I hope I am wrong but it looks to me like we now get to pay for the privilege of seeing auction prices realized at PCGS, which is one of my favorite resources when I am considering a high-end (for me) purchase. I will probably suck it up and pay it but that's a little less money in the coin purchase budget.:headbang:
collector club If you join their collector club, I think you get the auction results plus opportunity to send in coins for grading. Might be worth it.
Hopefully, you are already familiar with the Heritage auction archives, which are free and excellent.
Actually, I am a member of the collector club and I believe is the reason I used to be able to access the auction results. I can't get in any more -- I apparently have to join CoinFacts for 9.95 a month. I still haven't taken the plunge but am thinking about it. I found the auction records from all the different auction sites very useful to determine prices, particularly for items that only come up for sale a few times a year.
Mark I use the Heritage archives as my first stop but I find it useful to get records from Stacks, Bowers and Merena and others. PCGS has them all compiled in one place from all the auction houses. Heritage has a great site for search capability and their photos are getting better (at least the full coin photos, as opposed to the photos of the slabs that can be zoomed (don't like those)).
Hopefully you realize that you can access the Stacks, B & M and all the others, on their own sites - for free.
Doug I do access all those sites. It is just that the PCGS Auction archives lists all the different auctions in one site. So for a particular coin, say a 1926-D 5C in MS65, I can get a list of all auction results from the various auction sites and then go through the individual sites and look at the images and descriptions. It's not so necessary for Heritage because Heritage is so easily searched. The other sites are not nearly as searcher-friendly. Basically, I spend way too much time looking and dreaming before I make bigger purchases but at least I feel more informed. It is also a way to check whether the actual coin I am considering buying has sold in a past auction.
Yeah I know all that, I was more pointing it out for those who don't know it than anything else. And for those who don't want to pay to do it. It's like anything else, you can do it the hard way or the easy way - but you usually pay, one way or the other, for the easy way.
