How do TPGs find graders?

ICG is steady as they come. They just don't have the heavy marketing the bigger ones have. They stick more to grading coins.

 

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HASN'T been, for sure. But maybe it will going forward ?

Or maybe the newbies are all going to be digital and online players.

Saw an interview with a bunch of coin mover-and-shakers last year and they ALL said that business was doing very well....lots of new buyers....etc.

Let's hope it continues.

 

Will be less and less relevant going forward has it has been for years. I’ve been saying the same thing for years but people don’t like hearing it.

 

Does CAC sticker ANACS and ICG ?

 

Pcgs and ngc

 

I'll add my thoughts to the OP's original question when I have more time.

Oldhoopster, posted: "Insider searching for apprentices at ICG."

LOL. Actually we've needed to hire four new employees so far this year to maintain our fast turnaround times. One is a grader in training. He is in his 20's and a very sharp fast learner.

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Publius2, posted: "I wonder what the turnover rate is at the TPGs? It would seem to me that the burn-out rate might be high. While I love looking at coins as a hobby, doing it for a living at the rate of hundreds per day would get to be a beast after a while. Particularly if I was assigned hundreds of ASEs and the like. How interesting would that be?

Is the work at the TPGs a sweatshop environment with production quotas and the same mind-numbing rotework all day every day? Or is it interesting enough to keep people at it for years on end?

I don't know the answers to these questions but they certainly bear on the original question of getting and keeping what is no doubt a highly skilled and unique workforce."

It depends on the TPGS and how high up your position. I worked at NGC/NCS for ten years and cannot say one bad thing about the company, working conditions, and all the employees except for one. I loved the place and hoped to be there forever. For whatever the reason, my employment was terminated with several others during a business downturn. I was hired a few weeks later by ICG.

JeffC, posted: "Poor ICG... I was reading an article in the APMEX Learning Center, which graded the TPGs as follows: PCGS, NGC, ANACS, ICG. Then that made me wonder "who grades the graders" and what KPIs do they use? And if ICG is the fourth, what do they have to do to make it to No. 3, No. 2, or even No. 1? But that's a thread for another day I guess."

The ranking of the TPGS's has already been discussed. There are valid reasons that NGC and PCGS are either #1 or #2. APMEX is a large coin/bullion dealer. They have a product to "sell." I'm not surprise that the writer simply "barfed-out" commonly held rankings based on what they sell w/o any personal research.

PS I've never seen an ICG or ANACS coin sold by APMEX. I have seen several graded coins they sold that ICG would not cross.

 

I been following this thread and was looking forward to @Insider responding. If anybody knows, it would be him.

I have two friends that are coin dealers. One is an average coin dealer, the other is a high end dealer. I have asked them both about the coins in their personal collections and found that neither is a collector. Their business does not cross their leisure.

And from that perspective I would have to wonder. Would the best grader be someone that is enthusiastic about the hobby? Or would the position be better suited to a detail oriented person that doesn’t know a bust half from a Morgan?

 

Pretty sure they pick em up in the morning in front of Home Depot

 

"How do TPGs find graders?"

https://www.pcgs.com/job/grader
https://www.ngccoin.com/news/article/2257/

Also check glass door. LOL what do they require? Who really knows. They aren't specific.

I mean, it's like "Do you like coins? Think you're the best of the best of the best? Apply today! Salary commensurate with experience..

I think mostly they like to steal each others graders and taking applications from anyone but actually looking for graders from the lower tier TPGs.

 

Lower tier TPGs is not the term I would use, but I understand.

 

You are right, I should have said "the competition TPGs" my bad. Hope I didn't offend SEGS. LOL

 

I've noticed that Great Collections has been auctioning more coins in ICG slabs lately. Also, the bids for these coins have been pretty comparable to recent big two sales. I won a couple nice coins in ICG slabs recently and found the grades to be spot on. The next decision is to get them in PCGS or NGC slabs. If the ICG market remains strong then I won't waste my money doing that unless I want those coins in registry sets. The coin market seems strong right now.

