Thinking About Buying Coins On Ebay?

Record time.

When I see "unsearched" mentioned in the auction, I RUN away. Well, er, uh, I CLICK away!

Unsearched rolls of coins are easy to find. Just like used cars that formerly belonged to old ladies who only drove them to church and the grocery store.

Zeeple,
It's just my "philosophy" on collecting coins. I think there's a segment of coins which are over-hyped--where people pay unreasonable premiums, whether on ebay, HSN, Heritage, or even at shows. And these are the coins that get the spotlight...because that's where the money is made (ie margin). A few collectors are attracted to the bright lights, and mistake all that for the actual merits of coins.

Right now, too much is made about "coins as investments", and consequently there's a herd of newly-minted collectors who care more about trends, the finely-split hairs of grading, placement in slabbed populations, and so on. I suppose there's nothing inherently wrong about that, but that's not what collecting is to me. Consequently, a lot of stuff gets sold on the pretense the collector will somehow strike "paydirt", such as with those bags of "unsearched wheats" on ebay. Collectors would fall for all these scams much less if they were better informed and more specialized in their collecting.

That's a lot of words to basically say the real discoveries are with the informed collector--and what they find outside those "bright lights". This is essentially how I collect--and I find some great coins.