Ngc's World Coin Price Guide, Getting Better.

Since getting into foreign coin collecting, NGC's world coin guide has been invaluable for me. But it often had weird errors and glitches. Doesn't find results. Or has the price for an XF higher than an AU for a whole bunch of years in a row.

I pointed out any errors I found to NGC. And most of them got corrected. Took a while. But it was still hard to trust values due to previous glitches. They claim their values are inputed from Krause data. But some of them just seemed too weird.

I didn't want to spend $50 per century, and have these huge books sitting around my house. But I finally broke down and started getting Krause catalogues. But when comparing the two, I now find NGC to be pretty accurate. I think they have improved a lot of the glitches and made corrections. In some cases the NGC prices were slightly higher. But the Krause book was published 7 months ago, so I think that reflects the rise in silver and gold.

While the searchable data base is easier than thumbing through a huge book, it does still have a few glitches. So here's a list of workaround solutions I have discovered.

1. Try the search a couple times. There are times when no results show up despite the fact that I know the coin exists for that year. Sometimes, hitting the back button on my browser, then hitting enter again will work.

2. Even though "region" is a required entry, most times you can leave it at "All regions". You will still likely find the coin you want. But you may have to scroll though lots of results. Especially if you are searching for a German States coin from the 1800's. In that case, if you know it's "Prussia" entering it sure helps.

3. "Year" is not a required entry. So sometimes it helps to leave it blank. You may have to scroll through pages of coins. For me this comes up most often for non-Gregorian dates. Say an Egyptian coins with 1293 yr14. It might be 1895, but entering 1895 won't work. Now that I have a Krause catalogue in hand, I think I know why. NGC took almost all of the descriptions from the Krause book. And they put the Gregorian date in parenthesis. That's also how they are listed in NGC's coin description. And that seems to mess up the search engine.

4. For some reason, they aren't consistent on listing pre-decimal British empire coins. For example, Great Britains my have coins under threepence and sixpence, but Australia is listed as 3 pence and 6 pence. Try it both ways before giving up your search.