Polymer $100 - EKZ

News: Registration is free here at the CPMF!

While everyone is talking about the hard to find M/C HBG $5, have you noticed that EKZ $100 is just as hard to find.

Actually I reported most of them on SNDB.  If I can remember correctly, out of the 15 reported, at least 11/12 of them were found by me.... and one time I found 9 together from one bank withdrawal.  They are all circulated, over 9.4M but not quite consecutive.

All reported EKZ are in higher range of over 9M. Could they be replacements? So far no lower range under 9.4M been reported. We are in FKM - FKN so far, would the rest of the EKZ be still released??

And please don't ask me for them as I didn't keep any myself. 

  That is quite interesting.  It appears to be very similar with the M/C HBG 5$.  However, the difference is that there is no apparent reason for the 100$ EKZ notes not to be released.  What I find also interesting is that the low note was found in april 2014 and the high note was found april 2012, about 2 years earlier!

All reported EKZ are in higher range of over 9M. Could they be replacements? So far no lower range under 9.4M been reported. We are in FKM - FKN so far, would the rest of the EKZ be still released??

  They could very well be replacements, actually this idea was also suggested for the few M/C HBG 5$ notes found.  It could also be that the rest of the bricks were simply pushed to the back of the warehouse and have been sitting there.  They may pop up in the future but who knows if they actually will.

The situation with EKZ notes has been known for a while.  It appears that EKY and FKA are also interesting prefixes.  EKY appears to end at or before 7000000, and FKA does not start until 3000000.

The comparison between HBG and EKZ is interesting.  It does not matter if the Macklem-Carney HBG notes are replacements (or just inserts) because they are scarce changeovers.  Their value will be based on being rare and the average collector's desire to have a note from each signature series.  EKZ is more like ALZ, the $20 prefix that has just over one-tenth of a normal printing.  Neither of these prefixes is a changeover of any kind.  The difference is that ALZ followed logically in printing patterns from ALY.  EKY terminates early, and then you have EKZ notes in a high number range where the starting and end points are completely unknown.  This more closely resembles the start of the Journey series in the $10 notes where FDY terminated early and all the FDZ notes are numbered over 9000000.  However, FDZ is a changeover prefix, and the first 600,000 FDZ notes (signed Knight-Thiessen) are considered inserts.

Taking a look at the SNDB numbers, it would be easy to conclude that prefixes EKA-EKY have been largely released while EKZ and notes starting with FK* are still in release, meaning many are still in the vault waiting to reach circulation.  HOWEVER, we know that EKZ existed before the release of the polymer $100 series because a member of this forum obtained one at the launch.  For the longest time, it was the only EKZ note in the database and it took quite a while for any notes anywhere close to EKZ to reach circulation.  So I don't buy the idea that there is a raft of EKZ notes sitting at the back of the vault waiting to be released.  In fact, I am starting to think EKZ was printed before any other prefix.  That would explain why there is such a huge offset in the numbering of this prefix.

Years of research into examining prefixes and numbering have shown strange patterns that pop up very occasionally.  The similarities between FDY-FDZ and EKY-EKZ are striking.  That would make a strong case for EKZ being a replacement prefix.  However, FDZ notes are not rare and were confirmed as inserts.  EKZ notes are quite rare at present.  My gut is telling me that EKZ notes were printed exclusively for the Bank of Canada.  I think that the Bank of Canada, after all these decades, still needs to have a supply of notes on hand to use for their own purposes, and it would make sense that they get these notes before any other notes are printed.  In the 1950s, 60s and 70s, these notes appeared identical to asterisk note issues, but we learned the difference between true replacements and so-called "star make-up notes".  The smaller asterisk note ranges tended to be the ones that the Bank of Canada received and used for their own replacement purposes.  The printers did most of the quality control processes themselves, but since the Bank of Canada is the authority that issues money, they still need to check the products they are putting into circulation, so their needs are always going to be met first.

Naturally, every proposed answer raises more questions.  For instance, why should the first notes printed and sent to the Bank of Canada be "distinct"?  In other words, couldn't the printers have started at EKA and sent the first million or so of these notes to the Bank of Canada?  Of course, I don't know the answer.  But I think this process of planning ahead happens quite often, more than we think.  In fact, I am starting to believe that $5 Macklem-Carney HBG notes are very much like EJZ notes in the sense that they were printed before HAM-HAZ and HBA-HBF and their destination was the Bank of Canada.  Only problem here is that HAM-HAZ and HBA-HBF were either never printed or very few were printed and never released because of the signature changeover created by the departure of Mark Carney as governor.  My gut tells me that because HBG notes were printed with Macklem-Carney signatures before any other prefix, this forced prefixes HAM-HAZ and HBA-HBF to be abandoned for possible use with the new Macklem-Poloz signatures because, obviously, it would seem quite weird to have a block of Macklem-Carney notes suddenly appear in HBG after the release of tens of millions of Macklem-Poloz notes starting at HAM.  In fact, had this actually occurred, the Macklem-Carney HBG notes would be considered "good-overs".

