The Coin Grading Service - UK (CGS-UK) has closed according to an email I received from their successor today. It is apparently succeeded by London Coin Grading Service (LCGS) and the old records are available - for a fee...
Not unexpected, few British collectors are likely to have any use for such a parasitic service, most are happy to make up their own minds about condition and value. I have never bought a slabbed coin in 20 years of coin dealing and collecting.
TPG is almost exclusively a US centric practice. The revised NGC population report provides an easy view to evaluate how prevalent it is elsewhere. China, South Africa, Australia and Canada top the list elsewhere. From my review, China and Australia are predominantly NCLT. The counts for some Chinese circulating coins are high by world coin standards, but still a miniscule fraction of the total. I suspect it will be somewhat popular there in the future since these collectors have more counterfeiters in their backyard than probably anywhere else. I haven't seen many Australian coins in plastic outside of US auction and dealer websites. I don't believe most collectors in that market care for it, as I don't recall a single one in a Noble Numismatics auction and it is the largest firm in that market. Canada also has a lot of TPG which is a combination of NCLT plus I believe mostly buying by US collectors. South Africa wholeheartedly has adopted TPG, or at least the newer "investors" certainly prefer it. But still, over 200,000 or more than 50% of the total is accounted for by one coin, the 2008 Mandela 90th BD 5R. It was somewhat of a national obsession apparently, on par with beanie babies here. At the peak, coin broker South African Coin Company purportedly sold an MS-69 for the equivalent of $339,000 at the then FX rate. It will undoubtedly go down in history as the most overpriced coin and worst value ever. Even at a "discount" of 99% from this price, it would still be exorbitantly overpriced.
Look on Numisbid. A large percentage of their listings are certified (mostly PCGS). Many dealers in Sydney (at least on their websites) have a good percentage of certified coins as well. The Perth mint definitely throws off their NLCT percentages of certified, but considering the shipping costs and the difference in currency value they have a lot more certified coins then you would expect just looking at the logistics. I also believe their export laws restrict some coins or require a waiver in order to be able to send them off to be graded. If one of the TPGs ever set up an office there (unlikely given the cost of operating there) I would wager that you would see significant submission numbers. EDIT TO ADD: When I was there I had heard that a lot of dealers there had embraced the concept partially because of the strong consumer protection laws they have. Whether or not this is true I do not know, but it certainly seems that they aren't fighting it given that there is no way US sellers are responsible for the amount of certified coins that have ended up there.
I have noticed the PCGS population reports are higher than NGC. The reason I mentioned Noble Numismatics is because they have a large number of expensive coins in their auctions, especially by world coins standards yet none of them are graded. From what I can see, Australia has the second highest price level in the world after the US. There are certainly a reasonable to large number in other markets such as the UK, Russia and China but this appears to be a small or relatively small minority since Australia has only been striking coins for somewhat over 150 years and gold coinage almost exclusively the first 50. I agree with you that most of the TPG buying is local because I don't believe it comes from the US. This as opposed to the UK where I believe the vast majority of expensive and higher grade coins are bought by US collectors who have a strong affinity for this coinage.
PCGS is definitely their preferred TPG. Though if PCGS doesn't get it's act together soon with turn around times that may quickly start to change since people don't like having to wait 2-3 months to get their coins back. That may just be a government issue with some of the coins they had in those lots. If you look on http://arts.gov.au/movable/export/list certain numismatic coins fall under their class B export list which requires governmental permission to export them which is necessary for grading. Being an auction house they may have just made a decision at some point to not add the cost and time of grading/applying for licenses to export them for certification. I am not sure how hard that process would be to get the permits or the cost but if that was their reasoning I can certainly understand it given their success without grading to this point. Even without the regulation hurdle sending mid five figure and 6 figure coins overseas would carry a substantial cost either raising their fees or eating into their profit rather significantly The Royal Australian Mint really does a great job of promoting collecting there. I believe they currently have a program with one of their major grocery chains for special 2 dollar coins right now and they do a lot with special circulation coinage that gets people interested that may not have been otherwise. They even have a tour going around with a mint group to various cities. The US mint could learn a lot from them. It also doesn't hurt that a lot of their designs are very nice and they have a population that is very proud of it's heritage. I am not surprised the collecting base is strong given the total size of their country.
Agree. I have heard Australia called the "lucky country" for its economic and other advantages. The same applies to their numismatic market. In the past, I have attempted to identify the attributes which account for the difference in the price level between the US and other markets. I think I listed eight of them where the US has all of these but other countries have few or none. Australia also has most or all of them. They inherited the UK's collecting tradition. It is an economically prosperous country with sufficiently widespread economic affluence versus elsewhere. The variety and supply is large enough to maintain collector interest but not too large to suppress prices, as in most of Europe because the collector base is simply not large enough to absorb the supply at materially higher prices. The coins are not generally "rare" but the supply and quality distribution has a good balance. This as opposed to South Africa Union (and even other series I collect) where the coins are too scarce to be bought by more than a very low number of collectors. And lastly, Australian collectors are apparently also willing to pay high prices because they are used to it whereas most everywhere else, they are not.
I would just like to add to this thread. When I started collecting many years you had little use for graders but such has been the hype/fear factor in buying coins most people on certain platforms are not confident on grading/buying coins.This in turn means that if you want to sell a coin and get a decent price then you have to slab the coin as most ordinary collectors nowadays feel more confident buying them. I have over the last couple of years started slabbing my coins because one day I will decide to sell and this covers most bases.If you don't like slabs then by all means buy the coin and then remove it from the slab, I've done this a couple of times myself as you can still see the coin and judge for yourself whether its MS whatever even if you don't agree with the grade! I agree with the argument that slab grades are open to interpretation by the grader but doesn't this also concur with dealers when they say its Unc when you know its EF?. The one thing I would say grading has over buying raw is that it is very difficult to see if a coin has been repaired, tooled etc unless you carry a microscope around with you and before you start clucking that 'most dealers are honest', yeh right of course they are?. Im not going to go too much into it but I have seen with my own eyes dealers buy damaged coins at auction and sell them as genuine. One dealer I won't mention his name purchased a coin with a listed fault on it at auction for £9000 and weeks later on his stand was the same coin with a price tag of £20000 but I could have it for £15000 if interested! Was there any mention of the fault?....er..........NO, is he a member of the BNTA?....er....yes. Before you say why didn't you report him?.......to whom the old boys network? Let me put it this way the auction house he purchased from was sited right next to him at the coin show and if you could not see this coin and know what was going on then you must of been either a) blind b) stupid or c) in it together. No wonder people buy slabbed
CGS Became LCGS and (Go ahead hate me) I stuck with them. I made a huge mistake! They made simple attribution error after error so I was constantly on the phone or emailing them to correct before they were finally slabbed and had even to send some back as they failed to take action and issued incorrect labels. This week after having debited my card over x3 months ago for grading fees they returned x10 error coins as "Unable To Authenticate" when I emailed them to ask why Semra replied to inform me that as they had been receiving so many error coins they are now no longer going to grade any "modern error coins" Just when I didn't think it possible for this tin pot organisation to sink any lower they pull this 'ace' for their pocket. If you think this is deserving of its own thread please let me know and I will include the correspondence to inform as many people as possible away from this rip off organisation. I am awaiting a refund!
Its worth a try but they are saying that refusing to grade after taking the fee is in their T&C's? Also, it has taken them OVER x3 months to decide not to grade after they took my money, can I even ask the bank to get it back after so long?
Probably, you paid for a service and the service was not performed. They would probably honor the chargeback request.
