Went to another local bid board that closed the weekly auction on yesterday afternoon. For those of you who don't have bid boards in your area and still may not understand how it works, Here's a photo that may help out. That is what the board looks like at this shop. As you can see, hundreds of coins cover the wall of the coin shop, each with a tag that lists out the estimated grade, the estimated value and the minimum bid. The card also has a place where bidders write in their bid number and their bids as the auction takes place over the entire week. Some of the coins are owned by the coin shop, but many of them are hung up on the board by customers of the shop. Whoever has the high bid on the card at the end of the week is the winner of the coin! This week, I didn't find too much that I was interested in up on the bid board. There were lots of common moderns that I didn't need and lots of low grade silver coins that were just priced too high and didn't quite reflect the recent drop in silver prices. I did find one Morgan Dollar that was cool enough to bid on and I won it. It wasn't expensive, but I liked the old ANACS slab and thought it had some interesting color to it: After the bid board, I stopped by a local coin shop which was on my way home and which I hadn't visited in awhile. Usually, the shop just has the same overpriced and overgraded raw coins they've had for years so there isn't much need to visit often. However, I'm glad I stopped in as they did have something that made it worth the stop. As some of you may know, I like PCGS graded coins and also like collecting old slabs. Before starting up PCGS, David Hall certified coins as David Hall's Numismatic Investment Group and sealed the coins in plastic flips (with the coin in a hard plastic holder inside the flip to prevent PVC damage). The shop had just bought several of these flips and I bought a few of them: For modern proofs like these, I'm pretty sure the highest grade given out at the time was "Gem Proof Mint State 65." Accordingly, when finding these old flips, you can get some decent deals when you know the coins would grade higher under current standards. For example, the 1954 nickel is graded "Gem Proof Mint State 65." Today I think it would be a Proof 66 Cameo, maybe even a Proof 67 Cameo. similarly, the cent would probably be an MS66RD today and not just a "Mint State 65." And of course, the best part is that I think I got these pretty cheap as the dealer didn't seem to care much about these early holders. :thumb:
Ah the bid board, I miss those around my area Great toning on the morgan & I have never seen those Hall flips before, pretty cool. Wonder how rare they are in the minds of slab collectors.
That may be one of the greatest ideas I have seen. I'm going to present that idea to our board and open it up to discussion, that would be an excellent way for our members to trade and buy their coins other than online.
I think the bid board probably works best for a Coin Shop where buyers can come in and look at the coins and bid on them all throughout the week. And of course the shop likes it because they take 10% of the proceeds from the sellers of the coins (and they're also selling alot of their own coins on the bid board). Would be hard to have something like that during a coin club meeting unless you took a block of time for the meeting to give everyone time to look at all of the coins and bid on them. I belong to a couple of coin clubs that do their own auctions at the meetings and that seems to work well. One club doesn't take any money for the auction, but a couple other clubs take 5% of the seller's proceeds. Members bring in 5-10 items each (need to have some maximum) and set their coins out on a table before the meeting. Club members have a chance to look at the coins available before the meeting starts and during our break. Then, at the end of the meeting the lots are auctioned off one by one. If I'm selling my coins at a club meeting, I'd rather have the traditional auction format since my coin will have the room's full attention for bidding and no one could snipe from someone else it at a low price. With the bid board, all lots close at once when time expires, so undoubtedly some coins sell too low from a seller's perspective (but it works for the buyers!). Additionally, we have several elderly members in some of the clubs who probably wouldn't do well standing up and fighting their way to the front of a bid board to place their bids... much easier for them to just raise their hand in an auction. Overall, the bid board is pretty fun though.
