Ebay Vs NGC Pricing Guide Vs Heritage Auction

The ones that sold in the $900 range had some issues like poor strike, finger prints, low luster, excessive marks for grade. If these same coins went back on the marked today, they would most likely be in the $1100 to $1200 range because there has been another price jump in the last month for the 1921 Peace dollar.




NGC and PCGS are simply retail price guides, and you are correct they are overstated. A lot of ebay BIN pricing does follow the TPG price guides, but there are still good buys on ebay is you are selective for price and quality. Buying quality coins at a fair price is where you find them: ebay, coin show, online dealer, LCS, Heritage, GC, etc.

Buying at Heritage auction can have it own pit falls. A lot of sellers will put their market desirable coins up for auction at Heritage and it can create a bidding war. Some times you can get a better price on a market desirable coin from a dealer because you are not in a bidding war. I tried the flipping game of buying at Heritage and selling on ebay. I could sell the coins on ebay for more than I paid for it, but the only ones making money was Heritage and ebay.

For what it's worth, the only freakishly good deal I've gotten lately was on collectorscorner. The seller was just not up to date on current market, and was pricing by the book.

No one buys from ebay. You buy from a seller, and you're both using ebay as the platform for the transaction. ebay isn't setting the prices, the sellers are.

Obviously, if buyers are paying more than NGC or HA, they're willing to do so, and it's NGC and HA that are inaccurate.

Not sure, but you can search ebay for completed sales to research historical pricing.

I am getting a lot of great information from you guys and appreciate it. I am a retired actuary and am intrigued about he possibility of building a model for arbitrage. It seems clear Heritage has a lot of public data available that can be sliced and diced in all sorts of ways. I 'think' the buyers on Heritage will be more sophisticated than ebay, but maybe I am completely wrong on this . I also think my Peace dollar example may be a bad one, as as has been pointed out, there is new 2021 activity ocurring.....I think maybe looking at some other coins' key dates.
Zurie..can you tell me how you know that most of the sales on ebay for the Peace dollar in grade 64 were Bin and that there were 7 sales on ebay through auction at $1085.....(Incidentally, I think median will be a better data point to look at vs, average, but that is not an important point to meat this moment)

Filter your search on ebay for sold items, and you can then view either all listings, auction, or BIN. The 1921 Peace dollar example is fine as long as there isn't much price movement in the time period you're analyzing. Prices in general have been strong over the past several months, so looking back 3 years on Heritage would be a mistake. I doubt there is a consistent arbitrage opportunity between selling platforms, but there might be between buying carefully at auction (whether HA or ebay) and selling BIN.

ADD: Agree with your distinction between mean and median, but with this small sample size, median is problematic as well.

ebay indicates if a BIN item was sold, but the original BIN price is not necessarily the sale price. Quite frequently the seller will accept a lower offer, but ebay does not tell you what the final sale price was.