Eye Appeal Vs TPG Vs Rarity

Slerk, I totally concur. For me, each coin has potentially it's own story and that's what I find fascinating. Often a coin with visible wear is more appealing, to me, than a near perfect MS.

thq, it seems to me that forums like ebay have forever changed the hobby, bringing in many more novice collectors who may be unwittingly driving prices upward. I also think that the pandemic may be contributing to some degree and scarcity of some coins may occur more than in past. But, I could be mistaken. I watch coins of interest on ebay and am frequently shocked at the prices being paid.

I think that for collectors, which the majority of us on this website, eye appeal is something important to us. When we are looking to fill a hole in our collection, we want something that looks nice and we are proud to own. It's more than just a math game for how much of a margin we think we can score when we flip it sooner than later. We are a skewed sample size.

Also, those of us on the website are just browsing around. Few of us those that post on a thread are actively collecting the series at topic a lot of the time. And for the few who are, not many are chasing the listed coin too. So weather its an XF or an MS65 may be secondary to "oh, that's pretty!" because most of us don't actually have skin in the game. Stuff that gets comments is usually either pretty or ugly, and the mundane doesn't motivate entering replies as people move on to look for other things more interesting. Eye appeal is interesting and gets people talking! (In my 6 years on this board, I can only think of a couple times that I saw a topic, went on the hunt for that listing, and became a bidder on it.)

TPG's have commoditized coins and their populations reports have shown us what is actually rare or at what point something might become rare. It has certainly allowed for dealers to buy and trade coins based on a label with no regard to eye appeal, and in many instances, coins are traded sight unseen because of the label.

Rarity is a funky word and should assume supply and demand. Is a coin rare is there are 5 in the world but only 1 person cares to chase it down? Is a coin rare if there are 10,000 of them but 100,000 people hop on a website for the second of go-live in hopes of being among the lucky 10%? In the US markets, there are very few truly rare coins with surviving specimens counting as handful or dozen. - Its demand and competition on US coins that makes things like the 1893-S "rare" even though there are over 80 on ebay right now, and Heritage, Stacks, and Great Collections probably have a few more right now, and there are a few thousand sitting in collections. It's not a rare coin. My 382 AD Western Satraps coin has about 5 known specimens and I was lucky to pry it from the gentleman who wrote the book on the series... and I paid a lot less than a G4 1893-S for it.

ebay definitely increased the availability of coins. 20 years ago a lot of time was spent going to shops and shows, finding coins by random luck. ebay sped that up. There are still bargains but not as often.

Definitely eye appeal first Just Carl, but after that, for most of us, comes budget. If budget were never an issue I'd be travelling the world to examine potential buys in person.