I agree. Doesn't look legit. I'm just starting studying trade dollars so I could be wrong. Waiting to hear what others think.
Fake The reverse tells the story. Look at the tip of the lower arrow. On the original from PCGS it goes to the middle of the '2' in 420. On the OP'ers it only goes to the middle between the '20'. Now look at the tip of the olive branch that passes below the eagles talons. It ends between the 'I' and 'N' in the word GRAINS. The OP'ers it ends at the 'N'. Now check out the curl in the left side of the ribbon in E PLURIBUS UNUM. The curl should be to the right of the eagles wing. The curl on the OP'ers coin lines up with the wing. That should be enough, unless there are different die pairs I'm missing. From the PCGS website: From the original post:
Another big tell is the talon on the right. Try to locate the two 'toes'. On the original there is nothing between those talons. The OP'ers coin has what looks like the end of the arrow where the nock would be, between the talons.
Not all trade dollars are exactly the same depending on the year or mintmark. https://www.pcgs.com/coinfacts/coin/1873-t-1-trade/7031 Below is the correct reverse from PCGS website, not the S mint one it's compared to. Apples to apples guys! View attachment 1288857
weight sometimes tells a lot and NEVER forget the old magnet, not always a dead give away but worth a try and costs nothing but the time to do it.
As the picture came up on my screen the first thing to show up was the head of liberty. It looked questionable right away. I'm not very familiar with trade dollars so I wouldn't have noticed the issue with the arrows but, the head looked more like a skull with sunken eyes. The coin also appears to have been artificially / chemically aged.
If it's fake, it's a very good fake. I don't see a single indication of it at all. I'd like for the posters who said fake to point out at least one indicator that it's not real, because I can't see one.
I'm certainly not an expert on Trade Dollars, but has anyone noticed on the obverse of the posted coin that "In God We Trust" the "s" in Trust is not aligned the way the "s" is in the PCGS photo? Just my observation.
Look at the deticles on the reverse between the second 'S' in STATES, and the first 'A' in AMERICA. They're almost non-existent. Denticles are the very first thing I look at if I'm in doubt. They are almost never good enough on fakes, and if they pass the sniff test, then I'll move to other specifics. But 99.99% of fakes can't reproduce denticles well enough. If you read all of the posts, the position of the arrows aren't correct either, but that could be the difference from one die to the next (I haven't looked into it, because IMO, don't need to spend that much time on this coin to know with a certain degree of accuracy that it's fake).