By Richard Giedroyc
What percentage of ancient coins being sold are from older collections and how many of them are from recent discoveries?
There are no hard statistics on this, however, it appears that prior to 1975 it is likely about 70 percent of the available ancient coins were likely being resold from older collections. This changed around 1975 due to the use of metal detectors. From this point forward, about 30 percent were from existing collections, while about 70 percent were from fresh finds