1880 Gold Dollar

Two weeks ago I was paging through the Red Book and I was looking for potential sleeper coins when I saw that the 1880 gold dollar was priced similarly to higher mintage coins but a mere 1600 were coined. This struck me as odd (pun intended) since most other coins with mintages that small would command huge prices in the marketplace. Now go back in time to this past Sunday. I was paging through my August 4 issue of Coin World and a dealer had a PCGS MS-62 1880 gold dollar for $399. Now that I couldn't pass up but as if to mock me, my inquiry to the dealer brought what I had feared: the coin had already been sold. :-(

But it got me thinking about why such a low mintage coin would be priced this way. Fortunately, a Google search revealed the answer for which I had been looking. Apparently a large majority of the total number of coins were hoarded in mint state so that even though the mintage is so small there are hundreds that exist in various grades of uncirculated. Now that is a good thing to know and to understand that mintages aren't the whole story! Here is a link to the full article directly.