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Dumb Question about Bison Nickels
BIODTL
Posts: 46
I was thumbing through Ebay, trying to see what catches my fancy and I saw the sets of bison nickels from the us.mint. I looked on the web site and they are still on sale. do these sets have any potential upside? or are there too many of them to make them worth anything. also seems a bit risky to pay nine bucks for $4 worth of nickels....thoughts?
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Look at the Keelboat sets, last I looked selling for $16-$20 per set. Only 170k of them were made. However, you can also look at it this way: worst case scenario you can only lose half your money. Not too many other "investments" with a loss floor of only 50%!
They're still selling on ebay for over $80 now.
I bought some sets this year.
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Last year I thought $8.95 for two rolls was too much so I did'nt get any.
They're still selling on ebay for over $80 now.
I bought some sets this year.
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No offense, but don't you realize that's why everyone is buying some. Look at 1999 silver proof sets. They skyrocketed in value, so in 2000 EVERYONE bought some. Year 2000 silver proof sets are worth LESS than their issue price, because people bought so many, hoping that they would increase in value just like the '99. When everyone saw the '00 sets were a flop, not many people bought '01 sets, and they are now worth a considerable sum. When one issue is valuable and the next issue is released, it normally becomes quite worthless, since everyone buys one and the supply is much greater.
Who knows, I have 30 sets. Hope they go up in value, but I'm not pegging my hopes on it.
P.S. What error are ya'll talking about that has been found in mint rolls? If you are referring to speared bisons, those do not come from mint rolls, but only from bank rolls in the East Texas area (though one forum member said he found some in San Diego, however, his is the only report outside of East Texas).
Boy I only have a degree in math but that seems to be over a 100% profit in a year. Call me stupid but that seems good, so what are you making those big buck on? Your not losing anything so don't even try to act like you will....you can make up any lose in S/H on Ebay and you know it. Argure all you want but this isn't where people are losing money on this hobby.
I don't know how old you are but you seem to be collecting he extremes....ie...if you can't get rich why collect it? A mint roll isn't a bank roll that could have been searched, now is it?
P.S. What error are ya'll talking about that has been found in mint rolls? If you are referring to speared bisons, those do not come from mint rolls, but only from bank rolls in the East Texas area .
LOL are you sure? Funny the mint only sent them to East Texas! They don't search this stuff so this is BS IMO. A bag or a roll they put them out in bulk. What mint do they have in East Texas? The coin a friend found here is Tulsa must have come from the East Texas Branch huh?
Are you aware that virtually all of the 1955/55 Lincoln cents were found in cigarette wrappers? People searched their change for years with no luck. Did the cigarette companies have their own mint? Of course not! You have to understand how coins are made, and once made, how they get from the mint to your bank.
Here's how the speared bison came about:
A single reverse die developed a crack near the end of its life, imparting the raised line across the bison's back. When dies begin to crack, it means the end of the die life is near, so it probably only struck coins for another day or so. Someone more knowledgeable can fill in the gaps, but the mint presses hold several die pairs. As the coins come off each die pair, then fall into a bin. The coins from the bin ARE NOT MIXED WITH ANY OTHER COINS. The coins from one bin are placed in huge nylon bags, containing one metric ton of nickels. The bags are sent to the Federal Reserve. This is very important: the Speared Bison nickels all came from ONE die pair, which was part of ONE press, which deposited its coins in a bin. The bins are never mixed with the bins from other presses. Thus, all of the nickels produced by the speared die pair for the remaining duration of the die life all went into one or two nylon bags. These bags are sent to the various federal reserve banks throughout the country.
The speared bison bags wound up going to the Dallas federal reserve bank. Now as you might imagine, only banks in the Dallas area receive their coins from this bank--banks in Kansas City or Chicago or San Francisco don't order coins from the Dallas fed--only coins in the Texas region. Now, a bank in Tyler calls the fed and asks for five boxes of nickels. The fed calls Brinks or another armored car company and asks them to come pick up a couple of bags of nickels and distribute them to banks around Tyler and East Texas. Brinks randomly picks up a couple of bags, and as luck would have it, these two bags are the ONLY bags in the country that have the speared bison error in them. Brinks empties the bags into a sorting machine, rolls them, boxes them, and delivers coins to banks in their area. A Brinks office in Tyler isn't going to deliver coins across the state to Amarillo. They are going to deliver coins within a 100 mile or 200 mile radius, at most.
So the speared bison is produced by one die, which spits its contents into one hopper, which is put into one or two bags. The bag or bags of speared bisons are taken to one federal reserve bank; by chance this happened to be the Dallas fed. The Dallas fed then calls an armored car company in Eastern Texas to distribute the bag or bags of speared bisons to banks in its area. After a few weeks or a month, the banks the received boxes of speared bisons ran out of coins and ordered more, non-spears, from the fed. The speared bisons were only available in a small region for a short period of time, due to the nature of mint production. Now if the mint mixed all the coins from all the different presses together and then put them into bags, there would be speared bisons all over the country. But no mixing ever takes place. How come every nickel in a speared bison roll is not a speared bison--most of them are normal? Simple--the other die pairs on the mint press continued producing normal coins, while the one cracked die spit out abnormal coins. Since I believe there are four to six other die pairs on the same press, by far the majority of coins within a speared bison roll will be normal; the normal will outnumber the abnormal four or six to one.
The bags of nickels that the mint used to fill bison two-roll set orders did not contain the speared bison error. Keep opening your mint rolls, and good luck, but you'll never find any.
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A 100% profit would be magnificent. That was not my point. My point was this: The Mint issued 170,000 keelboat sets. The mint issued 650,000 bison sets. Which set is more rare? There is a point, if the mint makes enough of something, where everyone who wants one gets one, and therefore doesn't need to buy it for an inflated price on eBay. If 170,000 yielded a 100-150% profit, will a production four time greater yield any profit at all? Perhaps. Having a degree in math, I'm sure you took several econ classes. When demand stays the same and supply increases by 400%, what happens to price?
That having been said, I'm not trying to persuade you or anyone else. Buy a thousand of them, and I'll wish you luck. But biodtl wanted an opinion, so I gave it to him. I don't KNOW whether these will go up in value or down in value. I BELIEVE they will not go up in value. If I was psychic I could tell you for sure, but alas, we all have our limitations
"P.S. What error are ya'll talking about that has been found in mint rolls? If you are referring to speared bisons, those do not come from mint rolls, but only from bank rolls in the East Texas area"
I disagree and I have a real good reason to disagree. In fact I have 2 in Denver Mint wrapped reasons to disagree.
P.S. I think it strange that reports of finding SBs in San Diego and in mint rolls are just now coming out, four months after the discovery of SBs in Texas. But hey, stranger things have happened.
I happen to think the increased mintage of the two-roll sets will prevent them from gaining much, if any, value. But like I said, I have 30 just in case! Do a search on "bison" and "buffalo" and you'll find a lot of other threads speculating on what these coins will be worth. Some believe a lot, some don't. But you never know--they have a higher mintage than the keelboat, but they are more popular and in more demand as well.
What denomination are most of the silver coins she finds? Half dollars? If she finds $50-$100 in face value silver coins every week, that's a nice side income for her!