AU-58 Is MS-64

Just looking at echidna's coin, IMO the band, moustache and eyebrow are all touched off, so AU58 for me. I've seen plenty of dodgy slab grades, and the TPG's are certainly not perfect, so as said earlier, buy the coin not the slab!!

Buy the coin, not the holder.

It is a borderline coin and Walter is correct about coins that could fall either side of the AU/MS line. I think it just falls over into MS but 64 seems a little high (63 to me).
A bit hard to judge from photos especially when the same coin looks so different and has a better eye appeal in the AU58 photo. That large inconsistency in their photos shouldn't exist as it will cost the owner possibly hundreds of dollars if they sell this penny online compared to what they would have got with the more appealing photo.
Crappy photos (that you have paid for with your submission and a decent sized submission can cost over $1000 just for the images) can make it hard to buy (or sell) the coin and not the slab.

Exactly. Today's AU 58 really is an MS 63/64 depending on how you view the small high point friction.




It would have to be a 200 coin submission to get to $1000 in picture fees and at that point you should be getting a slightly better rate anyway. Any gold shield submission now gets TrueViews instead of a scan

If someone has slab images of the coin we can know more, it looks like was graded during the time of the Secure Plus scans which were very hit or miss and the reason why they replaced those with the TrueViews now.

Hi CoinOS
Is it a Doh! moment that you typed not having the 1930 Indian (instead of the 1930 English?). Kudos anyhow for having a near complete collection.
I do agree that key date cleaned coins are valuable (certainly not bullion value) but they are only worth a fraction of what an uncleaned coin is (at best 50% and if harshly cleaned then far less).
There are a number of respected dealers who sell slabbed coins (Eric Eigner and Chris Buesnell helps keep be poor with their coins) and I find them very honest.
I do go for high MS coins (but don't have any of the key dates in MS as like most collectors my budget doesn't stretch that far).
PCGS is definitely not customer friendly and from my limited experience with NGC they get my thumbs up. You say that PCGS and NGC have misgraded thousands of coins but that is hyperbole in the wrong direction (I once read that 20% of PCGS coins were misgraded according to a PCGS grader) so if they have graded 25 million or so then 5 million are misgraded. I have to agree with that 20% figure as I have a decent slab collection and can put multiple examples of the same date and denomination side by side (including multiple examples of the same high grade) and compare them to spot those that are undergraded (some) and those that are overgraded (too many)or wrongly described (love those as they are usually rare varieties in the common variety slab).
Now a misgrade (undergraded) will cost the owner when he goes to sell it (cherrypickers like me love those bargains) and the overgrades will disappoint the buyer.
Sure an overgrade can theoretically be sent to California for reconsideration but the compensation if the coin downgrades might not even cover your costs of sending it, plus they have the upper hand and may claim the grade is spot on (and they pocket what you paid to get it reconsidered). You could also in theory take it to court in California but again it will cost you tens of thousands of dollars in legal costs/international airfare/accomodation/time off work etc to do this.
Now I can understand why coins can be misgraded (too high or too low) as it is an opinion and very subjective (particularly eye appeal, I love rich toning and bid higher for such coins, yet others love blazing BUnc coins).
But wrongly described coins are a real black mark on PCGS. I have coins that were slabbed with the wrong country (ram shilling as NZ), the wrong mint (London threepence as Melbourne) and the wrong variety ('53 Large denticle as small denticle). There are also those coins that have varieties that were previously slabbed just by the date but now recognised by the variety and PCGS have them all in their lookup listed as the common variety So are they too lazy to get a staffer to look at the stored images and identify the variety or are they just being greedy and want people to pay a second time to send the slabs in to get the correct label? BTW their failure to correct the variety designation for the previously slabbed coins distorts the population reports and causes people to pay too much for a scarce coin that seems rare. The best Australian example is the '53 florin which currently has 274 Small in the population report and only 24 Large, yet I have a Large in a Small slab and 3 Large in the old slabs, so with just my collection the 24 become 28 and I have seen a number of others (including a MS65) in other collections.
The unethical dealers who spin cow pats about coins are at least slightly constricted by the slabs as they can easily sell doctored raw coins but that is much harder with slabs, plus with slabs the misgrades are usually only by a point (except at the AU/MS border) whereas with raw coins I've seen cleaned VG sold to idiots as ChUnc and dozens of fake '38 crowns and Centenary florins sold as genuine.

That was the old days years ago when they did have a customer service problem. They're much better now but the approach matters. They get crazy calls all day long so if you come at them like another crazy person, being polite goes a long way and many if not all the phone representatives now will do what they can to help the situation.




No PCGS grader has said the company misguides 20% of coins. You're distorting the quote Earl always likes to use which was just about grading in general and just sort of Ron Guth talking not scientific. The actual quote was that someone grading is likely around 80% accuracy but once you had a second opinion and a third is necessary that accuracy goes to well over 90%.

Hi CoinOS, sleep deprivation does wonders for our concentration (not).
The '33 shilling above looks cleaned (though not harshly) and I agree that it isn't worth slabbing. Thanks to Gerry Harvey (and others) we now get to pay GST on old Australian coins brought back from overseas.
I buy lots of coins on ebay in Australia as well as the the English and US ebay sites and the majority of certain dates and denominations are either fake or cleaned so unless you know what to look for its a trap. Even as an expert on certain coins I still get ripped off sometimes because some cleaned coins look like chrome dies (though most times you can spot little clues that the coin isn't). You can also get raw coins that look cleaned but turn out to be gems or proofs. For coins I'm not an expert on (99.9% of world coins) I won't bid.
PCGS didn't want to come to any mutually agreeable arrangement so no more submissions from me (they actually banned me from submitting, I got the ban on the same Saturday morning in May that I had 2 submissions packed to go to the post office), so the 8 coin "free" submission did't get sent and the medium sized (200+ coin) paid submission also went back into my Saflip albums and SDBs. So I blew my $400 on my membership but saved $7,000 on submission costs (that's for this year, next year I had planned to renew my membership and to do a big submission, so now the saved money is paying for a family trip to Egypt; funny how my family prefers a Nile cruise to me getting my coins slabbed )

Not that I am aware of.

The only issue of the magazine I own is V21/#4 May 2018 and I needed hands on that issue because Neal and Fred's article was of interest to me.

To attack a person's character on CCF would not only violate the forum rules, but reflect and speak to my own - and that is not going to happen.

Here is one of my all time favourite reads on CCF:

http://goccf.com/t/157658&whichpage=4

Cheerio