Greysheet VS What you pay for coins

I don't use the grey sheet for a guide. I typically use HA auction archives for my guidance. I'll also peak at NGC and PCGS price guides as well. Those tend to be a little high IMO.

 

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I just went to a coin show this last weekend, and the trend seemed to be that the dealer would look up the graded coin and charge somewhere between Bid and Ask, and ignore the old adage, "buy the coin. not the slab". I was able to pick up a few PQ coins because of this.

Talking to some of the dealers, dealer to dealer was doing well, but retail was down, that's why they are going Ask-. On the other hand some may be overpricing their slabs to give the illusion of giving the buyer a good buy. I bought a VAM marked $150 for $100 and when I got home I checked the price and it came out to be $110.

Talk about extremes, one dealer friend said he did $80,000 (not a misprint) dealer to dealer, but only $5,000 retail. He still considered it a good show, he was able to get a few coins he needed for clients back home.

 

My approach is basically the same. I look at SB auction results and at recent auction results in Coin Facts too. I find prices in PCGS and NGC price guides to be inflated. Heritage Value Index seems to be more realistic for collector prices.

Cal

 

I agree with your estimate, but at some point the stock that dealers buy from each other has to be sold to the general public to make a profit. What they buy from each other is to fill their stock or for coins that their customers are looking for.

 

Sounds like a Ponzi scheme to me. No, seriously, at some point the stock has to be sold at ask or more if you're a TV huckster, rather than bid, which you probably paid, to another dealer.

I do agree that dealers need to turn over stock as quickly as possible. I just bought ten 5 oz. ATB coins from a dealer, at not much more than melt (I'm a stacker), because he needed to move them to buy coins that a customer wanted to sell him.

 

John-

Or in my case, since it's a set of XF 3CS...

I think it's a combination - all four of them, plus two details coins - have been sold by the same dealer out west. I'm pretty sure he knows the market and the prices have declined a little bit as the additional coins came to market. I also thought the 2nd and 3rd (mine) were the nicest and I don't like the one on eBay (4th) as much.

Sounds like both dealers (whose prices are incorporated) and everyone benefits from having more sales reported. How do we make this a low friction process for dealers when coins trade off the exchange, e.g. at a show, to report prices???

Thanks, but that's AU55 not XF... you are still deriving XF prices (admittedly a condition rarity) from AU via some magic that I'm not sure I agree with since I can't find coins to buy at that magic price... and when I go to sell, I get low ball offers.

 

Don't forget all the people who crack open slabs, numerous times, to get a higher grade and thus a higher price for their coin. One person can inflate the population of a particular coin by doing the above practice.

Then there's the TV coin shows who invent their own grading company, charge as if it was graded by a top tier grading company, and then claim that the coin has a low population number. I've always disliked the term "population", I've always felt that the less informed confused this term for mintage. Less popular coins are less likely to be graded, and therefore have a low "population". Invented TPGSs will always have a low population for coins it "grades/certifies".

I got a huge kick out of the TV show selling Donald Trump labeled 2016 proof ASEs. They keep saying, over and over, that it had a low population and could run out, when all they have to do is make more. Borders on false advertising. Wait until they bring those ""certified" coins to a dealer to sell.

 

edited

 

...but, as always, it's a much less misleading indicator when set in the proper Y-axis context:



It's not going to the moon, but neither is it falling off a cliff.

 

I was very happy when HA expanded their pricing table at the bottom of each listing. I use the HA value index as my primary guide when viewing the table.

 

I use CDN as a guideline. There isn't many coins that I would pay GS bid for at this time. Maybe certain gold pieces and BN MS large cents.

 

Or you could show it corrected for inflation as an even more honest presentation.

 

I think this is only the case if you view rare coins as an index fund, which they are not. Not only have some specific series outperformed others, and so on, but coins bought in 2000 are likely upgrade targets in the current market, meaning you cannot compare them grade for grade. It's all too complicated to sum up in a snapshot, and probably best if collectors didn't stare at pricing graphs all day anyway. If ROI is your primary intention, I'd stick to the liquidity of financial markets.

 

The graphs all report accurate numbers. But by truncating the range (the vertical axis), the graphs exaggerate recent activity.

The 3-year graph goes from 9/10 to 1/10 of the chart height, implying an 80-90% loss; the 10-year graph is even more extreme. The full graph accurately conveys a loss of about 5% over the last 3 years, and 10% or so from the 2008 peak. (For bonus points, it also spotlights the true ~65% drop from the 1989 bubble.)

If you want to display performance of an asset over time, you've got to start the Y-axis at zero -- unless your goal is to make small fluctuations more prominent.

 

I went to a show once and was checking out a dealers coins when I spotted a NGC MS-65 Morgan that really had some flash. When I asked to see the coin the dealer told me it would be more than a MS-65 price. Told me he bought the coin in a PCGS MS-66 Slab and he thought it was so nice he figured NGC would give it a MS-67 so he cracked it out and sent it in and they downgraded it to a MS-65