Anyone get to hear Rick Snow's speech?

My comments were more longer term.

I suspect there many buyers of the more expensive coins are actually buying above their real financial capacity. It isn't something I can prove but say it because first, the people you are describing can do so because they are beneficiaries of the current asset bubble which has created a lot of fake wealth which came from nowhere and that's exactly where its going to go back to, eventually.

Second, as far as I am concerned, anyone who has to rely on having a job at all isn't really in a position to be buying five figure coins. The same argument can be made for four figure coins and I will admit I both need to have a job and have bought them, but the distinction is that I could hold out for a long time if I had to do so before I would have to sell any of my collection.

I don't believe that many of the buyers who pay these really inflated premiums for otherwise common coins really like the coins as much as you might believe. I'm not saying they aren't real collectors but that they have high confidence that the coins they buy will hold most, all or even more of the value than they paid for it. You can find these collectors on the NGC and PCGS forums because quite a few of them buy this kind of coin.

The premium coins you are describing which participate in this bifurcated market, most of their appeal is actually in their price, not based upon their merits. This should be self-evident by looking at their value decades ago before coins were bought as "investments", TPG existed and specialization was far less evident. These coins presumably sold for noticeable premiums but a small fraction of what they sell for now. I see them as being more popular now from a combination of the internet making most coins easy to buy which reduces the prior challenges of finding coins as in the past, the perception of their future economic value and coins which were a lot more affordable in the past are hopelessly out of reach of the lopsided proportion of the US collector base. For the latter, think early US federal coinage. When I started in 1975, most of these were expensive but many even in low grades now have increased far above incomes.

 

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Any updates?

 

From a poster on the PCGS boards...

"I was in Rick's presentation. He proposed a system called "PDS Grading System". It uses ANA grading system (from Poor, Fair, about Good, Good ..... all the way to Perfect Uncirculated/Proof) as basis and add Planchet, Die, Strike grades on the basis grade. In other words, you have to grade the coin based on ANA grading standards first, say the coin is a Very Fine coin or it is a Choice Uncirculated coin. From there you add its Planchet (to me, it is contact marks but Rick included more factors such as Cleaning factors), Die (to me, it is luster but Rick also included Die states and other factors) and Strike. Each P, D, S can rank between 0 (the worst) to 5 (the best). You add these three number up and you got a new system. For a ample, VF (8:2,3,3), AU (5:0,2,3) etc."

 

Alrighty then... This will certainly pique some interest among the "micro graders" among us.

 

Sounds like what NGC does to ancients.

 

And they don't do a good job of it. As an ancient collector I almost laugh at some of the grades NGC gives to ancient coins, when they are not busy getting their attributions wrong in the first place.

 

I picked up a pamphlet titled PDS grading or something at his table. It was probably given out during his talk.

 

So most people can't get **1** number right and he wants to add three more factors????

The concept == Full employment for TPGs.

 

There is nothing new about that idea. He might flesh it out with some details that are new, or he might have slightly different terminology, but Accugrade did the exact same thing 30 years ago. Many old-timers consider this a good idea (a single numerical grade could never convey all of the information necessary for a complete picture of the coin). As mentioned, NGC currently does something like this for ancients (a system that I greatly appreciate, even if I don't always agree 100%). EAC also does something seemingly similar (although their system is vastly more complex).

The problem Accugrade has was that they weren't very.... accurate. If there was a company with experience, talent, and the marketing resources to convince enough people to accept it (and trust their grades), this system would be a good idea. The downside, of course, is the added complexity of grading (and valuing, and buying) would be very complex. It would take an entire book to explain the factors, and how they affect grade and value (while the current grading system already incorporates these factors, they aren't usually explicitly spelled out or ranked).

Rick Snow is a leading numismatist, and widely respected. However, it will take a significant movement to gain widespread acceptance of this issue. Is the current grading system broken? Probably, yes. But it is what everyone is familiar with (and there is ~75 years of momentum behind it). Is a 100 point grading scale a good idea? As with the metric system, yes, it probably is - but you see how hard it is to implement even a common sense system of measurement that literally the entire rest of the world uses.

 

Actually the more I think about it, no.

The problem is that one of the most common questions in numismatics is "what's it worth".

We have several periodic resources all of which get roasted for being inaccurate, untimely, missing grades (what about my VF35, how come it only lists VF20 and XF40?), etc. But at least you can look at the greysheet, take the midpoint between VF20 and XF40 and 10% back of that is about what you expect to pay for that VF35 coin.

