Anyone Have A ICCS Flip With A Wings Sticker?

Pacific:
I know you have many many years in the coin business and you probably see more coins in a month than I do in a whole year... but how did you become an expert in this area... more specifically .. how did you learn to distinguish grades of MS coins... this is one area I'm seriously lacking in.. and I would like to improve

I will couch this before I answer. " We all see things somewhat differently. That said , with some accepted and acknowledged guides in place, we should then see them in a somewhat similar fashion " With coins this is true. What one sees as a Nice eye appeal MS64 1944 fifty cents with a bit of original colour as an example another might call MS65. All of the major services have grading philosophies that are somewhat similar, yet slightly different. The major US services have adopted a practice known as "market Grading " ( way too involved to get into here) and ICCS tends to grade in the older fashioned conservative system or technical grading. That is why you will see for example an ICCS Victorian Half graded lets say EXF 40 and it might be an NGC AU53. same coin different perspective. That is why a lot of numismatists could care less about the grade on the holder and buy the coin as they would a raw coin. Based on eye appeal and basically what turns them on. For instance some people (myself included) love original toned coins. Others cannot stand them ! One reason for this is...........simply put a lot of collectors and seasoned veteran dealers, cannot see through toning.
Too answer your question, yes I do see a lot of coins and indeed send in a lot of them to different services. Graded coins are easier to sell for better money. That is just the way the hobby has developed. To become an expert takes a lot of time and effort and you must look at many , many coins. I worked years ago for a dealer and then opened my own coin shop in 1985 and successfully ran it for many years. During those years I travelled to most of the major international coin shows. I was never afraid to ask major dealers questions, bought book after book, took a few counterfeit and grading courses. All the time learning and keeping an open mind. Try some of this and you will learn and indeed keep on learning! After 42 years of this it is still a wonderful learning experience. Hope this helps a bit ! Cheers!
PS. The internet has become a valuable tool for numismatic knowledge.

@ Ag sounds like you are on the right track for sure! @SPP yes the one and same LOL!

Back on topic, this is a coin that would have been worthy of a WINGS sticker. It was in an ICCS MS-62 Lustrous Brown holder. I bought it at a discount, but loved the toning and the surfaces were problem-free and exceptionally clean.

http://www.pcgs.com/SetRegistry/coi...9&sid=117576

ICCS has an unfair bias on bronze coins that are toned, red-brown coins rarely get above MS-63 grades and brown coins generally range in the MS-60 to MS-62 range, even if they have perfect surfaces. Of all the Canadian decimal denominations, WINGS would benefit the 1-cent series the most.

I'm not sure how many people have the time to become truly competent at grading. I feel even after only a year I'm pretty good with anything up to EF or maybe AU, but I wouldn't even attempt to differentiate betweeen various MS coins. There are some good online and written resources, as already mentioned.

When it comes to grading, I sometimes think of a study of judges, and how decisions varied depending on how long after a meal the decision was made (varying blood sugar and fatigue apparently affects rulings). You really want your case decided just after meal time, according to the study. It makes me wonder if coin grading works in a similar fashion.

Pacificoin (Jack) you are most welcome. We want to be as transparent as any private company can be.

I also received an email from one of the members asking if we have a place on our website with pictures of stickered coins. The answer is no other than those that appear near the bottom of our homepage .... for now (www.wingscoins.com). It is a great suggestion and the pictures that I sent to Jack I also just sent them to our I.T. guy and asked him to create a special page. I suspect that this will be done before the week is over. When I get the word that it is ready I will post the link here. His question also made me think that we should have other pages on our site dedicated just for pictures. We will be undertaking that shortly but I want to prioritize the ICCS coins.

One caveat. As I told Jack, I am not a photographer. I just happened to have been in the review room when the ICCS coins were being reviewed and I snapped the pictures with my i-phone/or pad. If you can deal with my amateurism I think that you can get a pretty good view.

I also wanted to point out that in the August 12 issue of the Canadian Coin News Bret Evans wrote an article about WINGS. If you want you can read it here: http://wingscoins.com/precise-gradi...n-coin-news/

Thanks again for the great questions and interest.
Larry

I just did a search on this site for "computer grading" and found the companies that may be doing it, along with a lot of discussion, mostly negative. I certainly understand the concerns, but I also believe that technology and programming may be advancing to the point where expert systems might soon be able to do better than human eyes for many types of grading. There would, for the foreseeable future be a need for human guidance for special cases, errors, ancient coins, environmental damages, etc., but even those could almost certainly be done by machine more accurately.

Interesting, I'm seeing a number of the old ICCS flips getting the sticker, which would make sense.