Deception In "Coin Trend Value"

His other one for a 1957 Roosevelt dime in MS-67 sez it trends at $2600 I sent him a message on both ones saying Coin Values has this one listed at $110 and asked him were he got that trend value.
http://cgi.ebay.com/1957-MS-67-FB-R...00_W0QQitemZ230072733167QQihZ013QQcategoryZ525QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

To bad ebay wont ban him then, he did reply but this is what he said.
"Hi there, I report the value of my coins right from the PCGS price guide. Go to pcgs.com and click on the price guide. Have a great day! Todd"
Now for a question, is the PCGS Price Guide in General for graded coins? For just coins graded by PCGS? Or all coins? I would guess coins graded by PCGS (Or am I wrong here?)

The PCGS Price Guide is for the very highest prices realized for the highest calibre graded and slabbed (by only the top three TPGs - especially PCGS, but also NGC and ANACS) coins. It is almost always considerably higher than actual market value. Very, very seldom will a coin ever sell for anywhere near what PCGS states as the market value. The problem is that its listings are greatly abused by such sellers as jojax who merely label a coin, say MS-67 (when it's actually only MS-63 or less [even cleaned, circulated, or damaged]), then refer to the PCGS Price Guide. jojax's "MS-67" 1957 Lincoln is a perfect example of this abuse. The PCGS Price Guide should be used only as a very general reference, mostly to place the correct number of zeros after the dollar sign. It should not be taken as gospel.

I believe jojax has already been NARU'd (= No Longer A Registered User = suspended from ebay) at least once as evidenced by his relatively recent join date. ebay is very, very lenient with its suspensions and almost always lets a delinquent member return to continue his fraudulent sales. I remember jojax being referenced in a very negative manner several years ago on another forum and even ebay's Coins and Paper Money Forum which seldom permits mention of a seller's username unless he/she is NARU'd.

ebay has become a haven for fraudsters and it's only a matter of time before something happens which will change this, hopefully for the better.

Coin Values is a subscription service http://www.coinvaluesonline.com/ , so I don't use it (I'm cheap) although I buy the magazine from time to time. I wouldn't want to state that any one price guide is better than the others, but Coin Values Advisor http://www.us-coin-values-advisor.com/ seems to be somewhat more current than the others, almost all of which tend to be optimistic. Coin Dealer Newsletter (CDN = "greysheet" http://www.greysheet.com/ ) is also a timely source, but it also is a subscription service (and I'm still cheap). Best means for determining the value of any particular coin is to do the research ourselves either by checking recent sales on ebay or the Heritage Auction archives, the latter of which will also be high since Heritage (and the other auction houses) sell mostly top end coins and command higher prices. I've bid on Heritage for what I had determined was a fair top price only to be outbid by others who bid over (often way over) the current trends. The price guides tend to take the highest auctions for a particular coin and publish those values rather than taking an average or range of sale prices.

All that said, I DO use the online and printed price guides to determine the very rough maximum value a particular coin might attain once it's slabbed, in addition to learning the number of zeros after the dollar sign.

Further, when I bid on a raw coin which is advertised as "BU" or MS-65 or whatever by the seller, I usually bid only up to MS-60 levels since most seller-graded raw coins almost never meet the seller' stated guess-a-grade. Lots of qualifications here - I've sent back the last two "MS-65" 1890-CC Morgans since they were problem coins (cleaned or damaged). And added two more sellers to my Don't Bid list.

Fred