Buying Price Vs Krause List

Krause can over and under represent the value of coins. As a general rule, I feel that the prices of modern coins are often higher than they should be and the prices of older coins are often lower than they actually sell for.

If you look in the front pages of any Krause catalogue you will see on the Acknowledgements page a whole list of names; many of these names are people that help Krause supply pricing data, usually within their own specialized field of interest. Some of these people live in America and give prices realized in American auctions and sales, others are in the country that the coins come from and give local knowledge. For example, the guy that supplies the Krause pricing data for Australian and New Zealand tokens from the 1800's is a local; he goes to my coin club here in Brisbane, Australia.

How accurate the pricing is depends in large part on the knowledge and effort these contributors provide. If they don't happen to have any knowledgeable contributors in a certain country's coins, or if the prices realized in the US differ greatly from prices realized locally, or if prices change dramatically between the contributor's report and the actual printing of the catalogue, then Krause's prices can deviate from reality.