Who Likes It Raw?

+1

Slabs are too restrictive for the kind of coins I collect.
Holding a coin helps me understand its impact in its day.
It's pretty cool to hold a half-ounce of silver that was money 2500 years ago.

I agree. It is interesting holding an old coin in your hand and imaging it's history and who could have owned it. You simply can't get that when holding a coin in a slab.

Now that said if I was going after pricey and rare coins then I could understand getting slabs. But since I didn't win the lottery last night I won't have that problem anytime soon.

Looking at it from the sales side, I can tell you that I sell over 100 raw coins for every one slab that I sell.

I do know that, like I said in another thread, slabbed coins are hard to come by this side of the Arctic.
However, the whole question is still relevant over here - it's just holders (probably your own 2x2s, or something very close to that) instead of slabs.
I personally still prefer my coins raw, so that I can hold them in my fingers and appreciate their beauty or history (or sometimes even both - while pre-WWI coins in anything above VF tend to be rather expensive, there is the weird exception of low-denomination Austro-Hungarian pieces which go for under a dollar even in XF, and yet other coins, like the Mercury dime or a few old Japanese pieces, look beautiful even in a lower grade).
However, if the coin is MS, that whole "hold in my fingers" thing becomes a little bad (as the coin would've been ruined if I did that). So for those coins, I prefer holders - just for protection's sake - and look at them through the plastic... good think I don't own too much MS coins (they're again either too expensive, too hard to find, or both).

Then there's the weirdness factor. One of the items in my coin collection is a coin "holder" someone made out of some sort of glass (well, that's what it looks like) - a rectangular object the size of a small book consisting of two halves (held together by several bolts) with about twenty coin spaces in between. The spaces are filled with various German coins from as early as 1874, including a silver 1/2 mark; I paid about $7 for it, and I estimate that if I opened the case and sold the coins individually I would've probably received at least three times that (and for that matter, the coins themselves aren't anything to look at, most being in the AG-VG range). Yet I keep the thing because I like how weird it looks, and for the simple reason that there's probably nothing quite like it anywhere in the world* (and if there is, I would be surprized).


End result: slabs and holders do a decent jobs of keeping MS coins MS, which IMHO is what they're for. Same is possible, now that I think of it, for coins made out of reactive metals (like the (in)famous 1943 Steelies) if they haven't rusted yet (fun fact: the only coin in my collection I bought raw but then decided to put in a plastic holder to protect was a Presidential dollar I didn't want turning brown too quickly). Everything else is better off raw (which, of course, usually means "in albums").

Sorry for such a long post :-)

Coin in slab is like a beautiful woman behind the locked glass door.

My key date coins are all slabbed. That way, there is no question of their authenticity.
Plus, I just feel more comfortable with them in the most secure holder for the long term.
I can care less what there opinion is on grade, problem/no problems, etc.
The rest of my collection can stay raw ;)