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

I think the idea that slabbing is mostly specific to the American market is no longer true. There is a very active numismatic market in Poland, and very large numbers of Polish coins have been graded (131,000) and are appearing for sale at Polish auction houses over the last few years. NGC has graded more Polish coins than either French, German or Italian. Among "European" nations, their census shows only the UK and Russia with more graded coins than Poland.

Then there is China. The majority is modern stuff in mint state of course. I assume these are being bought by collectors all over the world, and that it is the security of not buying counterfeits?

It may not be close enough to the main thrust of your thesis work, but it would be very interesting to see how this growth differs across differ countries. Certainly NGC would have the trend data. Or you could do it yourself the hard way looking through auction results over time.

@Sap




It is only my opinion, but back when the TPGs came on the scene, the US was noted as a place where the average person had more disposable income per person. I do not believe the companies could have made a start and been successful had it not been for that fact.and the companies knew it. As you said, its mainly North America even today.

I am old enough to remember ANACS, the first TPG to start up, in 1972 announced their company and what it was going to do. People would be able to KNOW they had a correct grade on their coin. Their ideas were going to become the new standard everyone needed.

However, the average collector of the day simply used the guidelines in the RedBook as people had been doing for years with no major problems. I worked in a coin shop as a youth. I do not remember ever hearing anyone say, "I just can't grade coins." Anyone could take out the RedBook guidelines and compare the coin in front of them to the words. It worked for everyone.except the people starting ANCA and trying to find a business model to profit from the large base of numismatists in some way.

People I was around in the coin hobby thought it arrogant someone would claim they were THE experts and we needed THEM to tell what the CORRECT grade was on a coin. The entire idea was mostly seen as a sham. Here was a company seemingly taking advantage of some people who seem to NEED an "expert's" opinion. Eventually ANACs got enough people to make a customer base - but it took awhile. Remember this was also the era when marketing things like pet rocks and Beanie Babies etc. was not too difficult!

It seems that the advent of ebay exposing so many people to so many slabbed coins is where the companies finally had their main breakthrough into a larger market base. Right before the internet is also when the TPGs made their computerized grading (more accurate in their words - eliminates human error). I would suggest a major change like this is presented by marketing when a company has to find a way to improve their public standing and business. It may be coincidence, but they abandoned the better systems at a convenient time . somewhere around the time when the internet was becoming household. At that time their customer base, if normal trends of the day held true, was likely greatly improved by ebay and the internet.

And as to grading companies being the answer to people not getting what they paid for.I suggest the (as quoted in my essay concerning No FG Kennedy halves) literal thousands of dollars spent on wrongly labeled No FG variety half dollar is worse than anything I ever heard of before these companies came out! Granted.we have more access to info nowadays, so its easier to find problems.

The TPGs' creation of online registry sets, creating competition by collectors, has hiked prices on slabs with higher grades, and therefore you get (not uncommon) wrongly attributed halves being sold for very high prices.




Thanks for bringing in this other very valid point. From what I have hear (please note the following is therefore anecdotal) is that some of the fake slabs even have a legitimate PCGS (NGC) number on them. So the fake can be looked up online by a legit number and seem to give a positive result.
Again - someone who nows more about this specific aspect should be consulted rather than taking what I just said as absolute fact.

@UoE_Student




This probably does factor into it. With enough people out there just assuming these companies are THE experts, many people buy the slab, not the coin, and so they can be easier to sell. I personally see this as (not necessarily a deliberate conscious choice) human nature's desire of "taking the easy way out."

However, you should also know that another reason experienced dealers and collectors slab a rare coin they want to sell is b/c there are so many people who just take the word of the companies an unquestionable fact, that the pieces will bring a higher price in a slab.

And yet another company found a way to make a business model profiting from the hobby. This profitable business is CAC.

CAC offers a paid service to evaluate wether or not a grading company's slab is the grade the slab says it is. If CAC sees the coin as being graded "properly" then they put a green sticker on it.

If CAC thinks the slab's grade is too low for the coin, they will put a gold CAC sticker on the slab.

And now CAC has gained enough of a following that a slab with a CAC on it goes for more money.

Step back...think this through.

Some people really hate it if presented with anything that seems to be questioning grading company expertise. After all, the grading companies are THE experts and last word in coins. However, these same people will pay the CAC company to make sure the slabbing company was not wrong.

