When I was young, dinosaurs roamed the earth, there was the Blue book and the Red book. They were measuring sticks, blue wholesale, red retail. Now everyone has those plus Greysheet. Is Greysheet retail prices, theoretically? Then what is Bluesheet for PCGS and NGC and then Morgans has all those plus VAM. Can someone clarify all this for me?
Any book is essentially worthless for anything other than telling what dates cost more, by the time an annual book is printed the prices are already out of date. The easiest for prices is real world sales https://www.pcgs.com/auctionprices For CAC coins theres also https://www.caccoin.com/pop/ The vast majority of things you should be able to find some general idea from real world sales on the various sites or GC or ebay, if not greysheet and having a feel for it would be the next best thing for it.
Even the new owners of Krause publications are trying to migrate people to the net at Numismaster. Don't know if they will continue the print catalogs or not.
Greysheet is dealer to dealer wholesale for all coins, certified and not, generally examined by the buyer before the transaction. Generally, retail buyers should not expect to buy at these prices. Blue sheet is dealer to dealer wholesale for certified coins not examined by the buyer before the transaction. You can pretty much count on coins transacted this way being coins which will definitely not be high end for the grade.
Actually, that's incorrect. The new owner of Krause Publications is Bertlesman's Penguin Books unit. There have been no signs of new editions of the catalogs, which would be difficult to do without the database. The Numismatic News and the NumisMaster part of the former F+W Media were purchased by Active Interest Media, a unit of Cruz Bay Publishing. This includes the database. They have relaunched NumisMaster as a subscription-only price guide.
IMO, the best online coin price guide is this one called NumisMedia. http://www.numismedia.com/rarecoinprices/fmv.shtml It updates it's prices daily based on sales by coin dealers and it's free to use. Covers just about all grades.
Numismedia is a FMV guide - retail purchase price at a decent coin shop or auction. Not a "you can sell for " guide. With that caveat, it's a good resource and I use it a lot.
No price guide, regardless of who publishes it, is worth the paper or the bandwidth it takes - they are all worthless. When it comes to prices the only thing of any value, the only thing that can give you an idea of the real world price range for a given coin are realized auction prices from trusted and respected auction houses. And the reason I phrase it that way is because the results from more than a few auction web sites should be ignored. And the reason they should be ignored is because there are too many people who don't know what they are doing buying coins there.
