I was eyeballing a coin and was trying determine it's grade from the shoddy seller pics. I could see that it was slabbed by INS.. apparently out of business. [TABLE="width: 97%"] [TD="class: ftalternatingbaroff, width: 99%, bgcolor: #CED0DA, align: right"][TABLE="width: 100%"] [TD="colspan: 2"]INS (International Numismatic Society Authentication Bureau) Little known service based in Washington DC. Active beginning in the mid 70's it specialized in Non-US coins at a time when only ANACS would certify Non-US coins and no one else would grade them. INS actually began grading coins before ANACS making it the first grading firm. Once they began grading the number of US coins submitted rose greatly and the number of “international” coins dropped to a miniscule percentage of those submitted. This company had a very low profile and most people didn’t know it existed even while they were in operation.. They used a certificate back in the 70's and 80's. They announced in Jan 1989 that they would start using slabs Jan 27th 1989. [/TD] [/TABLE] [/TD] [/TABLE] So.. since mine is slabbed.. it must have been circa.post 1989. Does anyone remember this TPG and if they were a decent grader? This post is just for my own curiousity...since I already bought the coin. I will prolly crack it out of it's slab when I get ready to send a bunch for grading. Maybe. It's my understanding that if you have a graded coin from a TPG that tends to grade upwards of what it's really worth... you might be better off sending it w/o the grading so as to not influence the new grade. Sound reasonable? This also from Google... The Greysheet's biggest weakness is that it ignores the current state of the grading services. It ranks some of the services in terms of how the market values coins in their slabs. But it fails to rank SEGS, ACG, and NTC, three grading services that have a significant market presence. And it ranks two grading service with virtually no market presence, INS (International Numismatic Society Authentication Bureau), which folded around 1992, and NCI (Numismatic Certification Institute), which folded around 1988. Whether deserved or not, this creates an aura of unreliability over all of its data. Oh.. and this.. the second guy down... http://www.icgcoin.com/TheTeam/tabid/505/Default.aspx
Yeah.. so? LOL. And people say I'm the spelling Nazi.... http://prollyisnotprobably.com/ Did you have anything to add to the conversation.. ?
Check the back of the slab and if it has an Anston PA address on it DON'T crack it out! There are six varieties of INS holder, two photocertificate and four slabs. The company started out in Washington DC and moved to Philadelphia PA in 1992 where the fifth variety came from. At that point it was thought that the company went out of business. In 2002 though the sixth variety turned up now from Anston PA and copyrighted 1997! Only a single example of INS 6 has been seen. Apparently by 1997 all that existed of INS was the President Charles Hoskins who had moved from Philadelphia to Aston PA. Why he produced the INS 6 slab I do not know. Possibly he was slabbing his own collection and disposing of it. Charles Hoskins was a former Mint employee and the first Director of ANACS. He left ANACS in 1976 to become the President of INS when ANACS moved from Washington DC to Colorado Springs. He died in sept 2008.
Now that would be different. Can't recall ever seeing anything in the Grey Sheet that I didn't believe.
I'm not.... hence this post. Not being very familiar with grey sheet and this chart.. I don't really know what it means.. although I can guess. If INS is out business.. then how old is that chart? And if it's that old... do you believe it?
Dang it... no. I have a photo and it was a Washington addy with a 1988 copyright. Good info Condor.. more than I was expecting. Thanks.
It's not that old, from 2004 I believe. The only reason I posted it was to show what companies they actually do use in their charts. As to what the charts mean, well people have claimed them as being gospel when they are trying to back up their belief that PCGS is the creme de le creme of the TPGs. Of course they always seemed to ignore the charts when they didn't say what they wanted them to say. This one for example, if you actually look at it you'll see that it rates ICG as the highest, NGC second, and PCGS third. There are plenty of other examples that show similar results, many with NGC as the highest. But what most seem to always ignore is what CDN explains as those charts meaning. CDN gets their prices every week from a large group of dealers all over the country. Then compile them, and come up with a number. The chart is to indicate the TPG that has the best prices being offered for coins in their slabs at that particular point in time. Now to anybody that knows coins, the results in those charts would not be surprising. That's because they'd know that the prices being offered are dependent on the coins, not the plastic. So if the dealers just happened to have some nice coins that week that just happened to be in ICG slabs, and the same coins found in NGC and PCGS slabs that week not as nice as those in the ICG slabs, then ICG would get the top rating that week. In other words, the charts are meaningless because they are based on pure chance occurrences. But they do show consistency in one regard for never did I see a single one where either NGC, PCGS, or ICG did not get the top rating. Of course in recent years, that has changed. Now it's always NGC or PCGS.
Probably still using it. I have a sheet from January of 2011 that has the same chart and companies listed (different percentages). Now that is a sheet from 14 years after the company went out of business, 19 years since they moved to Philadelphia, and 23 years since they last produced any significant number of slabs. I have no idea why they list INS. Even ten to 15 years ago they were not commonly encountered.
