Just picked up another $20 Liberty Double eagle, I found this super nice 1878-S in A/U 55 had the opportunity for a MS 61 but it had allot of gauges and distractions along the face and the crown, this 55 looks way better a more complete of a coin in my opinion, I like the old west so the years in the late 1870,s to mid 1880,s is what I am looking for stay tuned more coming
You are so right, the A/U grade almost always trumps MS 60 and 61,s as there usually scratched up pretty bad, the higher grades might have a little more luster but that would be all, they had a 61 in this exact coin but it didn’t compare to the one I got.
Do you own or are you looking at the Carson City Double Eagles ? Much rarer, demand has skyrocketed, but mid-to-low 50's is somewhat affordable to the average collector if they are willing to spend.
When you looking at coins from this era they can go for upwards of to $40 - $50 K per coin depending on the year even A/U which is my favorite grade many 55,s and 58,s of better eye appeal then allot of 60-62 the only thing is you get a little more luster but the faces are pretty scraped up, I take it on a coin by coin bases.
Surprisingly not, at least way in the past when I bought from them more frequently. Whenever buying a "BU" sight unseen coin, I tended to find that I almost always got just that, a coin that was an MS-60 or MS-61, with your typical bag marks and still some original luster here and there. Occasionally a coin marked "BU" was more like an AU-58 or AU55, but the dates on these coins were so common anyway that the difference in price was negligible enough to where it really didn't matter. Think about it, you are not going to get a rare coin by any means. Their "random date" selections are going to always be the 3 or 4 most common dates for any coin. You are never going to get a rare date, period!.