This investigation follows from the recent discussions surrounding $5 Macklem-Carney notes.
There was speculation that the 2010-dated $5 notes (prefixes HPA-HPZ, HAA-HAE) are far from completely issued, meaning there are still plenty more bricks waiting to be released before 2011-dated Macklem-Carney notes are released in any significant numbers. I used the opportunity to investigate data for 2010-dated Jenkins-Carney $5 notes obtained from the SNDB.
The purpose of obtaining the data is to look for gaps in the data, that is, large ranges of unreported notes. I want to make it very clear that large ranges of notes with no reported data are not proof that the notes are non-existent because a lack of data is not proof of anything.
Reams printed by CBN are usually 360,000 notes printed 45/on with a skip interval of 8,000 (or 270,000 when the skip interval is 6,000). On a few occasions, the printers switched to a 36/on format with a skip interval of 10,000, but this produces a ream of 360,000 notes as well. A few prefixes have some abnormalities, and a summary of the data is available in the Wiki...
http://wiki.cdnpapermoney.com/index.php?title=Mega-Sequences_BC-67b-i_2010_$5_Jenkins-CarneyWe know with the help of brick researchers that CBN creates mixed bricks. What this means is that a brick can contain many smaller ranges of serial numbers, usually from one ream. So even with just one note reported from a given ream, we know that the ream exists and some notes were issued. We just don't know how many bricks from each ream were released and how many are sitting somewhere ready for release.
So I looked for large gaps in the SNDB data that could indicate missing reams of unreleased notes.
Here are the largest gaps I found for each prefix:
HPA 80,019
HPB 68,145
HPC 269,384
HPD 136,860
HPE 241,359
HPF 242,923
HPG 360,803
HPH 389,437
HPJ 405,467HPK 182,037
HPL 432,612HPM 198,379
HPN 162,548
HPP 261,795
HPR 301,297
HPS 1,486,623
HPT 417,129HPU 280,024
HPV 262,661
HPW 135,495
HPY 135,694
HPZ 504,271HAA 151,876
HAB 734,95
HAC 50,316
HAD 98,375
HAE 49,580
With many prefixes reporting gaps of less than 100,000, this is an indication that 2010-dated $5 notes are quite advanced in circulation.
The largest gaps correspond nicely with entire reams of notes that are missing. Here are the missing reams:
HPG 7.56 - 7.92
HPH 3.24 - 3.60
HPJ 9.00 - 9.36
HPS 1.08 - 2.52 (4 reams)
HPT 4.32 - 4.68
HPZ 7.92 - 8.28
There are also a couple of reams for HPL which have 1-2 notes reported but none that have 0 reported.
So, in summary, for the roughly 272 million $5 notes printed in 2010, the reams where no data have been reported in the SNDB make up 3.24 million notes or 1.2% of the total printed. Again, though, that does not mean the data proves 98.8% of the notes printed in 2010 have been released. Neither do we know how many of the 3.24 million unreported notes have been released. But one thing we can say for sure is that the release of 2010-dated $5 notes is mature.
