Price guides

As a newbie to coin collecting, I bought a red book. But I also picked up a copy of coins magazine as well. I noticed that the prices in the book differ tremendously.

Which should I go by?
I don't know whats more accurate and I'm very confused.

 

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Your best bet would be to subscribe to the Coin Dealer's Newsletter, or the Grey Sheet as those prices will be more realistic than the Red Book and are published monthly, where as Red Book is an annual publication and the prices in the guide section can be as much as 6 months old.

Many also track completed sales from several online sources such as Heritage, Stacks &Bowers TeleTrade, and eBay.

 

I second all that.

 

I thought the greysheet is published weekly.

 

Oh I think that's right.

 

It might be, but the point is the prices are updated more regularly than once a year like Red Book does.

 

damn, that's the second time I've double posted. what's going on!

 

In the Red Book, the prices are no less than 6 months old, and even 6 months prior to publishing, the book was most likely wrong.
Except for the price guide, the Red Book is a great source of information about US coins.

 

Completed auctions on the bay place tells me what someone was willing to pay for a piece recently. Guides dont reflect the PM markets. There were a couple months last year when not coins, but early M. Gras tokens & CEC pieces shot through the roof.
They've settled again, but most slept through it.

 

There is actually some really great websites that will give you a good FMV like numismedia, I like rather than carrying around the grey sheet I can easily glance at my phone and see what the FMV is right then and there. I have done that several times to bargain at my LCS and got them to lower there prices, if its fairly close I will just pay the asking price (did that with an 1856 seated dime last week FMV was $2 less than asking so I just paid asking). It's also helped me make decisions before between dates as they might have a coin underpriced and I will go with that even if its a little more expensive.

 

Problem is buyer and seller look at different things when studying Ebay past auctions. You, if you are selling, may focus on muliple sales of somefolks paying $3,ooo for a 19XXz coin, but as a buyer I focus on how many were able to snag one of those same coins for $2. This is possibly why Ebay restricts the past auction data to only viewers who have sold something (or listed something) recently. One good tactic for buyers is to list a junk coin with a starting price of $4,000. It may never sell (but you will be overjoyed if it does), but as long as that ad is up there, u can see (and capture to your screen buffer for future use) the past auction data.

 

Under my current buyer account it isn't visible today. Under my selling name, it is right there next to auction, all listings, buy it now.

 

What I would love to see on Ebay is how many times something was re-listed and also what is the hottest coin this week.

 

The problem with Numismedia is that the values listed on that site are the retail values. The wholesale values which can be seen on Heritage's site are pretty accurate for NGC graded common material.