Grading Walking Liberty Halves

Digging the basement are ya ?

Boy ! That was almost 20 years ago. But short answer to your question - no, I don't have a link to it. A whole lot of links from back then are dead (as in no longer existing in today's world).

But I wrote about the ANA grading standards and what very, very few changes they've made over the years in the various editions of their grading standards book over the years here on the forum. And if took the time to do the searching you could find all those posts.

But I'll shortcut it for you. In the ANA grading standards the change over from the technical grading system which was used from 1977 in the 1st edition until 1986, to the market grading system (which is still used to today) occurred in 1986 in the 3rd edition of the ANA book which was actually published in 1987. Written in '86, published in '87 - (it takes a while to write it before it can be published in book form.)

Short and sweet, the written descriptions of the various grades for Walkers has not changed since 1986. The written words are the same - verbatim.

 

Well, what do you want to do - A, grade the coins consistently and accurately, or B, grade them like the TPGs do ?

If you choose A then use the ANA grading standards. The written descriptions are pretty well detailed and straightforward. Put another way, the tips are literally written out for you.

If you choose B, there really aren't any written descriptions anywhere, it's more of a guessing game, personal opinion game, where the grading has become more and more lenient over the years. So for one to know how each individual TPG will likely grade a given coin in the current time frame, one has to be particularly familiar and experienced with how each is currently grading the given coins.

And they are not same, no two TPGs grade any given coin in the same way. And they are well known for one TPG being stricter or tougher on a specific series than the other TPGs. And it varies with all the different series, they're tough on this one, loose on that one.

 

A whole lot of folks get confused about that term. And it's understandable because over the years the term has become bastardized. In today's world, and for quite some time now, the term market grading has taken on am entirely different meaning that it had in the beginning. To explain it completely I'd have to write a book here, but I'll try and keep it as short and simple as I can.

As I mentioned above, market grading was an entirely new grading system, completely different from the technical grading system that had existed before it. To understand it, correctly, you first have to understand its predecessor the technical grading system. Which was for the most part pretty basic and very simple. It only used 3 or 4 basic criteria, and there were far fewer grades. For example there were only 3 MS grades - MS60, MS65, and MS70.

When the ANA created the market grading system in 1986 the number of grading criteria increased to 9, as opposed to 3 or 4. And the number of grades increased to all of those that we have today.

But in later years, 2004 to be exact, when the TPGs began loosening their grading, (greatly so in many cases), people who know coins noticed their changes in grading right away because all the resulting grades when coins were submitted started going up. And this could plainly be seen simply by comparing coins in older slabs to coins in newer slabs. The TPGs of course denied that they had changed their grading at all. But it's pretty hard to deny what's right in front of your eyes.

And that's when the term market grading became bastardized. It took on the meaning of what the TPGs were doing by loosening their grading. All of a sudden grades became based on the prices coins brought on the market, as opposed to the actual physical condition of the coin. As price went up, grades went up. Oddly enough, in 2008 when the bottom of the market fell out, grades did not go back down. But it wasn't long before grades loosened yet again in an effort to boost TPG business - the number of submissions.

So, in today's world, market grading has taken on the meaning that coins are graded based on the coin market - not the condition of the coin.

Yeah, good luck with that. It's pretty tough to pin down when there are no written or published standards used by the TPGs. And it's made even harder when you're looking at a bunch of moving targets and trying to compare them to each other. What's F12 today, wasn't F12 a few years ago. To even have a chance of visually comparing to see the differences between F12 and F15, you can only look at coins in the same generation of slabs. If you look at different generations you're gonna see differences in the same grades, let alone different grades.

Now for those who doubt any of this, why do you think everybody scrambles to buy them when coins in old slabs hit the market ? Where do you think terms like OGH (old green holder) come from and why they're so desirable ? And why are all those tens of millions of coins in those old green holders so scarce and hard to find ? The answer of course is simple, they don't exist anymore. It's because they were all bought up and submitted for upgrades, years ago for the most part.

That's the problem - they don't ! Not a one of them does.


However, if you choose to grade your coins yourself, based on ANA grading standards, you won't have any any of those problems. Because the grading criteria is the same today as it was back in 1986.