Shows US Those Overgraded Slabs From Major Companies

1952 Canada Dollar $ MS66 NGC.....$1200.00 USD.

Oh my!!

Not a chance it even grades an ms65 at ICCS.

It's either an ms63 or at best an ms64.

MS-65+?!?! I'd probably go to MS-60 on it because it does appear to be wear free, and has full luster, but ms-65+?!?!

NGC 1948 UNC details......can you believe this grade?

Tokens are not immune from this sort of TPG exuberance, either. This one closed on ebay yesterday, selling at US $145.10. It had 22 bidders!

What's really interesting is that Donald Partrick, whose higher-end material has been all over Heritage this year, had it on his own envelope at "EF, WAS VF 30."

I've had my own example of this token pegged at VF for years, and it's a shade better than this one, I believe. My theory is that -- when it comes to tokens -- those of us who have been collecting for a few decades have seen and handled many more of any given type or variety than any individual grader at a TPG will see in a lifetime. That puts the responsibility on whatever quality control processes may or may not be in effect at the TPG...and apparently there aren't many.

Maybe "professional graders" should be required to research their own organization's registry and archives for comparables?

Here's the closed-sleeve variety of the same token, graded by the same TPG. Better hair (both sides), better collar-shoulder transition, etc. It's obvious that by definition these were struck from different dies, obverses anyway, but that hardly accounts for a difference of 20 points on the MS scale.




In total agreement with Silver101, establishing a baseline can be difficult, especially if the grader hasn't handled more than a few of a particular type. I sometimes have the same difficulty myself, over in my little corner of Anglo-Canadian exonumismatics.

To illustrate that, while NGC's VF-35 here is overall a more "pleasing" example than their putative AU-55 (above) to those of us who collect them, differences in die and strike characteristics can be notable and you end up with wear and flattening in different places. (For example, the bale, and the legend, specifically the thickness and observable flattening of letters...how different were they on the day these two tokens were minted?)

A bunch of us CCF members have had plenty of conversations on this very topic over at the Canadian token collectors' thread. (Not that we're special...just different... )

So yes, a lot of variables have to be taken into account with tokens, and I'm imagining -- having seen PhotoGrade books for both US and Canadian coinage -- that things are a bit less complicated for the folks who work at TPGs grading RCM issues. My guess is that they try to squeeze these idiosyncratic little pieces of copper into their assembly line process and workflow, and for the most part that just doesn't work...not in our best interests, at least.

But the bottom line is that there's no way in heck* the LC-53A I posted earlier today is an AU, NGC's expensive opinion notwithstanding!

* (Interesting! Just noticed in "Preview" that I got robo-censored by CCF for my use of a different place name here, which was apparently auto-changed to "heck." Drat! I'll try to watch my @#$% language in the future, I promise.)