How Do You Decide If You Will Grade A Coin Or Not

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UoE_Student New Member United Kingdom 17 Posts	Posted 02/25/2022 12:07 pm Dear coin community, I am a student researching for my dissertation on the rare coin market. I am interested in all aspects of the rare coin market, in particular the decision to grade or not to grade coins before sale. I imagine a lot of factors are to play here - the amount of fakes on the market (as grading proves yours is genuine), how confident you are that yours is good quality and genuine, and your knowledge of knowing if your coin might get rejected from full grading due to hidden defects like scratches and cleaning. I am also interested in exploring the difference in price between graded and ungraded coins and why for some coins having them graded appears to make little difference wheras for some it makes a big difference. If anyone would like to share what they consider before grading coins I would be very grateful. I would be interested in knowing how the market might have changed after grading companies started to spring up in the 1980s. Kind regards, Harry. Edited by UoE_Student 02/25/2022 12:08 pm Report this Post to the Staff

PlumCrazy814 Pillar of the Community United States 883 Posts	Posted 02/25/2022 12:50 pm I do, occasionally, buy TPG coins but have not yet ever sent a coin I own in for grading. The only way I would consider doing that is if I had something worth several hundred dollars and had some interested buyers. As for why grade sometimes has minimal impact on price...one reason is that some coins are readily available in high grades. Report this Post to the Staff
UoE_Student New Member United Kingdom 17 Posts	Posted 02/25/2022 12:55 pm Thanks, can I ask why having interested buyers would make you more likely to consider grading? Is this because the buyers would demand it be graded as a condition of sale? Report this Post to the Staff
jacrispies Pillar of the Community United States 3848 Posts	Posted 02/25/2022 1:26 pm It all depends on the situation to determine whether or not a coin should be graded. For rare coins in a certain grade, it may be a $10,000 difference between one point and the next. People like that security that they have a coin graded by a professional. Some collectors only buy slabbed coins and like the protection of the plastic. I personally like handling my coins raw. I would encourage everybody to learn grading for themselves, and to not be dependent on TPGs to know what coin they have. Common coins like a circulated 1958 Wheat cent would have no additional premium if it was graded. An uncirculated draped bust dime would command a large premium if it was graded. The premium is usually greater with rarer coins. Suffering from bust half fever. Want to learn how to attribute early half dollars by die variety? Click Here: http://goccf.com/t/434955 Shoot me a PM if you are looking to sell bust halves. Report this Post to the Staff
jbuck Moderator United States 187702 Posts	Posted 02/25/2022 2:03 pm to the Community! Coin Collector Since 1978 Avatar Old Avatar 7070 Eisenhower Australia Canada World CCF Members on eBay CCF eBay Search Engine Report this Post to the Staff
UoE_Student New Member United Kingdom 17 Posts	Posted 02/25/2022 2:25 pm Do you think this additional premium when the coin is rarer is because there are relatively more fakes with rarer coins or simply because they are more expensive so the same percentage premium amounts to more money for more expensive coins? or another reason thanks Report this Post to the Staff
Mr T Pillar of the Community Australia 2180 Posts	Posted 02/25/2022 5:54 pm I've never sold a coin or considered getting one graded but I suspect the answer varies from market to market - I am most interested in Australian and British coins where third-party grading aren't as wide-spread, but there is certainly a market for the finest known of a coin, and third-party grading helps you make that point if you're selling a nice coin. Some rarities are just safer to buy third-party graded due to all the forgeries out there - the Gothic crown is the main example I can think of. Report this Post to the Staff
Coinfrog Bedrock of the Community United States 94367 Posts	Posted 02/25/2022 7:07 pm to the CCF! Report this Post to the Staff
jacrispies Pillar of the Community United States 3848 Posts	Posted 02/25/2022 8:30 pm Quote: Do you think this additional premium when the coin is rarer is because there are relatively more fakes with rarer coins or simply because they are more expensive so the same percentage premium amounts to more money for more expensive coins? There is no good way to consistently compare premiums of graded coins compared to raw coins. It is whatever the buyers say. You can just assume that people pay more for a coin when they know that they are getting a genuine coin. People tend to pay less when they take chances at the unknown. Some coins just need to be certified no matter what. If an 1804 dollar came to market raw unslabbed, there will be siginificantly less buyers than with a slabbed one. People don't take chances of receiving a counterfeit or altered coin when millions of dollars are on the line, so they make sure the coin gets into the protective plastic. Suffering from bust half fever. Want to learn how to attribute early half dollars by die variety? Click Here: http://goccf.com/t/434955 Shoot me a PM if you are looking to sell bust halves. Report this Post to the Staff
