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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;illini420, post: 1367283, member: 19423&quot;]Good point!</p><p><br /></p><p>The answer is that the PCGS pop reports don&#039;t really tell the full story. Sure, in looking at the First Strike results, it appears that if you were to send in 5 reverse proofs, you&#039;d probably get 3/5 back in PR70... but the PCGS pop reports do not break down which results are from average member submissions vs. the big dealers who submit bulk. There is also no break down of which were the fancy Mercanti signature labels and which were the regular First Strike flag labels. All are mixed in together in that PCGS First Strike pop number.</p><p><br /></p><p>There&#039;s a pretty big thread going on over on the PCGS boards (and much more discussion in private to keep us all from getting banned) regarding the pop data on these coins. In summary, it&#039;s very clear that the early bulk submitters of these coins got rewarded with a huge percentage of 70 grades, roughly 70-90% of the coins got 70 in their bulk orders. Then, when the average collectors sent coins in (particularly after the first couple of weeks) they were lucky to get 25% of their coins getting 70. There are several possible resaons for this... could be a conspiracy to reward the big spender dealers who submit bulk... could be simply different graders w/ different standards grading bulk orders and more strict graders doing regular submissions. Average that all together and you get the pop report that shows around 55-65% of the coins grading 70. </p><p><br /></p><p>The non-FS PCGS numbers show some of that difference since most of the coins submitted bulk up to this point were First Strike... only the regular collectors sent in non-FS and not even half of those coins graded 70. Even though the orders were from the same pool of coins and may have qualifed for FS, the submitters just didn&#039;t pay the extra $18 per coin for the label. A couple of weeks ago only about 30% of the non-FS coins were 70, but that percentage has gone up rapidly in the past couple of weeks... it&#039;s possible that some of the recent bulk orders had some boxes that didn&#039;t qualify for FS??</p><p><br /></p><p>In looking at shared orders on the PCGS website (which are all non-bulk orders) it is rare to see a 25th anniversary set submission, whether it&#039;s one set or a box of 5 sets, get more than 25% 70s... which is totally inconsistent with the pop report data but that&#039;s because the bulk orders (which are never publicized) have totally skewed the data.</p><p><br /></p><p>All that said, I will most certain amend my previous comments... it seems PCGS is much more giving with their 70 grade if you&#039;re a bulk submitter. But NGC is a bit more giving with their 70 grade if you&#039;re a regular member submitting your coins.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>And the takeaway from all of this, if you&#039;re buying a PCGS set of these and they are the Mercanti labels (which are the bulk labels), be very selective on buying a 70 set... not all of them are perfect and I&#039;ve seen 70s that have flaws...&nbsp;&nbsp; But if you buy the standard label sets from PCGS, they quality is more of what you would expect if you see a 70.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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