Threats to our hobby.....

Vess is correct there absolutely is a dilution of collectors. The last few coin shows I went to 95% of the people were dinosaurs like myself.
Well, old dinosaurs die out and they are not being replaced by many young collectors, because in the current system coins are almost meaningless.
So there's really no attraction, fascination to collect them.

 

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To her credit, Mary Brooks made some efforts to bring in YNs--putting a mint gift shop in the White House for people taking tours. "Penny Bags" were also intended to attract YNs.

 

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IMO, it's appalling that we went done this road of allowing others to do something that is so central to the pricing of a coin. "Dirty deeds done (not so) dirt cheap." And at the end of the day we just become weaker and more dependent on it.

Adam Smith's Pin Factory should have been called Beer Belly Factory.

 

Well, there are two sides to every coin (pun intended). In the case of escalating prices, while I could not afford to acquire the coins today that I already own, it also means that the collection has appreciated by a huge amount.

Agree on the auction premiums. Used to be straight 5% sellers premium and 10% buyers premium with little in the way of negotiating with most auction houses. I'm fairly certain the instant Heritage Galleries boosted their buyer's premium to 22%, that sellers were demanding their 110% terms be boosted to 111.5% to compensate for their "loss". For those who consigned to January sales at a lesser rate only to get blindsided by the boost in buyer's premiums on short notice, if I were them, I'd be looking for another auction venue to consign to.

 

Yes, a paper money dealer I know was complaining about the higher buyers’ fee after he had made a consignment to Heritage.

 

OK, so I'll take the other side of this debate, happily. TPGs are GREAT for the hobby. Let's take baseball cards as an example. Back when I was growing up, kids generally did not know how to grade cards. So a card dealer would leave a stack of raw cards behind a display, and the cards might have slight defects that detracted from their value. Despite these defects, they all sold for the same price. So I unknowingly paid for mint cards that were not mint. Today, especially with TPGs, pulling that off would be much harder. A person can just buy a slabbed card with a reasonable degree of confidence that it is what the seller purports it to be. The same logic applies to coins, comic books, posters, etc.

 

When I was collecting them in the early ‘60s, who heard of grades? I preferred the cards with white reverses over the grey reverses. I noted the centering, but that was just me. All most of cared about was whether is was Mickey Mantle or Harry Cheti who was a journeyman catcher. Finding a Willie Mays card was a big deal.

Of course some kids stuck the cards in their bicycle spokes which kind of lowered the state of preservation.

 

This is an interesting discussion! So there has been a general concern in this forum about gradeflation, which intrigues me. So I try to avoid MS61 coins as much as possible, because the old-schoolers might say they are AU58. So I respect old-schoolers and maintaining standards. Anyway, CAC comes out with their own slab, supposedly much harsher in their grading than even NGC and PCGS, and now on Reddit you see people crying about this. So if the TPG is too strict, they are damned, and if they are too loose, like allegedly ICG, they are damned. I actually like strict graders, and generally respect the top-tier TPGs (CAC, NGC, PCGS, ANACS, and even ICG). But the crying over CAC is real on Reddit.

 

Maybe that's another plus with TPGs? Kids are less likely to put plastic slabs into spokes, and the slabs could protect both cards and coins from hits with other objects.

 

Certification is great for classic cars. If you buy a 67 corvette thats NCRS 98.9 means its 100% numbers matching, and perfect like off assembly line, if not better. Same for restomods like my 58 vette. Here it was completely rebuilt from frame up, everything brand new, classic body, interior, chrome on modern drivetrain, 600 HP LS-4 under the hood.
For coins its a problem. TPG slabs make people go gaga, they really think a MS-65 GEM is the cats meow, while that same overgraded coin might get a GEF grade from CNG, Künker, Morton & Eden, and hammer much lower. TPG coins are great for the consignee but not for the buyer. I have proved it myself, I missed a MS-65 Napoleon 1812-A 20 Francs (Heritage) went 5600US. Same coin reappeared in German auction, did not sell. I bought said coin as unsold lot for 1800E. The German firm stated, 1812-A 20 Francs fast st.= AU but in US slab MS-65!!!!!

 

Whenever I tried to find a Slabbed MS-60 I kept hearing that song from the Jeffersons.

 

I think this is, in the numismatic world, a first-world problem so to speak. So I will agree that if you are very skilled as a grader, you don't need TPGs. But what about counterfeit coins that have led to thousands of dollars in losses? If I am ever going to spend more than $1,000 on a coin, you can bet it will be graded. It's the same if I decide to buy a sports card or poster for more than that amount. I want to make sure an expert has looked it over, with the knowledge that I lack the same skill in grading. To me, given the liquidity of the U.S. market - and again this is just my preference - it's fine if other countries use different standards of grading. Maybe this can be taken advantage of in arbitrage? Generally, and this is me being blunt, TPGs lead to increased prices for collectibles, because they give buyers more confidence, boosting liquidity. So we can be proud of our collections in the boonies somewhere, admiring our collections by ourselves, but I think if we are honest, we all take some pride in the value of our collections.

 

As a veteran collector, I think that a properly grade AU-58 is worth as much or more than a properly graded, but ugly, MS-60 or 61. It’s been like that since I really got into early U.S. coins in the early 1980s. The trouble is grade-flation has “degraded” the AU-58 grade. Now AU-55 or even the new grade 53 sometimes sneaks into the holders.

The CAC slabs are conservatively graded from what I have seen, but I’ve seen high asking prices for them too. You have to decide if the higher price is really worth it.

The CAC sticker is right the vast majority of the time, but it too has followed the grade-flation on some of the CAC approved slabs. Once more, there is no fool proof substitute for knowing how to grade coins.

 

Aesthetics will always play a factor in valuation. So lately I've been buying blast white MS62 Peace dollars, and I'd rather have a blast white MS62 than a toned MS63 or even MS64. Sure, there may be more contact marks with an MS62, but it does not detract at all from the attractiveness, at least without a loupe. I also feel pretty confident that I will be able to recoup most of my cost if I ever have to sell, thanks to the TPGs!

 

Something about the blast white coins (especially Morgans) makes me think they are dipped. Since coins were not put in slabs 100 years ago, (or otherwise protected from the toning elements) how can all of the coins have remained blast white? They can't and I believe they are chemically enhanced which over time will make it's presence known on the coin.

 

There are lots of circumstances that can protect coins from toning. Think of a big bag of Morgans sitting in a bank vault for decades. The ones on the outside get textile toning, but the ones on the inside get nothing, because the outer layer of coins soaks up those gases.

 

This is an interesting argument and one that I have thought of, but you could say that tarnish is technically corrosion, and without a removal of the source the coin will continue to degrade. So it seems when coins are dipped, the corrosion is removed, but that can cause its own problem if they are not properly dipped. I have also read here or elsewhere that 80 to 90 percent of early 20th-century silver dollars were dipped, so by now we should see the damage if it were to occur. Lately I've been buying some blast white Peace dollars in rattler holders, and they seem to have held up in the last 40 years or so.

Regarding the ethics of dipping, which is prevalent, it seems it's the "juicing" of the hobby that most seem to accept as above board. After all, when grading coins, we look for surface alterations. Well, technically, dipping coins alters the surface, but perhaps it's just a matter of degree that makes it acceptable or not - it's just not noticeable enough, so the method gets a pass, unless done excessively, which ruins the luster or appearance.

Then again, cleaning coins used to be considered acceptable in the hobby. So a lot is arbitrary.