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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Hobo, post: 363687, member: 11521&quot;]I won&#039;t post the Guest Commentary (which is what this is) but I hope it is OK for me to quote a line or two (or three) from it.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>My first impression was the writer - veteran coin dealer Jay Bowman - has a bad case of sour grapes. He starts off complaining that eBay yanked his coin auction due to &quot;the mere mention of&quot; SEGS in his description. </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Throughout the piece he rails against both eBay and ANA and used ample portions of hyperbole. He makes a few meaningless arguments and rambles quite a bit. </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><br /></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Is he saying that the criteria to determine a good TPG is whether they have a &quot;nice holder&quot;? From what I have heard the Chinese counterfeit PCGS slabs are &quot;nice holders&quot;. </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Since when are SEGS coins as &quot;conservatively graded&quot; as PCGS or NGC? Who does this guy think he is fooling? But I digress. </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Next he offers &quot;Graders are only human; mistakes happen.&quot; and lets us know that he has seen coins from every TPG that have been overgraded and undergraded. (Too bad he didn&#039;t give us numbers or percentages. It would have been very informative to know what percentage of PCGS or NGC slabs are overgraded vs. what percentage of SEGS slabs are overgraded.)</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>After touching on Chinese counterfeit coins and slabs he launched into a great deal of hyperbole equating ANA&#039;s recommendation and eBay&#039;s decision to only allow the top 4 TPGs (or 5, according to Bowman who also includes NCS) to Big Brother, bigger government and a loss of personal freedoms. (This guy should write speeches for politicians.)</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Bowman rambles quite a bit saying buyers (&quot;investors and speculators&quot;) should become &quot;more alert and educated&quot;. He fails to appreciate that beginner collectors and non-collectors do not know how to grade coins and count on the TPG to tell them the grade of the coin. &quot;The grading services should just confirm what you already know.&quot; That&#039;s great (unless you know nothing about grading). </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Do ya think Mr. Bowman&#039;s opinions are affected at all by the fact that &quot;a third of his business is conducted via the Internet&quot; (according to his bio)?[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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