction, the trick is to find one that's attractive. There are no AU's or XF's or even VF's. There are no sliders except for the '82 and '83 issues. Back in the mid-'90's for several years I advertised to pay $40 each for Gem '82 quarters. At that time these listed for $40 per roll. I was hoping the few people who set rolls aside would go through their rolls and send me the best few. Despite dozens of ads in various coin papers I got very few responses and even fewer actual coins. Half of what I did get was just junk people pulled out of pocket change. This was 1994 and anyone who thinks you can walk into any coin shop and buy a Gem '82-P quarter for the Redbook price today of $35 (less that what I offered one and a half generations ago) is simply wrong. You will not find a coin shop with one in stock, and any that has a high grade slab will contain a poorly struck coin made by worn out dies. All those ads and I didn't actually by a single Gem. I did pay $40 for a small handful of nice gemmy (MS-64) specimens. I just kept trying because I hoped someone would have a cache of them. I once sent in a remarkably clean 1987-D cent struck by brand new dies with a perfect strike and minimal PL appearance. I was hoping to get a new pop top. It came back MS-65. At this grade I spent $20 to have what might be the best '87-D cent in a holder that is valued at 30c by Redbook today!!! But it has to be graded to be worth 30c. The older classic markets are sufficiently mature that most coins can trade at prices reflective of their value among a large population of collectors. Everyone wants to see high and ever increasing prices. Modern markets are very immature and there are very few collectors. One of the reasons these markets are so immature is that price guides are artificially kept low and one of the chief reasons is that when their customers see modern prices they don't want to see high prices. I would wager most mentors wouldn't know a modern coin if it bit them on the nose. Odds are pretty good that they don't consider them real coins.

I'm jealous of your aluminum. It's probably been more rejected than any other base metal coins and base metal coins are probably the most rejected in history. Debased silver is always rejected as well but it is still silver and does get some interest. I just didn't pay any attention to aluminum unless it was obviously unusual or was Gem. It seems to come either awful or Gem with relatively little in between.

I said ten years ago that if I were a young man I would start collections of aluminum coins. These have done very well over the last ten years but there is still a great deal f potential in them. There are countless greatly undervalued modern coins. I barely have any aluminum at all because such a high percentage of them are exceedingly common because they tend to be very low denomination. But still there are scarcities and many were made to very very low standards so attractive examples can be very elusive even where many exist. Try finding nice Indian 10p coins from the '70's and '80's for instance in anything even approaching Gem.

Q.A.: "Trauma"... "open wounds in the hobby"... "boomers (Me!) are never going to accept clad coins"... Say, I wonder how this guy was able to get ahold of my life story??? Catalogers still list unrealistically low prices for moderns to avoid offending their customers; boomers.

There are literally billions of world coins including billions in BU rolls and in mint sets. But this simple fact has no effect on the price of tea in China nor in the availability of something like a 1950-E E German 10p coin nor a nice 1967 Japanese 100Y. You can't make a silk purse of a cow's ear nor a 1954-B Indian 2 a out of a bicentennial quarter. There is no kind of eraser that will remove a scrape from a '80-D half dollar or the wear from a '72-D type h quarter. It's all done. The fat lady has sung, and the ship sailed. It doesn't matter that you can lay hands on many thousands of Yugoslavian 50 D because many other coins are gone now. Yes, there are millions of proof sets but there are few world mint sets and more importantly very few world modern ever existed in mint sets. It's not "world moderns" that are rare. It's most world moderns. Make a list of all world moderns and 20% of the coins on the list make up 99% of all moderns available. Stick it with a fork because most of the coins have already been withdrawn and melted by the issuer.

Hatred of base metal is a one off. In every country silver was removed from the coinage beginning in 1945. I've always suspected it was a part of the Breton Woods Agreement. In each country people stopped collecting new coins when they were debased. Keep in mind though that in those days more Americans collected foreign coins than the number who collected in those countries. This is still true for more than half of other countries. Americans continued to collect some of these but tended to ignore them. However they did continue to collect foreign base metal coins that existed before the debasement. The switchover to clad was traumatic to most coin collectors beginning in 1964 when it was announced the current date coins would be made for all time killing the BU roll market was was huge at that time. Then it got much worse from there and there are still open wounds in the hobby to this day. The biggest such wound is the simple fact that most boomers are never going to even accept clad coins as actually being coins at all. Even nickels that remained exactly the same in 1965 except far lower mintages could never be seen as actual "coins". Many coins made since 1945 simply no longer exist. Attrition in some cases exceeds 99.9% Coins that defy the odds are usually heavily won and cull. There's a new generation collecting these now right in the countries of origin and prices are simply exploding.

Words have many meanings and they all get parsed. Nobody points at me in my brand new birthday suit. Mebbe the meek really will inherit the earth but until then I can play "Pretender to the Throne".

