CRH halves: 1 year totals

[7up2000]

After finding a bank that would reliably order 2 boxes of halves every week....I decided to bite the bullet and hunt the halves for one year. Last week was the one year anniversary and here are the results:

100 Total boxes searched

66 Total silver found

Breakdown:
48-40%'ers
16-90%'ers
2-80%'ers

--the above included 1 Walking Liberty, 3 Benji's, and my personal white whale: the 1970(ironically enough I found this in the very last box searched). In MS 63 condition it is worth $18. Mine is in very nice condition so it probably came out of somebody's coin collection.

--most of the silver was found in the first 4-5 months. The last 6-7 months was pretty COLD. I no longer do the halves--switched over to doing nickels

HH to the group

 

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[Uncleslick18]

Nice on the 70. Those are rough averages, I think mine are about the same or maybe worse than yours... I’ve never found anything older than 1964 in bank boxes, and I’ve only found 1 90% coin, so you’re def better off, I’ve also only done about 30-40 boxes since Nov, I kind of stopped just because I got sick of all the running around for nothing.
I just picked up 4 boxes of dimes and had some decent results, so maybe that’ll be the new thing.

 

[7up2000]

Nice on the 70. Those are rough averages, I think mine are about the same or maybe worse than yours... I’ve never found anything older than 1964 in bank boxes, and I’ve only found 1 90% coin, so you’re def better off, I’ve also only done about 30-40 boxes since Nov, I kind of stopped just because I got sick of all the running around for nothing.
I just picked up 4 boxes of dimes and had some decent results, so maybe that’ll be the new thing.

Thanks for the interesting feedback. And good luck with the dimes.

 

[FormerTeller]

Up till a couple months ago I was searching 6 boxes per week for the last several years. Your average is about the same as mine was when I threw in the towel; five years ago my average was three times as many. I understand that five years before that it was two or three times higher again.

Unfortunately this only illustrates (to me at least) that finds continue to decline on average. The cause may be up for debate (I place a large portion of the blame on videos...), but statistically the results look pretty cut and dried.

Sorry to be such a downer. You do have some nice finds.

 

[A2coins]

Thats sounds like a great year. Keep at it this will be a good year

 

[Megalodon]

That 1970 is very nice! Congrats on finding a coin that is much more scarce in practice than its mintage and pricing suggests. I'm hoping to find one too.

Interesting perspectives on the declines with halves. If not for one box this year with 75 and another with 24 on the same day, my numbers would be very low.

Thinking about trying dimes again. My one foray into them was not successful and I gave up not because they were skunks but because handling such tiny coins with large hands and fingers was so tedious and clumsy. Halves are the perfect fit for me but over 2/3 of my boxes are skunks.

 

[baddbluff]

Your half boxes are pretty rough. I averaged about 1.8 silvers a box from 2012 to 2018. I pretty much gave up on them now though cuz my averages now are much lower & I haven’t found a really solid find in a couple years.

 

[Megalodon]

I don't believe that averages are that useful statistically - at least for halves, because they are not normally distributed. When you find 75 in one box and then the next 25 boxes are all skunks, the use of an average can be misleading, or at least, not useful for predictive use.

 

[FormerTeller]

Meg, you’re partly right. When I throw out my boxes with high numbers, the percentages are far more bleaker. However, 6 boxes a week means 300,000 halves searched per year. I’d like to think that’s a big enough sample size to give a reasonable estimate.

 

[Megalodon]

Meg, you’re partly right. When I throw out my boxes with high numbers, the percentages are far more bleaker. However, 6 boxes a week means 300,000 halves searched per year. I’d like to think that’s a big enough sample size to give a reasonable estimate.

I agree that you have an excellent sample size - and that does increase the usefulness of the mean. But I think if we include a measure of the dispersal about the mean for non-normal distributions, that would better explain the mean. Or, at least include the median. My mean for this year is down to 2.4/box - and that doesn't look too bad. But the median is 0 - showing that skunk boxes are more common than boxes with any silver. Maybe we should include the median along with the mean. What do you think?

 

[FormerTeller]

It’s been a while since my last statistics class, so I’ll take your word for it. All I know is that in 2019 I was finding 0.3 silvers per box, and I’d had enough, for now at least.

 

[Professor of Engineering]

Nice job!

 

[Tommybuckets]

Wow thats an epic amount of work. I was doing 2-3 boxes a week but it does seem like the finds have really tapered off in the last year for all the posters here anyway. I am down to less than a box a week. Its just too much work for nothing. Its too frustrating that my teller will hand me a walker, a ben and a few silver Kennedys and then I excitedly plow through the box and theres nothing in it. My tellers and I have found more halves in the past few weeks than schlepping these boxes all over town for a year. I think I need to start recording my CWR numbers. I can tell you they look like this
Skunk, skunk, 1 %40, skunk, skunk, 2 40%, skunk skunk, skunk, skunk, 1 90%... I think if i wrote it down I'd be too depressed to go on lol. Last year running my calculations I found $2-2.50 worth of silver (roughly 1 40%, 2 dimes, or one 90% half in 2 hrs) per hour driving/ searching including picking up and dumping. Those were decent numbers to me. Boxes were yielding 1.8 40% per box and 1 90 per 2.4 boxes (if memory serves) . About 3/5 my boxes were skunks 3 years ago. Now my boxes have changed consistency dramatically. They are full of NIFC and marked worn out trash. I was thinking someone started dumping into my pickup stream or the machines are set to keep the silver but it may seem we are taking them out of circulation much faster than we did in the past. Its funny how many people are moving to dimes. To me they are just too small to really add up. Looking at my stash before I put it in the bank for last year it looked like I had 3 and a half rolls of dimes from metal detecting and CRHing and I do 300-400 cwr/ mwr a week if I can find them. This year dimes have dried up dramatically for me. Sorry to be depressing but I guess I am trying to say " I feel your pain" .

 

[Megalodon]

I agree that tellers are a better source of silver halves than are boxes. The only reason why I continue with a box order at all is to see my tellers on a regular weekly basis. I'd give up on boxes altogether but it just seems weird to me to pop into the bank for no other reason than to ask for loose halves or CWRs. At least if I pick up a box, that appears to be a valid reason to be there and then ask if they have any loose halves or large dollars. But they may be happy not to lug those boxes out of the vault. I do feel guilty that one tiny teller carries two boxes of halves at a time for me.