2016-W 30th Anniversary Silver Eagle

A very nice lady indeed!

You will find after being on coin forums that the difference of PF69 and PF70 will depend on what kind of day the graders at the TPG are having and if there was not enough sugar in their coffee.

Grading is an art and not a science. The slabbed coin market depends on how much faith people have in the TPG to "expertly" grade a coin. And some people pay even more money for a hope at getting a CAC sticker to testify the CAC's "better professional expert coin graders" are sure the TPG's "professional expert coin graders" were really the "professional expert coin graders" they claimed to be.


My local store owner is a large dealer. He said he researched with many dealer friends he has in the state of Pennsylvania. They all reported that when they sent in a monster box of ASEs for grading, that a consistent 20& would come back as MS70 and the rest were lower. He said he looking at the ones they grade as MS70, he finds some with rim nicks etc. He is convinced they just pull out a random 20% of the coins from the box and label them as MS70.

The whole MS or PF 70 thing is a gimmicky tool that keeps the TPGS getting customers willing to gamble for perfect grades so people will put a much higher perceived value onto the coin. This is why you will hear words of wisdom from seasoned collectors of "Buy the coin, not the slab."