Nice attractive clad is very hard to find. Even many of the coins slabbed as high grade can be very unattractive due to poor strikes, poor dies, chicken scratching, and poorly centered strikes. A very low percentage of clad coins were attractive when the came off the dies and a startling low percentage of these were saved. Today the kind of quality that people take for granted in older coins can be hard to find in many clads and moderns. Try finding any of the above coins raw and see how it goes. It will give you a feel for what's available. THEN look for them in high grade slabs and you'll see most of these suffer the exact same problems but are otherwise free of marks. 1984 cents have very unattractive surfaces. About 98% are ugly at arms length. Of the remaining 2% most have carbon spots and they additionally have bubbles and various manufacturing defects. They aren't hard to find with very little marking; they are hard to find attractive. Try finding a '76 type I dollar that is fully struck by good dies and isn't covered with chicken scratching AND marks. No! The problem most assuredly is NOT that the supply is too high. There may exist not even one of some moderns in true Gem. The problem is lack of demand. There are a mere handful of collectors seeking the best coins and not all of these people even have registry sets. I believe this number can increase just as the demand for the coins I listed above and are NOT registry set caliber can increase dramatically. I mean come on, I'm suggesting a nice '80-D half dollar that isn't scraped is tough! If you don't mind scrapes then there are otherwise nice looking '80-D's everywhere. If you do mind scrapes they are none to common. People consider all moderns "uncollectible" so they don't even look. This will not persist indefinitely.

There are lots of variables and a great deal depends on what coins specifically are desired by future collectors. A lot depends on how you define the terms as well. I'm going to attempt an answer by defining the terms as coins with the greatest percentage increase in price that are not dependent on being pop tops and not proofs. 1984 1c in solid Gem 1969 25c in nice Gem. 1992 5c in solid Gem 1982-P 25c Gem 1968 DDO dime in vchBU 1976 type I Ike in solid gemmy condition 1966 5C SMS FS 1965 10c SMS FT 1965 dCAM cent 1980-D 50c solid Gem. "vchBU" means a very well made coin with full luster and reasonably clean. (MS-63) "gemmy" means a well made coin with minimal marking and no major strike or die deficiency. (MS-64) "Gem" means a well made well centered coin made by good dies with very little marking. (MS-65) "solid Gem" allows no grading parameters to be weak or borderline. (Ms-65/66) Services allow worn die strikes and poor strikes to get higher grades and future collectors may not want any coins without full detail/ full strikes. They also won't want carbon spots and unattractive coins. "Ugly" plagues almost all clads and especially the early years and the '82/'83 issues. There are numerous other moderns that are really quite scarce in nice attractive condition or even just nice chBU. There are quite a few very scarce and important varieties like '71-D/D dimes and '70-S sm dt in high grade. There are hundreds of highly desirable modern US coins that will probably enjoy spectacular gains some day. Most of these I know for a fact are rare because my sample size is more than sufficient but others of these can not properly be sampled because all coins "bunch up"; ie- there could be someone with 100 rolls of really nice '84 cents through sheer coincidence. Despite looking at hundreds of rolls and thousands of mint sets perhaps I was just unluck in finding this coin. Other coins simply won't exist because they weren't saved or didn't appear in mint sets. For instance 98% of '80-D half dollars in mint sets are scraped. The 2% that are not scraped are almost always poor strikes or have deficiencies. People weren't going through rolls of half dollars in 1980 looking for Gems. I got lucky and found a few in souvenir sets but most of these are gone now and fewer than 1% were Gem.

Greysheet lists this coin for 15c and even this is a little optimistic if it's really only MS-61. Buyers willing to pay 15c want mostly MS-63 and better. There is certainly room for price increases if any demand ever materializes.

I'm sometimes little more optimistic than you are. I can grow extremely cynical watching the evil prosper while the good and competent fall by the wayside. But then I look at the children and remember most of them will try to do what is right and our job is to merely teach them right from wrong. They remind me that where there's life there is hope and there's nothing like a human or entire generation of humans working together to get any job done. I believe that right up to the time we manage to make human life impossible there is a virtual certainty that moderns will be hot. Collectors collect and so long as there are collectors someone is going to want every coin; even if it is nothing but "clad".

Last year I made the monumental mistake of buying a computer with cash. I expected it to cost under $400 but the HP I bought that doesn't even have a disc drive, monitor, or anything else was well over $500 by the time they added everything up! I thought it was a good time to get rid of a few bills but I sure was wrong. They acted like they had never seen cash before and managers were crawling out of the woodwork to OK it and pass on it. You'd think I was trying to cash a third party check on a foreign bank with all the commotion. Believe me I've actually done this before and it took less time. Maybe they thought I was planning to come back after closing time and steal the bank deposit. When I set aside a Gem 1980 quarter I knew full well that I was taking a large risk on inflation and opportunity costs. Never did I realize the loaf of bread I didn't buy with that quarter might someday require a handful of quarters in the form of a credit card. Every day the world gets screwier but people don't seem to notice. We have the worst products in history yet their producers of it get all the money. If I sell the Gem 1980 quarter the middlemen, ebay, and paypal get the lion's share.

