Any Database Of FDC Canceled Numbers?

If we know how many stamps produced, why we have hard time to know the number of the fdc cancelled. In any other countries we can have this numbers, except US, at lest for collectors like me.

My point it is: The community must have this information, so everybody who like fdc can evaluate himself his cover.

The market prices are so relative. Personally I have 8 different factors which can influence this. No question about.

Any suggestions?

The overall number of FDCs canceled is noted for many issues in the Scott Specialized catalog. The bottom line is that overall supply is sooooo much greater than demand. Thus supply is a very poor factor in computing a price for a specific FDC even when known.

The cachet design/artist is going to be the main driver.

What are your 8 factors?

The 8 factors I look are:

1. Demand (middle one, relative to dealers)
2. % stamps versus fdc
3. Historical value
4. Cachets
5. Timing (current time)
6. Thematic
7. Political & Economical Enviro
8. Producing (paper, printer, etc.)

Those are my main factors. why I make this topic? Simply: I test the market and the result is un-fear for the collectors.

Explain: I brink Friday in NY to 3 giants dealers 3 covers: 629, 643 and 644 ( White plains, Vermont and Burgoyne cachet) The best deal was 10$ for each, reason to many on the market) Today my friend was to same dealers to ask for. Results 75$ each in the best case them can find.

Conclusion: We have to have an indices which can tell as approx value.

Sorry, forgot to say:

I make business, the stamps and the coins are hobby. I collect stamps for each one's NH, used, block, plate block and FDC, if available and good fair price.

$10? $75? Cachet maker? Other factors to get such good offers?

Sc 629 cat. $7.50

Sc 643 cat.$6.00

Sc 644 cat. $12.50

All cachet, look the black book

I see. Definitely depends on cachet maker. $10 seems ok to low. $75 seems too high.

What is the black book?

My point is not the prices, my point is how many was emitted.

House of collectibles (editor) #40 (2018)edition. It is the book of average selling prices by dealers cross US, (like cars black book)

I have seen some covers listed with known quantity issued (usually auction house or seller such as McCusker) but not with most cachet fdc. No database that I am aware of. Though the pricing on McCusker site gives a feel for supply & demand.

Black book. Yes. Thank you.

Have you compared McCusker to black book? I know, not about the price but quantity. Need to start somewhere to get an idea of supply.

With cachet fdc many are not known who the maker was let alone the number produced.

The pricing driver is also not quantity issued as you keep repeating. It is collector demand, something you completely ignore. See if you can measure that. There are many stamps and covers that are very rare. But so are the collectors for them. An example was and still may be Kansas state postal history. One collector bought nearly everything and any other serious collector with money gave up and stopped collecting. That collection was sold off with little interest and low prices compared with other states. There are also very few collectors of Washington DC postal history, period.

And prices can be cyclical or can even diminish tremendously. You expect your model to be predictive, which nobody has been able to do to date except maybe to predict less people collecting FDCs.

You also fail to include condition, a critical factor in the older era.

No serious collector uses the Official Black Book for US stamps. It's the small pocket guide sold in bookstores. Its prices are quite inflated.

any catalog / price guide is merely a standard - a starting point

but you have to use JUST that one guide (do not mix them) to get a feel how the real-world prices compare to that catalog / guide

once you start making those comparisons, you then have a feel of how the real world market regards the items

'
Some of the cachet makers (and there were many of them, over the years) might have data on how many blank covers they produced, and might have data on how many serviced FDCs they sold, but they will know nothing about the percentage of blank covers that they sold that were subsequently serviced vs went to waste.

Any data you find is going to be partial, and very, very soft.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey (who has always found it easy to imagine what other people should be keeping track of)

Also, there is an enormous difference between the price a dealer will give you for your covers compared to the price that same dealer will charge you to sell you the same covers. Dealers have high costs of business they have to pay for. They have to pay for the cost of their store, if they have one, the cost of tying up their cash in a cover that will be hard to sell and so will likely sit in their stock book for many months or even years, they have to pay their employees a living wage, they have to pay for their costs to travel to shows many times a year - both the fees they are charged by the shows for their tables plus the costs of traveling to the show and staying overnight in hotels, and they have to pay themselves a decent salary to make it worth their while to be a dealer, and so on. As such dealers must buy at only a fraction of the amount that they will sell something. Catalogs and similar price guides are almost worthless in determining how much something will actually sell for, especially with all of the variables already mentioned by the others (which cachet or no cachet, condition, is it unaddressed or addressed, and so on). Finding out how many FDCs were cancelled is also a difficult job since there are FDCs made by the Post Office and so numbers for those can be found in many cases, but there are many more that were serviced by collectors and by dealers. Adding up all of those numbers, as has already been pointed out, means that the number of FDCs prepared for any particular stamp is going to completely overwhelm the number of potential collectors who may wish to buy them, other than some very early stamps or some very rare cachet makers. The number of FDC collectors today is tiny compared to what there were in the past and most of them tend to focus on the rarities rather than the ordinary FDCs. With only a few exceptions such as some of the dollar value stamps most US FDCS of the past 80 or so years with common cachets can be bought on the wholesale market for 10 cents to 25 cents or even less.