I'm curious if the sniping things work there too. I was outbid with less than a minute to go, but I was right there watching it and snaked them back in the last few seconds. Maybe someone was online also hitting refresh? They had not placed a bid at all until that final minute. Cost me $40. Seems weird that someone was also sitting there watching that specific coin. Just wondering what I was up against I guess.
If there are coins I’m after on GC, I do that very thing as well. I make sure that I’m available at auction end and keep hitting the refresh. I’ve had a few that had this same scenario, getting outbid and having to jump in to move my own max (if indeed it was worthy to go over my initial high bid).
If you were watching the auction you can bet someone else was as well. Not saying there isn’t a bot but a lot of people watch the auction lots there are interested in. I do but I don’t bid in the GC auction.
It just seemed odd that they jumped in with less than a minute to go, with no previous bids. I had not seen that before on GC. Typically someone has been outbid already and then watches during the last few minutes if they really want it (like I did). So I was curious if it was automated in this case.
Not saying this happens on GC, but a lot of nefarious goings on in the auction/bidding process on line. Happened several times with me where I was bidding up a coin to my max and stopped (way to go, self control!) and saw later the coin had been sold for UNDER my last bid. Could only think there was someone or something outbidding me with the hope of driving up the price.
It would be highly detrimental to their reputation to do such a thing and relatively little profit to them. I'd only be suspicious if it happened repeatedly when I had been winning an item at a "steal" price and even then it is understandable. Odds are they don't do it and if they do it's a human doing it. Programming a machine is easy enough but then it's more like a "conspiracy" and good companies just don't do it and can get caught.
I don't have experience with Great Collections, but this type of thing happens all the time on eBay. Most of the time I think it's manual, but there are automated tools specifically for this purpose.
I don't think there are any known sniper programs for GC like there are for eBay. Most of those lost second bids are people manually entering their max in the final few seconds. GC is still small enough where someone can easily look through all the items, certainly in one or two categories, and find the listings that are still under priced. For example, I look through the world coins each week and if I see one I really want, I will wait for the last few seconds to bid. If it's something that I think is priced low but I don't necessarily have to have it, then I will bid my max early and let it ride. Most of the time someone outbids me but a few times I have won auctions that way.
I have personally witnessed auctioneers bid up online bidders to find their upper limits, then back out their bids until the online bidder wins. This is why I do not bid on online auctions. Well, that, and the fact that I'm normally swimming in more coins than I can reasonably process anyway, and mostly am trying to SELL more coins than I buy. And I find plenty of what I collect driving around to LCS, who are usually happy these days to have a customer wanting to buy (vs. the hordes wanting to sell.)
I guess the easiest explanation is that I have a doppelganger out there. The bidding had already exceeded both PCGS and NGC price guides by quite a bit when I increased my max with about 5 minutes left to get past two bidders who had bumped it up on Friday. So I doubt any of the bidders thought it was underpriced. Then this new bidder jumped in with 54 seconds left. It's a 1900 25c in AU55. I only diligently monitor GC and Heritage, and collectors seem to clutch their 1900's because they don't come up there that often. I've been trying to get all the hub type combinations for 1900 for the past five years, and focused on P mint because it has 5 out of 6 of them. This II/II was the last of the 5 that I needed. My census shows that only 5% of the Philly coins have this combo. The last one I picked up was two years ago. Others that came up were always a combo I already had. So I guess it's possible that someone else is doing the same thing, which is unusual because the II/II combo is relatively unknown outside BCCS and my forum posts. Maybe I shouldn't have publicized the third obverse hub so much.
I will admit that I too do the track refresh thing and 90% of the time I just place a bid and let it ride but I have on occasion did the last second bid. Sometimes I am not sure who has actually figured out that a specific coin is a rarer type, and or what the going price should be. I recently had an experience on GC where I placed a very large bid on a coin; (at least 2.5 times the going rate for the common version); only to have someone else place an even larger last second bid. You can't win them all. I console myself with the simple fact; "There is always another auction with another coin to come"). James
I looked at the coin and it is not a rare holder or a toner, so that leaves the most likely reason being that someone else is also looking for the hub types like you are (maybe even inspired by you ). It could also be a bidding error (someone bid on the wrong coin or saw something special that actually wasn't there).
It also has "In GUD We Trust", a broken O. I vaguely recall that there was a BCCS article on this years ago, and I did some research on it looking for other examples. I'll have to dig up the article and see if it was 1900. Doesn't seem like there'd be much premium just for that though. But I do like coins with a little something extra. Here's the GC image since everyone can figure out what coin it was by now anyway. Edit to add that it also appears to have a die clash under the jaw. I'll have to see when it arrives. Another of my 1900's has the same.
