A 2003 peny sold for $15,120 a little while ago. Here’s the link. I understood maybe 1 in 5 words on that site. Why would a 2003 penny be worth so much? I can understand (sort of) if it were a really old penny, or if it had been used to buy something very unique, but it seems like it’s just a penny. A penny that is worth $15,119.99 more than the pennies I have scattered all over my car and sofa. Should I start looking more closely at all my pennies too?
It is a very special penny. One of a very few of that quality and condition. You might find it profitable to read about numismatics.
Another doper may add more information.
I don’t understand all the technical jargon, but it looks like the coin is in exceptionally fine condition for one intended for circulation. So if you just touched it with your finger, you take thouands of dollars off the value. But even that doesn’t seem to justify the very high price.
So wouldn’t this mean that any penny fresh off of the mint, handled with white gloves could possibly be worth thousands of dollars?
The link spingears provided is great in the explanation of Numismatics, but I am still curious to how a single, not-too-old penny could hit the five figure range. Because it is clean and untouched?
No, because you can get higher quality coins than the ordinary coin fresh off the mint: coins where extra care is taken, and the dies used to mint the coins are higher quality. These conditions are used to mint coins to go straight into packets to sell to coin collectors.
Okay, I’m still not getting it. From the link I gave, it says it’s “business strike”, or meant for everyday use. So is this penny just exceptional because it is of such high quality yet it wasn’t meant to be? How would they even recognize how great it was to begin with?
For whatever this may be worth, PCGS means Professional Coin Grading Service.
I think I understand a bit more about coin collecting, but I had a couple questions.
Firstly, what does the “red” (RD in the grading, I think) designation mean?
Secondly, if this was intended to be a common coin, how was it “gotten” without being damaged? Was this cherry-picked by a mint worker from an early run on a new die? From all the talk of just unprotected skin touching the coin causing loss of value, you’d think that would happen quite a bit during the course of manufacture, before it would be in common circulation and able to be “collected”…
When in the manufacturing process are coins EVER handled? Its not like the rolled coins the banks get are by employess hand rolling them- doesn’t a machine do that? So wouldn’t any brand new rolled coin received at a bank or wherever have the chance of being “perfect”, as long as the rolls aren’t subsequently handled?
I’m merely a dabbler in numismatics, but until one of our resident coin dealers happens along I’ll chime in here. PCGS is the premier coin grading service, which means you send a coin to them to certify its condition. They have experts “grade” it based on the wear on the coin and the quality of the strike, and they enclose it in a vacuum-sealed protective case. The coin grading system is a scale of 1-70, with letter designations before the numbers that divide this range into categories. The highest category of business strike coin grades is “uncirculated” or MS, which covers 60-70. This means that any wear from handling drops a coin below 60 and into AU (almost uncirculated). The varying grades between 60 and 70 measure the quality of the strike of the coin, since none of these have any wear from use. If you were to get a roll of pennies from you local bank that had come straight from the mint, you’d have a bunch of uncirculated pennies. Obviously, this means uncirculated pennies are not worth much. But the vast majority of these would be in the MS60-62 range. The rarity of the higher grades is more exponential than linear – that is, a coin a grade or two higher may be an order of magnitude rarer. The important or benchmark grades in the uncirculated range are MS63 and MS65. Basically, MS63 is a nice coin, MS65 is a very nice coin. MS67-68 is approaching the highest quality coins produced, and MS70 is perfect.
It’s very, very rare to see MS70, and this coin has two additional distinctions. As a business strike coin, it was made in the normal process of minting coins for everyday use. This is as opposed to specially minted coins as for proof sets that are sold to collectors, which have greater care taken to ensure quality strikes and are sold without being handled as a matter of course. The mint also sells uncirculated sets, but I’m not sure if they take extra steps to ensure good strikes in those.
On top of that, this coin has been certified “red,” which does pretty much describe the coloration as the name implies. Coin “tone” has an effect on value, and this effect pretty much increases as the coin grade increases. Some toning is considered desirable, while some is undesireable. In copper cents, red tone is valued, and extremely so if the color is both even and aesthetic. To be certified “red” by PCGS – certification for tone is uncommon – it must have a nice, even tone (hence the term “full red” in the article). Full red is as good as it gets for pennies.
In summary, this is pretty much the epitome of 2003 pennies. Only a handful of coins of such quality may be produced, and since this was a business strike, the vast majority of these would pass into circulation and be “ruined.” The price here was for perfection.
Wow, thank you A. I. Wintermute. That was a great response. I wonder how they found this penny?
Probably picked it up off the sidewalk.
Very interesting. I’m just curious, how can they tell this coin is a business strike coin?
When the mint starts using a new die set, it must run a few hundred coins as a quality control check. if the dies are producing defective coins, aren’t those dies destroyed? Anyway, this leads to another question; many years ago, the FBI caught a guy who was counterfeiting NICKELS! Even back then (1940’s)? this made no sense-his costs to produce the fake nickels was pretty close to the value of the coins-and IMAGINE having to pass off TONS of nickels. But, these mis-struck coins must be easy to counterfeit-how do collectors know real from fakes? :o
That was my question too.
Last year we took the tour of the Mint in Philly. I definitely recommend it (but be prepared for serious security.) The minting is entirely mechanized, with hucg machines stamping out slugs at one end and shiney coins pouring out at the other. The coins poured into these huge (maybe 4’x4’x3) crates for shipping. (really makes you wonder what is happnening to all the coins that they need to keep making so many more!)
While no one touches the coins from start to end (other than ones that fall off during the process), you would expect some marring to occur as they bang into each other in the process. Of course, I wonder what percentage of coins get examined at an early stage to see how perfect they are? And how much is the rating objective vs subjective? Would there be any dispute as to whether a particular coin were - say - a 68 as opposed to a 69?
How did that penny manage to be the one among however many tens of thousands stamped out that day, counted, rolled and sent out? ie: Why is one penny the picture of ultimate perfection, and all the others in the bin are well, just pennies? And how did it escape anyone’s grubby fingerprints?
Are there people that put on gloves and carefully open random rolls of pennies from the bank and look for coins like this one?
Also, what governs the redness? Were all of the pennies made that day “red,” or was there some one-off variance in the production of the copper-clad zinc blanks that made this one random blank extra-red?
If I’m understanding it right, this hyper-valuable penny is the result of two exceedingly rare production anomalies happening to the same penny.
You can easily diffentiate the latter because Abe is upside down. 
So a professional coin grader can tell whether a coin has, say, rubbed against another coin? Or touched a machine belt? How can such minute occurences be detected?
I have a feeling this thread is going to give me a compulsion to just sit there and stare at all my change and wonder if any of it is THE ONE. I had no idea any of this existed.
I’m with you. I find this whole thing quite hilarious. Ah, the collecting mind…
But I’m curious too how this instance of perfection in penny form even happened in the first place. Where in tarnation is samclem?