I Don't Get It.

And a real big welcome to someone with a simple question.
Just like a car. You buy it for $20,000 and turn around and sell it for $15,000 the next day. And nowadays you buy a house for half a million and can't sell it for ten thousand tomorrow.
This is just the fun of loosing money
OK, now enough silly statements. What your looking at is the little thing called marketing. As you may have noticed there is no manufacturers list price on coins. Nor is there a government standard on coin price caps either. Nor is there a law that says you can not sell a coin for less than you paid for it.
In other words there is no RULES on buying or selling coins. Price guides are just that, GUIDES. They are invented by people that I feel have nothing else to do or just now have found out that making a book or price guide on coins is better than selling used cars.
The Red Book is Guide. The PCGS forum web site for coin prices is a guide. The Coin World or Numismatic web site coin prices are guides. Even the now famous Grey Sheets are a guide.
I well know your frustrations with ebay. Someone I know saw a $5 gold piece on ebay and bid $5 and won the bid. He was sent the $5 Gold coin, it was real, the seller paid for the postage too. You just never know.
Again, WELCOME TO COIN COLLECTING.

This hobby is what it is. If you are not business minded you don't make money. Our hobby is really paying for what you like doing, collecting coins. If you are a collector you spend everytime you want something and then you spend again for the same coins because you want an upgrade then you spend again because you want another collection. In the end the business minded "collectors" will not buy your collection at the price you bought them as they need to make money also and it takes time to sell the collection. They will only buy the nice ones and the common ones have to be sold at a lost if not at face.

Just think of it as spending money for the hobby, like maybe shooting that you have to spend everytime for bullets. etc.

so...in a purely buisiness sence, for one to get their money back, it's more profitable to melt down and cash in metal value. hmm, maybe thats what's happening to our historical coins. scary.
in checking on the value of my inherited coins, these are the grims that I'm unearthing.

Just one point that should be mentioned , coins unlike other commodities are elective you can live and work without buying coins unlike gasoline , so one of things that is going on in the coin market right now is a down turn because purchase volume is down due to prioritising of available funds for buying coins and redirecting it at debt reduction or nest egg building .

Its called adjustment , what you will see is many of the mid range common date coins drop in price ,the keys and semi keys will not likely follow suit because no matter what happens to the rest those coins stay in demand .

what we have to look forward to is when the economy picks up then coin prices will adjust up just like they are now adjusting down .

if you can afford to purchase a few or many of the coins right now and you have the patience to wait out the economic down turn then you will be in a position to sell some of them back at a profit .

If you expect to make big money on a quick turn around on coins its not going to happen now and in most cases at just about any other time its just the nature of the hobby .