Adding more grades, finer gradations, etc. just makes it impossible for any reference to have ANY applicability. And that will hurt more collectors than having better 3rd party grades will help.

 

I really don't see how a 100 point scale would change anything when you really think about it. We already have 11 MS grades and what about 20 if you count plus grade. The other thing is we don't even use the entire scale we currently have anyway. Just using the whole 70 point scale essentially gets us a 100 point scale if you account for the pluses at the higher end.

As far as the changes Rick proposed in my opinion most people already do that when they're deciding to buy or not. The biggest problem with grading in general is that everyone likes different things. Certain things appeal to one group which don't appeal to others and we keep trying to come up with ways where everyone will agree on every coin and it just will never happen. Adding another three layers to it (though I do kind of like what NGC does with the ancients) will just add more disagreement to the process unless for this aspect of grading we are expected to just take someone else's word for it

 

Okay, @Cascade and @C-B-D, if you made Rick's talk in Anaheim, I was the jabronie in the blue shirt with a Sony a6000 digital camera shooting away from all angles during Rick's talk.

 

We planned on it but forgot and remembered like 10mins before which didn't give us time to get there. It was a total syncronized Home Alone moment. Just substitute Kevin for Rick...

 

Interesting.... obviously this has nothing to do with imaging coins, but is the first time I've noticed anyone speak of using mirrorless on this forum. May I ask if you use it for said purpose, and if so, what your impressions are? I ask only out of curiosity, and mostly because we often hear DSLRs recommended, but the adaptability/flexibility offered by (inexpensive APS-C or MFT) mirrorless strikes me as being an option well worth considering, especially for those not wanting or needing a dedicated coin imaging setup.

 

I spent the first half of my career in the photo industry and was an SLR (Canon F-1 and EOS and Nikon F series) and Leica M snob, like everyone else in the 70's and 80's. I'm not sure when I decided the Sony was my system of choice in the digital world, but I can tell you this - I am enjoying the bejabbers out of owning the Nikon F, Canon FD, Canon EF, and Leica M adapters that are made for the Sony system. My copy stand has an older Sony camera body (sans optical viewfinder - screen only) on it with a Canon FD adapter and my old trusty Canon FD 100mm f4 Macro SC lens on it. I also enjoy shooting birds (I feed) with my Canon FD 300mm f4 SSC. It leverages my legacy equipment so nicely that any other system just doesn't give me the bang for my buck that the Sony does.

 

You just nailed everyone's complaint about Anaheim - too many minutes between the bourse floor in Hall D and the Money Talks room on the 4th floor of the Hilton. You needed to have the skills of Usain Bolt unless you planned early.

Even Rhonda's planned daily Volunteer morning meetings crashed and burned.

 

Have you ever seen an escalator so long lol

 

Now I'm going to date myself (almost in Doug's range) - maybe at the United States pavilion at Expo '67 in Montreal. You know, before it was a Formula 1 racetrack. But you're right, that was a major badrump one.

 

Another Leica fan; good to know I'm not alone here. I remember you writing of your past experience, and is a big reason why I asked when presented with the opportunity. Beyond my beloved M, I shot F and F2 until most regretably (and stupidly) deciding that my film equipment had no future and was sold.

I too immensely enjoy legacy glass, and have become addicted to goodwill auctions in my never-ending search for something new (old) and interesting. Being as I just couldn't justify coughing up for M digital and the holy of holies that attach to them at this point in my life, I went Sony and couldn't be more pleased although I took the full frame route, in big part due to the fact that handling the A7 series very much reminded me of the classic Ms.

Anyway, point is it's good to see someone using mirrorless for coins. Other than myself, I don't recall anyone ever suggesting or even mentioning mirrorless as an option in camera/photography threads and is a shame, especially because not everyone wishes to invest in the often-recommended DSLR/macro, cheap DSLR/bellows setup, or would be happy with the P&S or cheap USB "scope" route.

 

Yup, I lay my old school Agfa 8x photo loupe on the screen of my copy stand mounted Sony body to check focus and fire away with a 3 sec. self timer setting to eliminate shake (no fancy remote capability on that body). Works for me because I don't do volume. In fact, I'm still tweaking my lighting and coin holding options to get a look I like. My copy stand is the monstrous one that was originally fitted with the Polaroid MP4 copy system camera.

Note to "young'ns": there used to be a company named Polaroid that made actual photo products and not just a brand slapped on cheap Chinese DVD players. They made stuff that developed itself, some had to be peeled apart after timing the appropriate length, and other products people just waved in the air like a fan for no reason whatsoever - it accomplished nothing other than give them premature carpal tunnel problems.