Advice — Buying Coins Between Price Guides' Grades

Since not all prices follow a linear progression, it might be helpful to plot price vs grade on a graph and use that for your estimate. You could also use this to see outliers. Fun anyway

The president of our local coin club gave me a rule of thumb when he purchases coins that are in between grades. He said typically 15% to 30% higher on the in between VF grades and about 25% at XF 45. Granted this is a generalization, but if you look at auction prices realized its pretty close.

Agree with numismedia.com and ebay results. Premium eye-coins are worth premium prices, grading aside.



to the CCF!

Aoraki has made the most sense, thus far.

To begin with, there are enough grades in the Sheldon system that the number of in between coins are marginal, at best.

A coin is graded by all three sides resulting in a single number the vast majority of the time.

No matter what price guide you use, with the exception of recent results at auction or on ebay with comparisons for both grade and eye appeal, any other guide can only give one part of a two part equation.

That being: Technical Grade +/- Eye Appeal = Value.

Make it simple. Pick any coin that sells regularly in a relatively easy technical grade. In other words coins that sell fairly frequently. Go to Heritage and check sold prices. For the same technical grade you will find huge ranges in value because of the eye appeal factor.

Also notice that Heritage lists something like 10 different price guides on almost every coin. Why go to all the different places when you get all the prices right next to each other?

Price is a sharp hook only.

Or the old coin shop way (true story!)

Oh your coin is graded VF-25. It is not that much better than a VF-20. Thus it is a VF-20. I will offer 60% of VF-20 bid.

The coin was an 1814 large cent.

Numismedia + completed ebay auctions is all you really need.

great topic, something I think about often.

A couple of thoughts. For one, since I do a lot of data analysis as part of my job, using microsoft excel all the time, making a simple graph from your favorite price guide could help. I quickly made this one for some semi-key Mercury dimes. Sheldon scale on the x-axis, 2018 blue book price guide values on the y-axis. you can specify straight or curved lines, etc.



In addition to online resources for prices like numismedia and usa coin book, I like the "auction prices realized" at PCGS (others mentioned heritage and NGC):
https://www.PCGS.com/auctionprices/

You can tabulate in excel, calculate average, median, and graph these too. I usually knock of around $25 if I'm buying a raw coin vs. slabbed.

i totally agree about eye appeal effecting the grade too. you can just go by the PCGS photograde utility (app or online) but grading is often said to be an "art" as much as a "science", and pleasant toning, "originality", and other considerations all come into play when determining valuation - some of these are obviously subjective.

Josh, this is what you can do for split grades pricing. For the example you gave of the 1905-O qtr, F12 $77 and VF-20 $198. There are 8 pts of difference between grades and $121. So, each pt difference is $15.13 (121/8). For an F-15, it would then be $77 + 45.39 ($15.13 * 3) = $122.39. Not too far off the $125 you spent. So, you did fine.