 

I was also wondering about SEGS. It is still around? The only reason I know about SEGS, is that I bought Franklin Half Dollar that had been graded by them. The coin is beautiful and graded an MS65, if I recall. Sorry for no pictures. It would take a while to get it from my security area.
So! What about SEGS?

 

And it should be AI-automated...computer-aided, et al...given the times and technologies of the day. Specs and standards for each coin can be written to programs for scanning/examining each example and rendering much more fair/equal, consistent and comprehensive grades/results. Just as it's become/becoming integral in and to various/multiple other industries and in sports, computer analysis is needed badly for TPG. For a while it may/should be a combination of both until confidence and acceptance in programs and grade results are comfortable and proven, but it needs to happen IMO.

 

Only one way to get a coin from ICG to PCGS or NGC...at least at the same grade and assuming you believe the ICG grade is correct/strong...and that's to crack it out, submit it raw and hope. I have a $10-grand older Lincoln cent if in NGC or PCGS slab...came to me by a listing accident...but valued at virtually/comparatively nothing in its current ICG MS68RD slab. And the irony is, an ICG rep just last week personally told me...his experienced/professional opinion...that it would be virtually impossible to cross-grade any ICG (in slab) to PCGS or NGC slab and receive a lateral/same grade. Are there rare exceptions...? Probably, but rare is usually bloody-rare and I much prefer well-done.

 

Let me clear something up for a lot of people here who think this would be easy.. you are literaly talking gigs of data and thousands of variables for each type and date of coin. At this point AI does NOT exist and is not even close to coming into being with even the biggest baddest quantum computers being built today. No computer is self programing.. This means MONTHS if not YEARS of effort and programing to build a program that could grade a single coin... yes 50% of that code would carry on to the the next coin but each individual variable of each and every coin would have to be entered.. Programs of this nature are already being worked on, but a solid dependable computer grading system is still decades away at best...

 

Double the gigs and effort for 2 sides. Then a similar effort for edge.

 

exactly!!

 

A few years back a contributor on here was going to start a grading service he claimed. I know most members on then remember the Ed Wood School of Grading. He even showed diagrams of his to be company layout. I remember a few of the regular posters ripping his philosophy of grading.

 

At the current level of technology, all AI means is that you have a generic system that can review large sets of data and extract correlations.

Let’s say we had a single Lincoln cent, and that everyone agreed it was the most perfect example of an MS65 that all grading services certified. First off, you would need to have a controlled photographic setup, so the lighting was consistent and did not obscure any details. Then you would want to photograph the coin from multiple angles, probably with two or three lights to help bring out the contours as bright highlights and darker shadows.

Next you have a couple of approaches.

One would be to feed all the images into a program that aligns and matches them to create a mathematical model of the surface. (Homographic tomograpy). Then you could start adding more coins, photos, and data to build and idealized model of the coin. Algorithms exist to compute the variance of an image from the ideal model. This could be tuned so that the more degraded the markers in the image, the lower the grade.

The second approach would be to “train” an AI package to detect similarities and differences between coins. You would accumulate as many sets of data as possible by, again, photographing as many coins as possible under precise conditions. Feed in each set of data, along with the grade, denomination, and possibly the date/mint mark, and let the AI software identify correlations between the data sets and the grade. It may well find that some poorly produced years may have special exceptions to the overall deduced rules.

This is just like the Captcha images you often see - “Which squares contain a traffic signal” - or hills, or road signs. Your responses actually help train recognition software, from what I read.

After building the dataset, you can start feeding in new images and letting the software respond with the grade. After having done this enough times, and then feeding back into the system the actual grade, you should start converging on a reliable process.

Of note here is that more data makes better results. And better, widely agreed upon grades are essential to building a reliable data store with dependable rules.

Would this need to be done separately for each series? Is there enough available data to train the system? Can the system pick up the essence of MS65 if you feed in a mixture of coin denominations? Are all gold coins the same? Copper Silver?

Those questions would come out of the attempt to load data, but whether they affect the reliability would have to be determined as the project went along.