Hi all I have taken quite an interest in tokens lately, and I have discovered many interesting sites that help me to attribute them, but other than completed auctions on eBay, which is almost useless, I can't find anyplace that has pricing data of any kind. Does anyone here have a site they could recommend?
I buy coins virtually daily (just finishing purchasing a 4 digit value CACed coin) using the eBay values as an acquired bid basis. If we don't see a value desired, that generally isn't an indicator of current exchange values! Other firms values are usually established considerably in advance, and generally not currently applicable for a very diverse volatile market! JMHO
If you are looking for early-mid 19th century Canadian tokens, then there are some very good books and guides.
It would be helpful to know what kinds of tokens you're interested in because there's no resources or price guides that cover all tokens. Are you interested in car wash tokens, arcade tokens, dairy tokens, store tokens, civil war tokens, hard times tokens, picker tokens, transit tokens, canning tokens, bread tokens and/or other tokens?
I do not understand this comment at all. I'm not sure there's any better source of current values. There's going to be a lot of outliers, high and low, when it comes to thin markets with infrequent sales, which probably applies to certain types of tokens. So it's not perfect, but eBay / auction and the coin auction sites that are public facing are the best data points that you've got. The only thing I can imagine being better than that would be a few dealers that make a market in tokens and probably have a lot of private sales data but that they likely won't share with you. Books, magazines, niche sites, and newsletters can't possibly be better than eBay / online auction sales, IMHO. They are at best Stale, and at worst just plain made up. eBay completed sales are like a crowdsourced near real time pricing guide, and I would think it's your best bet.
I agree that completed sales on eBay or others are about as good as you're going to get. They give real-time values as people have just now or recently paid that price for them. Bruce
Let me help you understand what I mean. eBay is a wonderful resource for pricing data for items that they sell on their site. Truly I find it to be one of the best, however, what about the items that don't sell on eBay? In this case it's more than a lot because of the varied nature of tokens. I see everything from Civil War Tokens and Store Cards, to Hard Times Tokens, Good For Tokens, So-Called Dollars, World's Fair Tokens, Convention Tokens, and I could go on all day. My comment is that in the case of tokens, many of them have never been offered on eBay, or at least not recently enough to be archived for many of the tokens that I encounter. Many times, the crowd of collectors here will be specialized in their studies and will know of lesser known sites (e.g. tokencatalog.com) that might be useful.
I don't know if this is of use to you but the Heritage Auction site has a listing for historical items and I believe tokens are under that heading. hope that helps. James
One of the best sellers in the token world...especially CWT's...is Steve Hayden. He has a huge database of past sales but of course it's not available to the public as far as I know. He buys many types of collections for resale and of course has sources to base his purchase prices on. A lot of it is probably from experience. In any case he's the best token man I know. Bruce
Ahh, I get it now. You weren't saying the pricing data on eBay is useless because you don't like using eBay to estimate values, or that they are wrong, you were saying there are no data points at ALL, since these token rarely (if ever) show up for sale on eBay. I misunderstood your original post. The spirit of my post is still relevant, however, and that is that any book with values is still going to be useless for you, unless you are using them for identifying the token, its rarity, special information, etc. The listed dollar VALUES (pricing data), are what I think is useless unless someone has compiled a ton of recent data points from non-public information that you dont otherwise already have access to. If these are so thinly traded, with so few data points from any source, yeah, pricing a collectible or asset like that is going to be very rough. At that point, it's basically huge spreads, lots of fluff in the middle, and whatever you are willing to pay is suddenly what its worth, since YOU will be the data point.