Basically TPG experts are THE experts and last word in coins. But now we have another set of people to evaluate THE expert's opinions. So I guess CAC has more expert experts than THE experts since the CAC more expert experts can give a "legitimate" evaluation of the unquestionable job already done by THE experts?

Something I made up years ago wen another company names MACAC decided to try their hand at a business evaluating CAC's work:





BTW...just for fun.

So what happens if a PCGS MS65 coin was slabbed, submitted to CAC, got their OK, and then the coin is broken out, resubmitted, and comes back as MS64?

That would nullify the CAC "more expert" expert's evaluation of THE experts at PCGS. But...this scenario actually could happen.





Correct in the concept of it becoming a commodity. And...this is another reason why I do not like what the slabbing companies have brought about.

Before slabbing, every coin in a set (for the most part) was valued on how many were made per year and mint mark. It was enjoyable to find a coin that was of lesser mintage, but not necessarily a key date for the series, just b/c everyone knew they were harder to find. Those of lesser mintage, therefore, always had more value than common ones.

Nowadays, forget all of the above. Slabbing had produced higher and higher prices on keys, and so now the lure of profits has removed the focus on each coin's history/mintage. It is common to hear of a set of a Mercury dimes as as a key date, a few semi keys and the rest is "junk silver." Junk silver, before grading companies, was something I remember only referring to 1964 (or so) coins since there were so many.

People used to enjoy each coin for what it was. Now a lot of them are just seen as fillers for holes in order to have a set.

I have written too much anyway...so...

Back when ANACs started, we actually used to joke that since these guys were seemingly arrogant in setting themselves up as THE coin experts, then someday someone else would start a scam business and tell people they would evaluate how well the grading companies had done their job in grading their coin.

Note the following is NOT a negative meant to be aimed at anyone. This is an accurate representation of what ewe used to say...

We actually said back then that we "knew" nothing like that could ever happen b/c no one would be stupid enough to pay good money for it.

Marketing sure is powerful enough to change perspective of the masses over time!

Again - if someone enjoys slabs and a (Coke...oops ), CAC - then that is your own business/fun. Fun is what we personally define it to be or it is not fun anymore

Slabs have reduced the amount of thought that a lot of people put into coins in general.

There is something called "market acceptable" grading we are seeing more and more of with certain series. This is where the coin has a problem and is technically a Details coin, maybe an old cleaning that is somewhat retoned (Seated Liberty), light corrosion and rim rings (early coppers). It seems that TPGs aren't always strict in adding the dreaded "Details" note to the label because they are saying the market will still accept the coin as good enough. But the coin still has the problem, noted or not. And it will certainly one day impact the value.

Part of learning about fakes is holding them. Should someone only ever hold slabbed coins, they have little exposure and therefore remain rather unlearned. Fakes are a fascinating field; modern dupes made to fool collectors, contemporary counterfeits that traded undetected for decades as a part of the economy and traveled the world and became part of history.

Buyers should have the knowledge themselves to study the coin regardless of the label and judge it on it's one merits.

But the reliance on whatever the label says has given a lot of people reason to not study them as much as in the past because it's easier and takes less brain power to not think much. Knowledge, which is the soul of this hobby, is in no way increasing these days. Trading solely based on an opinionated label is not an advancement of the hobby. It's basically stock trading for many.

Consider researching the trading card market as a comparative and see the influence that PSA has. Their opinions, I mean slabs, cause even more wild volatility. At least coins have intrinsic value in the metal and face values. That market is cardboard. It's wild just how profit hungry and rabid those folks get over the grades. Also note how fast most cards lose value after release, but when a "generational talent" comes around just how far values will skyrocket. The amount of speculative buying is crazy, and cards can change hands several times in short periods before anyone ever actually touches it. Stock markets gone wild! We see this numismatic ally with new issues like silver eagles and proof sets as submitters chase for 70'grades and almost anything else becomes fodder.

I find the very existence of CAC hilarious! I study economics and it is so interesting to see the functioning of the market in this way - people will always profit from uncertainty and the desire of people to be insured / gain certainty on their item.

