Have Any Of You Ever Sent Your Coins Off To A Ratings Agency

It all depends on the type of coin and how many you spend. Shipping will cost approximately 50 dollars round trip usually give or take some. If you have 2 coins that seems excessive but 10 or 15 and its not that bad.

Moderns for PCGS and NGC are about 16 a coin, ANACS isn't worth using for moderns as their 70s have very little premium and I actually cant stand them anyway from my thread in the TPG forum.

Older collector coins for PCGS and NGC are usually 20 or 32 depending on the speed and coins value. But they can be anywhere from 20 a coin to 100+ a coin if you want the turnaround time to be as quick as 48 hours.




At first your usually going to get some surprised. I still have some from my first batches I'm trying to sell but it was a good learning experience and helped me learn quickly so it was worth the reasonable losses on those. The better you are at grading the less surprises youll have, but modern 70s are by far the hardest to get without bulk submissions. Chasing those modern 70s is usually a money losing proposition in all honesty if you arent sending in probably 10 or 20+ of the same ones you hand picked.

Generally people are surprised their coins dont do better when using a TPG for the first time or surprised at how many come back with details grades for older coins from a cleaning or something like that.




Ive done well with it over all and gotten some things dirt cheap but it does take some effort to get good at cherry picking. I enjoy the hunt though so its a win win for me. My experiences with PCGS have been good, ANACS was a HORRIBLE experience ruining a 300 dollar coin of my trying to remove the toning, and I've never used NGC so I have no comment on them.




I have, though things dont always sell the fastest so you need to be willing to sit on things if you arent willing to roll the dice with a no reserve auction sale. Usually though where you see a huge jump between two grades (like the panda you mentioned in the MS 70) people will want it graded before theyll spend the money on the higher side of the jump.

The biggest con imo is having to wait a few weeks to find out as I get impatient when I know it should be done soon. The biggest pro imo is whenever youre at a shop or show you can look for things that could be undergraded that have a good value jump in the next grade up. You can either get stuff cheaper that way or sell it and get extra money to buy stuff you really want.

@BB

is a Gem uncirculated a higher grade than MS 70 for a bullion coin?

Before slabs became so prevalent and the Sheldon scale was widely adopted. Raw coins used to be given Adjectival Grades. This grading was totally subjective and of course varied collector to collector and dealer to dealer.
AU coins were graded AU, but after that the grades consisted of
Uncirculated (UNC)
Brilliant Uncirculated (BU)
Choice Uncirculated (CH BU or CH UNC)
Gem Brilliant Uncirculated (Gem BU)

These were how I learned to grade coins when I was a kid. Basically UNC was equivalent to MS 60 and you understood from sight, the upgrades to Brilliant, Choice and Gem.
And you still see these grades all the time on old 2X2's

Nowadays in slab vernacular , Gem Brilliant UNC is anything under MS69 that the seller doesn't want to attach a number too