Back to the subject of EKZ notes, it does not look like there will be a major release of this prefix.  Yes, it is early, but we are already seeing subsequent prefixes in circulation (FKA-onward).  This tells me EKZ is destined to be rare.  As for collectability, unfortunately, EKZ is a $100 prefix, and the $100 polymer notes are proving to be very unpopular.  No doubt, there are very few prefix collectors for the $100 notes.  Moreover, the comparison to HBG notes and the huge popularity of HBG notes is going to overshadow the EKZ notes at least in the short term.  I don't know if it is a rule of thumb, but sometimes, notes that are not popular when they are new could become very popular when they are vintage.  So maybe it's worth holding on to EKZ notes for the long term.

There is still something interesting about this batch of 9 EKZ from only one bank withdrawal of $1000.

I noticed they didn't come from the bank teller's drawer as the teller got them from the CDU. This
means they might not come from a same branch customer deposit but directly from the bank's central treasury dept. filling the branch cash order.

All previous occasions of the find have been only a single note found after going thru a big amount of $100 notes.  Hence I was very surprised to see 9 together at one time. But when I went thur these 9 notes, other than they were all over 9.4m, almost all of them have different handling patterns i.e they have different handling marks, some have no folds, some have one fold, some two folds and some multiple folds. This means they did not originate from one holding but were originally circulated separately and then gathered back together.

Now the question is who wants to gather them from various circulations and what is the purpose of doing that?  Immediately what come to my mind would have to be the BOC who is the only authority that has the ability to cull notes from circulations. Have these notes been inspected for some reasons and then released out again?

In other words, can these be some kind of test notes?  Now I may be completely wrong about this, but it sure puzzles to me.

In other words, can these be some kind of test notes?  Now I may be completely wrong about this, but it sure puzzles to me.

It is definitely a possibility, but we have to define what being a "test note" means.  To many people, it's a special issue that was printed differently.  I don't think that has to be true.  The Bank of Canada could "test" regular notes for any kind of criteria, and since the $100 polymer series was the first of its kind, all they really needed was something tangible which would make the notes easier to spot for the purposes of withdrawing the "test notes" from circulation.  Having a specific prefix like EKZ suits the purpose.  This is entirely consistent with how $2 S/R notes were issued, though it is said that S/R notes were not regular notes, meaning they were somehow different to make them a special test issue.

I have been thinking about starting a separate discussion relating to what I have tentatively called "internal notes".  I define "internal notes" as any notes that were printed exclusively for the Bank of Canada.  The problem with such a discussion is that it's an obscure concept filled with hypothesis... We simply have no idea what the Bank of Canada does with its own notes apart from issuing replacements.  We also don't know what happens to these notes when they are not issued.  But this idea that some notes are printed out of chronological order fits with the data we get from research, data which shows that bizarre and unexpected numbering anomalies tend to occur toward the end of print runs.  One anomaly that I can think of right off the top of my head happens in $20 prefix ALV of the Journey series.  Recall that ALV is a date changeover from 2005 to 2007.  In 2005, the printers started at prefix AZN and used a skip-24,000 numbering system.  They printed like this up to prefix ALG, then switched to a skip-1,000 system incorporating "mini reams".  Then, for no reason, at the end of 2005, they went back to the old system for the last 2 million notes (ALV 5535000-7559999).  It is possible to hypothesize that the last 2 million ALV notes printed in 2005 were actually printed FIRST.  Then the printers resumed normal printing at AZN and printed just about everything up to the middle of ALV.  The last notes printed in 2005 would then be ALV 4560000-5544999, running right up against the first notes printed in 2005.  The notes in the range ALV 4560000-5534999 don't follow expected numbering patterns, adding to the notion that the two ranges intercepted and overlapped slightly, thus necessitating the truncation of the final ream leading up to the interception point at ALV 5535000.

The fact that notes in the range ALV 5535000-7559999 got out into circulation seems to nullify the notion that they could be "internal notes".  It also does not help that prefix ALV was not seen in circulation well before earlier prefixes.  But with all the data we are collecting in the SNDB, it might be possible to pull together large amounts of circumstantial evidence from different prefixes to sustain a viable hypothesis about out-of-sequence prefix printing.