Earle42 Bedrock of the Community United States 10034 Posts	Posted 02/25/2022 8:35 pm Harry, I want to first say I am not advocating people drop collecting slabs. This is what I typically get called out for by those people who enjoy collecting slabbed coins. Someone enjoying collecting slabs is having fun in the hobby the way they like to - there is nothing wrong with this at all. Having said that, I have spent the last 10 years now researching the reality of what these companies produce vs. what the majority of the mindset in the market believes. Unfortunately the more I research, the more disappointed I become. To start, here are some hardcore facts: PCGS, NGC, and ANACS are the top three companies. The market, at present, sees the "best" as PCGS, then NGC. Cost Concerns for the service (PCGS and NGC): 1. In general this forum will tell you if a coin is not already valued at 150.00, then its not worth the fees. B/c people do not understand the businesses, so very many people end up with spending far more money to slab a coin than the coin is worth. The companies profit greatly with mandatory membership fees, submission fees, insurance fees, shipping fees (both ways) and extra (chosen) fees. ANACs does not have all these fees though. Mass Mistaken Mindset 2. Newbies start using grading companies assuming any "good looking" coin can be slabbed and sold at a great price. These people learn a hard lesson quickly by losing money and getting back a face value coin in a slab. The companies make a lot of money form this mistaken mindset as proven by the huge number of face value coins in slabs (cheap slabs for sale). Grades: Professional predicting not possible: 4. Note even most people and coin dealers who live, eat, breath, and deal coins for a living are able to accurately/consistently predict what grade the companies will give. Watch experienced dealers online getting packages back from PCGS etc. They are always at a loss to explain how the company comes up with what they did on some slabs...b/c there is no science involved at all when giving a grade (point b below elaborates). a. Coin grading companies are typical business that exist to make profits and stay in business (nothing wrong with that). The companies use a system where allegedly three, but in reality its normally two, graders look at each coin and give an opinion. The company videos showing the process can make you believe grading is a relaxed pace of the graders carefully studying each coin. In fact one PCGS video shows a number of guys sitting around a table discussing what they think a specific coin should be graded as (on youtube somewhere - sorry no link). Uh uh. While I have been told recently the graders are salaried, they used to be paid for how many coins they could get through in a day. The graders from those times I spoke with said they were always very rushed. I would assume being salaried has helped this situation. b. If you take a PCGS graded coin slabbed as MS64, break it out, and resubmit it to PCGS, *you are never guaranteed the same grade again.* The slabbed coin might come back MS62 (extreme and a bad day for graders), 63, 64, 65, 66 (extreme and a great day for you!). This is b/c the process is all subjective: *No scientific/verifiable standards or methods are used. This subjectivity makes for greater company profits since people resubmit the same coin trying to get a higher (better price when selling) grade. In the 90s, the companies, at great expense, created better (their own words*) scientific methods not relying upon human opinion. No doubt the large profit from the re-slabbing game fell. The companies abandoned the science and went back to their less accurate systems. Note the companies had described the system they use as being less accurate when advertising the better system they abandoned. But..this is all hearsay without proof. So... http://goccf.com/t/346174#2967242 Another real eye opener to actual expertise level of PCGS vs. what people assume them to have is to read the PDF linked in my signature. The data used there is from the PCGS website. The paper presents a rookie level error made by this "best" company (and the others) which has cost coin collectors thousands of dollars with wrongly labeled slabs that a rookie level Kennedy half dollar collector knows. The paper upholds our forums' standard saying of Buy the slab and not the coin. I want to again re-iterate... Collecting slabs can be enjoyable and there certainly is nothing wrong about enjoying them. The companies are not evil or mean. But they are just businesses. They most certainly are not THE last word in coins. Ron Guth, a former president of PCGS has said anyone can learn to grade, it just takes practice. The businesses exist b/c there are a lot of people who (for their own reasons) have no interest in grading. Unfortunately this can lead to a mindset that ONLY the companies know what they are doing. Sorry this is so long, but you are researching and I am a former teacher. Please feel free to PM me. I have a lot more info I can share. I have been researching off and on since 2011 on this subject. How much squash could a Sasquatch squash if a Sasquatch would squash squash? Download and read: Grading the graders Costly TPG ineptitude and No FG Kennedy halves https://ln5.sync.com/dl/7ca91bdd0/w...i3b-rbj9fir2 Edited by Earle42 02/26/2022 5:01 pm Report this Post to the Staff
Sap Moderator Australia 16808 Posts	Posted 02/25/2022 9:24 pm It should also perhaps be pointed out that the "slabbing" of coins is still very much a North American phenomenon. The TPGs are still largely unknown outside of the USA and Canada, even among high-end collectors. At my local coin show here in Australia, there's about 30 dealers in attendance, and maybe 3 or 4 of them might have a few slabbed coins. Even in countries where coin collecting is far more popular than it is here in Australia - countries like Germany, Japan and Britain - slabbing simply hasn't taken off. It's seen as "just another weird thing those weird Americans do". Plus, of course, slabbing has extra shipping costs and delays for people outside of North America. In America, the slabbing of rare coins is saturated to the extent that when people see a rare coin that isn't slabbed they immediately assume something must be wrong with it. "If it's so good, why isn't it slabbed yet?". So unless you know for certain that a rare coin has been sitting squirreled away in an "old collection" since before slabbing was invented, the question of "why not yet" will arise. The other "problem" with slabs that Earle didn't raise in this post is the issue of fakes. Not fake coins, but fake slabs, which might contain a genuine coin but will most likely contain an coin that is also fake. Because anything worth making is worth faking, especially in a market where people have come to believe that "just because it's in a slab, you can trust it to be true" - the nuturing of this attitude was, of course, the reason why slabs are invented in the first place. China, in particular, is a rich source of fake coins in fake slabs - you can go to the Forty Thieves website and buy them in bulk, if you want. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis Report this Post to the Staff
