Could This Hobby Go The Way Of My Other One?

I also collect Comics. CGC is the TPG for that Hobby. It is owned by the same folks that own NGC.

If you think there are two camps in coins you should see the Comics forums. There are Collectors and there are Speculators.

By and large Collectors will not buy slabbed comics. The reason is price. The price to slab a Comic. You see, for High end Comics there is no set price for grading. Instead you pay 2.5% of Fair Market Value(FMV). And that FMV is for a slabbed book, not an unslabbed book, for which multiply by 3.

So how long until NGC starts the same policy with Coins? One of the big concerns is that with pricing predicated on FMV, it then becomes advantageous to the TPG to grade as high as possible. This has led to a loss of confidence in the grade assigned by the TPG, among the collector segment of the hobby. On the other hand, the speculators love it. Because they took a raw 20 dollar book from one table at a convention/show (that was graded as vg/f) and then walked it through the grading both where it got a VF and is now worth in the $200 range. Who then is the market? Not the general collecting public. It is rather the Speculator market. There is now a total disconnect between the two markets.

Seriously would you rather spend upwards of $1500 to slab a a coin? Or would you like to take that $1500 and buy yourself another coin or coins? Remember this is not pie in the sky stuff, this is the actual pricing structure already in place in another division of NGC.

Thoughts?