Gray Sheet Debacle?

A far as I can tell dealers had been working below greysheet on a lot of items lately. Prices have been going down in general, and a pricing guide isn't worth a darn if it can't go down too.

Speaking purely as a collector, I hope they keep going down.

Lower prices will help me too. I have a lot of pricey holes.

Price guides are only good the day they are printed (and frequently not even then). Something is only worth what someone is willing to pay and to know that you have to look at ACTUAL sales. Since coins are sold in so many ways to so many people every day there's no realistic way to capture all of that information. In my opinion the closest you're going to get it is to look at past auction records. Of course this won't take into account the millions of coins that are sold at brick and mortar shops, at coins shows by dealers, and on the may dealers that sell coins straight up on their websites.

Fortunately there's a fairly good tool to view past auction results and it's provided free of charge by PCGS. It was discussed in another thread but here's a link.

http://www.pcgs.com/auctionprices/

And here's a link to a list of all the auction houses that it surveys: http://www.pcgs.com/auctionprices/a...irmlist.aspx

The nice thing is that this tool will provide results foir coins graded by more than just PCGS. It also includes NGC, ANACS and ICG. Unfortunately it doesn't capture coins that are sold raw.

This is nowhere near a perfect way to estimate value but it's a whole lot better than using the Gray Sheet if you asked me.

So basically those calling it a debacle are blaming the market dip on the gray sheet. Is that like the tail wagging the dog?

Quoted for truth. I will be using that one later today.

I just don't trust any coin Guides. As far as I am concerned, they are all just made by someone that is sort of a guesser.