The first 50 rolls

During the commodity boom several years ago, I purchased $1000 worth of nickels as a hard asset hedge. At that time, each nickel contained about 9.5 cents worth of metal, based on the price of nickel and copper. Since that time, the price of all metals has plunged and each nickel now contains less than 3 cents worth of metal.

I reasoned at the time that I had little downside risk since the metal was actual currency and could be returned to the bank at the cost of inflation and whatever transportation costs were involved. Metal prices have been low for a long time so I decided to start returning some. Instead of simply turning in the rolls I had received from the bank, I decided to look through each roll for rare dates. The only dates I planned to save were 1950, a relatively low mintage year, particularly the 1950-D, and any war nickels with silver content. I know this was not a productive use of my time, but as a numismatist, it was kind of fun. I have now returned $100 of nickels to the bank and found several anomalies. Out of what was supposed to be 2000 nickels, I found:

1 penny
1 Mexican 5 centavos piece
1 Canadian nickel
2 dimes

A net loss of 1 penny. There were a lot of old coins in the rolls, as far back as 1939, but the only rare date I kept was a single 1943 war nickel. I'll post another update if anything interesting turns up.