The Standing Liberty quarter series has long been “quietly popular” among collectors. Its classic design has been the basis for its wide appeal. I frequently talk with collectors who have another primary coin collecting interest but who also collect Standing Liberty quarters. As a challenging collecting bonus, recognition and appreciation of the coin’s “Full Head” designation has helped teach collectors the importance of a coin’s overall strike.

But in spite of the strong collecting appeal of Standing Liberty quarters, the series has followed the rest of the market in its softening price trend over the past couple of years. A recent update of Standing Liberty quarter values has revealed a few price increases, but this series is generally lower across the board. I’d also like to point out that valuing the majority of CAC-approved Standing Liberty quarters is difficult, both with and without full heads, because these coins are downright scarce, with low pops and few sales of some individual issues taking place in recent years. What’s more, values for CAC-approved examples must be extracted from limited sales data for many of the issues in this series.

All that being said, a few sales are noteworthy. For instance, in its ANA auction last month, Heritage sold a 1916 Standing Liberty quarter, graded PCGS-Secure/CAC MS 66+ Full Head, at $135,125. That’s comparable to prices for MS 67 grade examples in FH, the latest of which sold at $146,875 (in a stronger market) in the January 2015 Heritage F.U.N. sale. The record price garnered by the finest-known 1916, a PCGS/CAC MS 67 FH, was set by Stack’s Bowers in 2010, at $195,500. As a comparison, the most recent PCGS/CAC MS 66 FH example was sold in the January 2017 Heritage F.U.N. auction for $54,050 (the next most recent MS 66 FH CAC piece on record that has sold was back in 2012). We consider the $135K sale of the PCGS/CAC MS 66 FH Plus-grade example to be an outlier and have set the MS 66 Full Head value range at $47,500-55,000.

Here’s a great example of why CAC Market Values uses value ranges: in the 2017 Heritage F.U.N. auction on January 8th, two PCGS/CAC MS 66 1926-D quarters were sold, one lot right after the other, at $2,350 and $1,645. Again, these were two like-kind coins graded exactly the same by the same grading services (PCGS and CAC) – they were sold in the same auction, one coin right after the other, but one sold for a price that was more than 40 percent higher than the other. Clearly, one price point for this example could not convey an accurate account of this coin issue’s market value in MS 66.