How accurate can the population numbers be ?

[Midas Q. Morgan]

Spoiler

Hi,  I imagine that this question has been asked many times ; but with dealers and collectors breaking out coins to resubmit , hoping for a higher grade , how accurate can the population figures be ?  Realizing that one grade or even a + grade on rarities can make thousands of dollars difference , I can imagine that hundreds of thousands of coins have been sent in multiple times , thus bloating the figures . Thank you .  

 

[Matt G]

Thank you for your question. We make every attempt to ensure that our population report is accurate by requesting labels to be sent back to us when a coin is removed from the holder. We provide a $0.50 credit for each label we receive as an incentive. Unfortunately, not all labels are returned to us so we are not able to update our census when a coin is removed. 

[Morpheus1967]

On 10/9/2017 at 2:38 PM, Matt G said:

Thank you for your question. We make every attempt to ensure that our population report is accurate by requesting labels to be sent back to us when a coin is removed from the holder. We provide a $0.50 credit for each label we receive as an incentive. Unfortunately, not all labels are returned to us so we are not able to update our census when a coin is removed. 

So you offer a $0.50 credit to send a label in, but it costs $0.49 for a stamp?  So you would net $0.01?  Unless you are sending in 10+ labls at a time, not much of an incentive there.  Maybe come up with a way to do it electronically?

[Midas Q. Morgan]

I realize that you do that now Matt, but breaking coins out to resubmit , has been going on for years.  And as Morpheus said , there's not much of an incentive to send in a label to get fifty cents back . I would guess that the population figures for higher grade coins ( where one grade is worth hundreds or thousands) are are tremendously inflated . Lately I have been looking at the NGC numbers on some high grade Morgans .  Most of them have obviously been recently graded by the looks of the numbering on the holders. That leads me to believe that dealers and some collectors continuously send in better looking high grade coins.     I guess there is no way to really adjust these population figures to accurately reflect the actual rarity.  Anyone have any ideas ?? 

[Matt G]

For the question by Morpheus1967 we are unable to handle this electronically as we need the labels to be removed from circulation. Certification labels can be mailed in along with submissions to save on postage. 

If a coin is sent to NGC in its original holder we are able to update the census by removing the original certification number once we crack the coin from its holder. Unfortunately, we can not track coins that are submitted raw as we do not have the original certification number. We provide the incentive to persuade submitters to send back in the cert labels but we cannot force this issue.