How rare are business strike MS70 coins?

I searched for "PCGS MS70" on ebay and every result I got was some sort of commemorative coin or a collector's coin or an ASE or something related. I didn't see a single regular business strike. Are MS70 business strikes extremely rare? Are they very expensive? Just curious...

 

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Non-existent, AFAIK.

 

for what coin ?

 

Any coin. Mercury dime, large cent, ugly modern nickel, Morgan dollar or any other business strike coin.

 

nope just bullion comemeratives.

 

There are scary few business strike (circulation) coins that are MS-70s. The road that a business strike coin travels and what it would have to escape to achieve a 70 would be as improbable as all of us winning the powerball. The only 70 coins that you would generally run into are usually only the "made for collectors" coins.

 

I figured as much. Thanks.

 

I found this article:

http://www.pcgs.com/News/Pcgs-Certifies-First-Perfect-Business-Strike-Cent

 

I remember that coin. It was supposed to go for stupid money, but it fetched 13,500. Not bad I guess, but less than the lofty predictions that were anticipated. It was some years ago while coins were "cheap", but still outside of the average collector market anyway. It has since been downgraded to a MS-69 for reasons that I don't recall. That is two strikes for PCGS if anyone is keeping score. I doubt that you will ever see anothe pop 1/0 Lincoln from PCGS ever again.

 

Pop 1/0 could be MS65 if there are none graded higher.

 

That PCGS 2003 MS-70 cent developed a spot and was downgraded to MS-69.

https://forums.collectors.com/messageview.aspx?catid=26&threadid=644643

 

Thats what you get when you don't know how to fill out a submission forum .

It does have a spot on the forum to check min. grade ( MS-70 ) . The only program this coin could gone through, was the secured plus program, which again, there's a min. grade ( MS-70 ) that could of been placed ....

 

Secure Plus didn't begin until 2010, almost two years after this coin was downgraded due to the spot.

 

Thats worst yet, what were they thinking ....

 

Some coins of the last 50 years had as few as about 3% of an issue come off the dies in MS-65 and most of these were then marked up at the mint before getting out. Even the most nicely made issues tend to be scarce in MS-67.

 

Even the America the beautiful 5 ounce billion coins never reach MS 70.

 

It had developed a spot and the owner sent it in for the guarantee to get his money back from the downgrade basically.

I wouldn't call that a strike against PCGS since it spotted after grading and they did end up paying him for that. If you look through the old thread the owner seemed happy with the value he received for it. While its a shame that happened to the coin they did stand behind their guarantee in that instance.

There's no minimum grade you can put on regrades that is only for cross overs. They back up their grade and will give you some form of payout on a regrade or reholder but they reserve the right to downgrade a coin whenever they review it.

It also wasn't until more recently that they allowed 70 to be placed as a minimum grade for cross overs, that was not an option back in 2008 when that happened but that is more of a side note since it was sent in with the specific purpose of getting a payout when the spot downgraded it.

 

If I were high up in PCGS, I think I'd make it an unwritten rule that graders should avoid calling copper coins MS70 or PF70 if it would end up being a pop 1 coin that's worth a whole bunch of money. It's too easy for a MS/PF70 worth, say, $10,000, to develop a spot and become a MS/PR69 worth like $100 that PCGS then has to do the buy-back thing with. I think something similar happened with a PCGS PF70 1963 cent that developed a spot and PCGS had to do damage control with it.

 

The problem with that is they have to grade the coin that is in their hand. They can't grade based on what they guess may happen to the coin in the future. There is a risk of downgrade with every coin they grade. They have taken precautions if the event should ever arise. If they do what you suggest, they will quickly become nothing better than a basement slabber.

 

I agree that they definitely don't want to arbitrarily call a 70 a 69, but I'd still be very very tempted to keep looking at it for an inordinate amount of time looking for a break in luster to justify a grade of 69 instead of 70 to avoid getting raked over the coals financially. It definitely wouldn't be an upstanding business practice (especially since I doubt they spend more than a minute looking at an ASE before giving it a grade of MS70), but like I said, man would it be tempting.