Wee bit o' pee? ............ it's auction time!!

Yup ... oh my God, it's auction time!!

=> I'm gonna spend a million ... ummm, or nuthin'!!

Oh my God => I hate this "stuff" ....

I have zero idea what is goin' on!! .... ummmm does anybody have a semi-cool method of attacking auctions?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

Don't ask me-- I'm the one who recently bid on and won a coin and had no recollection of the event 2 weeks later

That fluke aside, I typically use Numisbids or Sixbid to make watch lists. I whittle them down, use CNG and other sources to check recent sales prices, narrow it down further, and roughly prioritize my choices for each auction.

Sometimes I print out the watch list. If there are many things on there, I make a spreadsheet with things like relative availability, recent hammer prices, how badly I want it, my max bid (which sometimes requires a bump) etc.

I'm gearing up for the upcoming big auctions. Megatons of things on my watch lists but I will probably only bid on a small number. Because of the sheer volume this month I'm having to get fancier with the organization. Spreadsheet time. Alarmed reminders on my phone.

[disclaimer: I'm very new to this... my sum total of experience is mere months...so I don't know much.]

I have frequently seen your handle on coins I'm watching... I would* hate bidding against someone I know

[*edited to add the word 'would'; to date, I have never knowingly bid against any of you]

 

There's no auction house that offers the coins I want for my Nabataean set, so I'm just poking around on eBay, seeing if I can find any bargains.

 

ahaha really? ... well, I'm sure that there is some sorta blurry-line between "pre-knowing" and actually knowing that a buddy/member is bidding on a coin ... yes?

=> ummm, which one of you dudes is gonna mindlessly bid against me or another member? ... anyone?

... anyway ...

=> I have always believed that there is some sort of "Gentlemen's Rule" amongst the ancient folk ... am I incorrect?

=> I myself, would like to jot myself down as someone who would "never" knowingly bid and/or snipe another ancient member ... (signed in full)

 

I agree.

 

I have never bid against you. And I suppose 'frequently seen' was an exaggeration. Just a few times recently, coins I was casually watching.

I'm not going to sign that agreement though. I would definitely hesitate to bid against someone I know but if it was a coin I really really really wanted, well...

If I saw you bidding on a coin I felt compelled to have, I would probably PM you and let you know of my intense interest and to see just how committed you were to getting the coin. If you (or anyone else whose name I recognize and interact with) jump in late in the auction and there isn't enough time for such a conversation, I'd just have to make a decision on the fly.

I don't like it when auctioneers show the bidder's user name for this very reason. I'd rather not know.

 

Ditto. The friendships I've made on this forum are more important to me than some dumb coin.

But if it's a Nabataean I really want, screw all of youse, lol.

 

Wow ... so not so ...

=> brothers => I will "never" knowingly bid against you (end of story)

 

So as long as we're talking about such things, how do you folks feel about last minute bidders?

Most of my bidding so far has taken place late in the action. Sometimes purposefully, sometimes because I was flip-flopping in my desire to buy. I felt there was nothing to gain by bidding early, other than token bids when the price is low.

Am I going to be ostracized if I continue last-minute bidding?

 

Well I don't do a lot of ancients so I usualy stick to the local coin shops for the ones I do buy (always because I like the coin itself hehe).

But if you replace Nabataean with a Bust half or Large cent i'm after I have to agree with John

 

Now, if someone posts a coin in a forum, asking for opinions and expressing interest, I do promise not to snipe their coin. That's different, in my opinion.

Say someone posts a coin they've found on eBay, soliciting opinions or asking questions... I'm not going to sneak over and buy it out from under them.

In the above posts I'm talking about Heritage Live, Stack's, things like that.

 

Well whaddya know. I just reviewed my watch list and see your name on the coin at the top of my 'try really hard to get this' list, Steve. Will PM you shortly.

 

I wouldn't do that to anyone on this forum, but there are a lot of lurkers. In the past, I've PM'd the experts with questions about auctions. I don't think it's a good idea to put them out in the open.

 

In the good old days, eBay openly posted the handle of bidders so I could bid $1 and my friends would not bid against me. That was really not fair to sellers who started a lot at $1 and hoped two of us would battle over it. As a result, eBay decided not to post the ID of bidders so you never know if you are bidding against me or not.

This same situation really worked both ways. If I bid on a lot as a scent marker, someone who was not my friend but knew that I was a specialist in that area could figure that if I were willing to pay $10 for a coin it must be worth more so they would bid $20 not having any idea what it was that they bidding on. The playing field was somewhat leveled when Sniping was invented. Most winning bids on eBay are placed in the last 10 seconds and you never know if I bid on it or not since only the seller sees the winner's ID and many of my losing bids are never actually posted because the lot was over my head before my allotted time came up. This is fair. I used to despise snipers but I joined them. If you want to win coins, bid more than they are worth. If you want bargains, bid on 1000 lots and realize you may win one or two because no one else thought the coin was worth having. If things go bad and you win all 1000 lots, well, you should have known better. I have won a dozen coins in sales that I expected nothing and nothing in sales I expected to sweep. That is the game.

The absolute best way to bid in a sale is to hire an agent that you trust. I once paid an additional 5% (I have no idea what they charge now) to a man who was attending a sale in person with instructions to buy what he could from my list that looked like the big dogs did not want. That day cost me $1500 and I got some great coins at well under my maximums. A couple were even coins I would have paid double but I could have just as easily struck out.

 

Ohhhh, so that's why people bid early? To stake their claim, to hope the people they know will back off? Although I guess that rationale only works if bidder names are shown.

I've also seen a few forum friends bid early on monster coins when the action was safely low, with no intention of being a contender, just so they could say they were part of it

 

=> thanks for the personal note ... I totally appreciate the heads-up ... you rock!!

 

OK, but I'm sending you a link to a different one I'm going to try for instead. I don't see your name on it yet... or in keeping with the thread title, you haven't peed on it yet

 

Bidding early gets you on the list to be notified so you can see how the lot is going. I don't bid early on coins I want. Those get sniped. If ten of us all bid early on a coin it will attract attention to the lot which is not good for a buyer. You can set a watch on a coin but eBay displays a pop-up that says something like 10 people an hour are watching this lot and I don't want you to know I am interested enough to watch it either. When you snipe, you must decide how much you are willing to pay and not a cent more. If you bid $10 and I bid $11, I should win even if you thought it was a $20 coin. If we both think the coin is $20 but want to be sure we win it, we both bid $30 and the seller smiles all the way to the bank. How do you think some of those CNG lots go for ten times estimate? All it takes is two people with more dollars than sense or a coin that really is worth 10x CNG experts evaluation.

 

Boy howdy, I've seen that many times already in my short experience. Coins going for literally 10x more than the estimate. In fact, it happened so often on coins I was interested in when I first started watching ancients-- I thought it was the norm, and have since tended to overestimate the value on some coins as a result.

I'm watching a couple hundred lots in the upcoming auctions, but mostly just for experience. There are ~5-10 lots that I plan to seriously bid on, and it's likely that 2/3 of those will end up going for more than I want to spend for them.

And no, I'm not going to bid early.

 

Thanks for givin' me the heads-up ...




... man, you are quickly becoming my newest coin combatant/friend ... you rock, sister!!

=> thanks for the fun times!!