cdngmt Valued Member Canada 402 Posts	Posted 02/25/2022 10:49 pm Just a to add a point to Sap said. I stumbled across a site listing slabbed coins (including what waas supposed to be 1/2oz gold coins offered at $100.00). I tried contacting one of the third party graders websites to see if they would do anything about the website/seller. The answer I got to my email was that the person I had reached did not know how or what to do but would "send it up the ladder. As this seemed to go nowhere I did ask one of the moderators on this forum if they could do anything, but that was fruitless too It is sort of like the wild west...you don't know if what or whom you can trust.. Report this Post to the Staff
Collects82 Pillar of the Community United States 1316 Posts	Posted 02/25/2022 11:15 pm I have submitted to ANACS a couple of times when they had a special going that applied to me. It's the only way I can justify the cost of putting a coin into a slab. Some of my reasons are family related. In the near term, it's so that I can let my young kids be more hands in when I am coining and not freak out about the coin getting damaged. In the long term, when I kick the can, the family will have much easier time doing whatever they want to do with the collection, at least the better pieces. A few of the sets I am working on, like my AU/BU Buffalo nickels and Draped Bust large and half sets, many of the coins I buy are already slabbed. So I've chosen to slab my raw coins so I can store them in the same binder together uniformly. I know they say to buy the coin and not the label, but the labels have proven to add value a lot of the time. To your second question regarding how TPGs have changed the industry: They have commoditized it. Slabbed coins are now primarily judged by the label and traded accordingly, often sight unseen based on the label. The resulting population reports have brought to light what coins are actually rare. Over time, the truly rare stuff has appreciated moreso, while the common stuff has stayed much flatter. Some coins thought to be scarce have proven not so much, and visa versa. This has affected market values. One of the main negatives is that knowledge of coins, especially how to grade and spot problems has decreased. People just rely on the label mores than their own ability to judge for themselves. The TPGs aren't consistently accurate enough for someone to not have the ability to grade themselves, and those that don't know how to judge a coin by it's own merits always eventually get burned. Edited by Collects82 02/26/2022 02:59 am Report this Post to the Staff
jacrispies Pillar of the Community United States 3848 Posts	Posted 02/26/2022 12:34 am Earle42, that is awesome research you do, and is very interesting. I am impressed! Sap, cdngmt, Collects82, thanks for including your well, thought-out input. I know these are UoE_Student's questions, but I find this topic intriguing. Especially learning other people's viewpoints and experiences. Suffering from bust half fever. Want to learn how to attribute early half dollars by die variety? Click Here: http://goccf.com/t/434955 Shoot me a PM if you are looking to sell bust halves. Report this Post to the Staff
UoE_Student New Member United Kingdom 17 Posts	Posted 02/26/2022 07:23 am Hi everyone, this has all been extremely helpful - a few points raised that will be especially important are the idea that there is a minimum value that it is worth slabbing at, the idea that slabbing is more of an American thing than the rest of the world (this could provide me with some good data to use by comparing American coin market to, say, the German one), the idea of commodification of coins which is fascinating to me and I'd like to learn more about, and the fake slabs. I will have to reply on here because I can't send PM's or emails yet as I am a new member. Earle42 - thanks so much for all of this. I wonder if one of the reasons people like to slab - aside from proof it is genuine / ((likely) problem free - is because it makes items easier / quicker to sell? I can imagine that if you listed an unslabbed coin on ebay, eventually someone will agree that it is an MS60, wheras if it is graded as such people would instantly think it is an MS60 and it would sell faster? This links in with the idea of commodification, that the coin has become an investor item that is liquid and can be sold quickly with no uncertainty once slabbed. Sap - thank you for your comments also. I am wondering when roughly fake slabs first came into collectors knowledge? I don't suppose anyone knows, but I'd assume there was a gap between the first slabs and the first fake slabs and this might be interesting to get data from for me. Collects82 - I was wondering if you would think that slabs have also reduced people's ability to detect fakes and ability to detect flaws as they can rely on the slabs? Kind regards, Harry. Report this Post to the Staff
just carl Bedrock of the Community United States 20753 Posts	Posted 02/26/2022 08:11 am You will get lots of info here. But you will have to decide yourself what to believe. My self, I think to many people are just slab happy. Report this Post to the Staff
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