It's not just collectors who hate moderns; https://goldseek.com/article/americans-throw-away-millions-us-coins-because-american-money-junk The American public probably "throws away" a lot more than 68 million dollars worth each year if you add in what ends up on the ground, recycled with cars, and in public incinerators. A lot of coins are discarded accidently or are dropped but not worth the effort of retrieving. Most countries have some coins of real value and their vending industry flourishes but here coins have no value as the government wants it that way. The paper currency no longer has ,much value either inasmuch as no significant purchases can be made with it. Every year inflation chips away more at the value of coins and more coins are discarded and lost. Every year all those old quarters are further degraded and another ~4% are lost forever. Older coins have a higher attrition because they are thinner and lighter. Soon enough they'll just be a memory. When the government demonetizes and recalls them there will be only a few left to turn into refrigerators and other appliances that won't last. But at least we'll have gotten our money's worth out of the clads; the last vestiges of quality in a throw away society.

Even though debased coinage is USUALLY scarcer and often much scarcer than the coins they replace they usually sell for a small fraction of the price. Why would you think this is?

Repeating things that aren't true has no effect on anything. You can find fistfuls of Unc and gemmy British silver for every 500 fine coin you can find yet the sterling sells for more. Then you can find a lot more of the 500 fine than cu can the cu/ ni yet the 500 sells for more. Mintage and sales are irrelevant. The only things that count are how many survive and how many want one. I'm selling. Not because I have as much profit as possible but because of my age.

I had a chance to buy a few hundred of the scarce 1959 Scottish 1S back in 1995 but would have to take them all at ~40c each. I passed. They were almost all XF and AU with a few VF's and sliders. I doubt many of the cu/ ni coins are tough in XF except maybe the early ones. I see a lot in poundage and they tend to be F. Moderns are funny. It seems most are either more common or less common than one would expect.

Imagine how hard these would be to find if there were lots of collectors and lots of collections! 20 years ago most of them were just a dollar or two each and I always picked them up but rarely saw them. Now they are five or ten dollars and you still don't see them. These come nice but Gems are not easy. A lot of them are tarnished and these don't clean up as readily as clad. There are lots of sliders and AU's also.

No. what I am describing is collectors refusing to pay much less for scarcer coins because they are base metal. There's a simple reason they won't pay a lower prices for scarcer coins: They don't collect them because they are believed to be common debased junk. Part of the reason they are considered such is that mintages are higher and quality is lower on average. I can find handfuls of nice chBU, XF, and VF British sterling for every "common" mid-'20's .500 fine debased junk. Then I can find handfuls of high grade .500 fine for the '50's era cu/ ni coins in BU. It's this way in "every" country.

In almost all countries (at least major countries) between the Bretton Woods agreement and 1968 silver was discontinued and the coins were replaced by base metals, usually cu/ni. Referring to the debased coinage as "modern" makes sense because its introduction in every case marked the beginning of the cessation of collecting new coinage. In a few case copper coins that were unaffected by the debasement continued to be collected but in most (such as the US) all coin collecting of new coin ceased. This happened in this country in 1965 but in most countries it was earlier and in a few it was later. The definition of "modern" hence is "new debased coinage that was not collected and usually still isn't". Whether or not this ball was set in motion in Bretton Woods is a question that won't be answered for years yet. I strongly suspect it was. Mebbe the bankers wanted all the precious metals so they could sell the same bar to numerous individuals.

I wasn't aware of this. When I was young back in the late-'50's/ early '60's most of my friends were collectors though most rarely bought coins or supplies. I suppose it's possible that it's more widespread today than I believed. I've been trying to get the numbers for coin folders that are printed each year but haven't succeeded. I'm sure it's very substantial because I see these everywhere except filled and walking into coin shops. Obviously there are a lot of state quarter collectors.

If you define "collector" as anyone with a collection of coins that they are studying and increasing or simply has an advanced collection then there are probably at the very least 10,000,000 collectors. About 1,000,000 of them buy supplies, services, or coins on a continuing basis. The number is still lower than in 1964 but is approaching it.

Charles Morgan and Hubert Walker make an important observation in this article; https://coinweek.com/1983-p-kennedy-half-dollar-a-collectors-guide/ Only two '83-P half dollars trade per day. This pales in comparison to the number of something like an '09-S VDB that trade. Tens of thousands of people have wheat cent collections and as the population of this group evolves coins must trade in the market; you can't take it with you and you can't have a complete set without the VDB. How many people are collecting half dollars for so few to trade hands? There are no old collections, no BU rolls and WYSIWYG applies.

If it weren't so well struck I wouldn't give it a second look.