Apologies if this bores people but I want to share an important aspect of my work. A link I have drawn is between the rare coin market and the used car market. The used car market is often described as "a market for lemons", because when buying a used car it is hard for most non expert buyers to verify weather the car is mechanically sound. As a result, sellers who happen to have a very good car (say in the top 1% of mechanically sound cars) would not want to sell their car on this market as a buyer would not pay for its true value since they cannot verify its quality. As a result, the seller seeks "signals" such as warranty, certificates and other proof of quality. This eventually separates the market into cars of good quality with this proof and cars of bad quality with no proof. I feel like this is similar for most buyers on online auctions - it is hard to verify if the coin is genuine and if it has been cleaned by just photos. As a result, sellers who know their coin is genuine with certainty and perhaps who also know it does not have any condition flaws, might be more tempted to either keep their coin in their collection or get it graded, because they cannot achieve its true value selling unslabbed on ebay as an ebay buyer is 'pricing in' the chance of the coin having some flaws and their slight uncertainty if it is genuine. As a result, just like the used car market, the good coins and less good coins are separated.

Of course there are caveats to this. There are some sellers (those who inherited coins or absolute beginner collectors) who cannot tell if a coin is genuine or has condition flaws so will just put all of their coins on ebay (or perhaps submit all for slabbing). Also, since slabbing comes at a price, at the lower end of the coin market there are plenty where slabbing is not an option. These cases all provide things that are interesting to me to study.

Thanks for reading my stuff here, please give me suggestions on if anything doesn't sound right.

Collects82 said:



First - I know there are slab collectors who are very intelligent people. They understand they are buying opinion and do not mind the grades can change if cracked and resubmitted. They enjoy what I call the slab+coin+label hobby with its competitions for getting the best grade on a label they can. More power to them! They are enjoying their hobby in the way they like to.

Second - marketers are smart enough to know the psychology of the masses. I have no doubt when starting ANACs clear back in '72 that they KNEW humans tend to be lazy when given the chance and the KNEW some people seem to need to hear the word "expert" attached to anything and will accept this kind of opinion blindly (not a negative term here).

I also am of the OPINION ANACS knew there would be the more skeptical people out there calling ANACS nuts for thinking they were a needed service. But ANACS also, I THINK, the concept that the sheer size of population means there are an awful lot of people of the need-an-expert mentality. ANACS opened their business and it took awhile to sort those people out into their customer base. I think I mentioned it took until 1986 for the next large rival - PCGS - to come on the scene. This HINTs (no proof - keep that in mind!) it took from 1972 until 1986 for ANACS to be accepted by enough hobbyists as legitimate in order for a second rival company to try to take a share of the market. NGC was the next year. This was starting into the 90s when all the companies invested a LOT and came out with their (as they said) more accurate systems eliminating human error. No doubt a marketing move in the newly established rival business atmosphere.

Then, as said before, the internet grew the market base and.well.back to the human system which brings in more profits. Again.please note that last paragraph is all speculation based on typical business actions in the market which will go where the profits are, and the introduction of "new and improved" for sake of profit. It is all assumption based upon timing of historical events. There is no science involved.

Hey, I guess I would make a good grading company

@UoE_Student. I decided to take a different approach. I will comment on your last post by inserting red text.



BTW - I want to mention there are some slabbing company benefits to the hobby that are undeniable.
1. The references provided online such as coin hobby interests like the background of a coin series etc. are available online.
2. The (great) online high resolution pictures of numerous examples of the same coin (and the grades the company gave them) allow for excellent examples of the coins for anyone to see as well as providing a baseline from which to compare a fake coin against.
3. When they get the varieties correct, its great to be able to have a picture of a variety so a person searching for one has seen the target the seek.
These are some of the available resources from the companies I have used (mainly PCGS, but some NGC) personally. I feel these specific areas are some that are mostly neutral from worrying about the actual assigned grade since the point in question is not grade accuracy, but about the coins themselves.

This literally made me laugh out loud because of how true it is. So now people not only pay for an opinion, but are willing to pay more for an opinion on an opinion.

In the sport cards world, the big players are PSA and BG. It's no different than NGC or PCGS in that people are adding perceived value to human opinions. To make things worse, PSA has been caught multiple times where they didn't determine that cards had been trimmed or altered and this resulted in a card going from a 7 to a 9 or 10 once resubmitted. I have been out of collecting those for awhile and not sure if they have something similar to CAC or not.

Regardless, in both hobbies I have noticed that people who are big proponents of grading get quite defensive when the flaws are pointed out with the grading companies. Personally, I enjoy grading my own coins and use a combination of a book called Making The Grade, the Red Book, and online guides to learn what I can so that I can try to be fairly accurate. At the end of the day, though, it's still an opinion just like the grading companies.