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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;SuperDave, post: 2645340, member: 1892&quot;]How about the <b>reality</b> slant instead of the PR slant? I&#039;m not explaining this to you - your opinion is already set in stone - but to those reading who might think that CAC is about you, me or us or our coins.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>It&#039;s not</b>. CAC is about Albanese Rare Coins, and all the other dealers at their level for whom a $5000 coin is &quot;just business.&quot; You ever notice how many dealers are already gone by Day Three of a major coin show? That&#039;s because <b>they&#039;ve done the business they came to do</b>, and it doesn&#039;t have anything to do with you, me or us. That business was with <i>each other</i>, to acquire the coins they need for their clients, most of whom do not come to coin shows because the coins they buy are too expensive to just stick in your pocket and walk out with.</p><p><br /></p><p>Dealers do a <b>lot</b> of volume with each other. Much of the time it&#039;s to fill a customer want - mind you, a multi-thousand-dollar customer want - and sometimes it&#039;s to get out from under something they&#039;re overstocked in, or acquire something they&#039;re understocked in. Dealers have done this for a long time, for as long as there have been dealers. Wholesale is <b>big</b> in numismatics, far moreso than the average collector imagines.</p><p><br /></p><p>Part and parcel of that is being able to trust the product the other dealer is sending you. In the &quot;bad old days&quot; before TPG&#039;s, there was always the chance that the dealer sending you those coins simply wasn&#039;t an expert grader of that issue, or maybe even sent you his &quot;dogs&quot; to get out from under them.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>That&#039;s why the TPG&#039;s were formed</b>. Sight-unseen trading. Wholesaling. Yes, it benefited the end user - you, me and us - but only because it allowed our dealers (don&#039;t forget, this world where we can look at coin images on dealer&#039;s websites and Ebay has only existed for <i>twenty years</i>; before that, you had a dealer you patronized, or you bought from a print ad in the coin magazine, and that was it) to reliably tell you they had the coin you wanted in the grade you desired.</p><p><br /></p><p>So what happens when the TPG&#039;s you founded for the specific purpose of sight-unseen trading became so unreliable that you couldn&#039;t trust their product, when you could as easily find a 63 Details or a 65 in a 64 slab?</p><p><br /></p><p>What happens is what John Albanese did. And keep in mind, Albanese is just the public &quot;face&quot; of CAC, the guy who took the publicity because his was the name that carried the most weight in the situation. CAC is a <b>consortium</b>, a group of major coin dealers and a few major whales in the collecting community (guys whose name you&#039;d recognize, because you see their names on slab provenances) who reached the limit of their patience with TPG aberrations. They started CAC to regain control of the sight-unseen market. They were <b>disgusted</b> with the TPG&#039;s.</p><p><br /></p><p>And think about it. You think John Albanese wants to be spending his time rechecking slabbed coins? You think that&#039;s an effective use of his time? How much is he worth per hour? More realistically, how much is the person he&#039;s paying to do this worth per hour? Somebody who can reliably call half-grade differences in five-figure coins in all denominations?</p><p><br /></p><p>At, what, $12 per coin? I kind of doubt CAC even operates in the black, to tell you the truth, and even if they do, they&#039;re not making sufficient ROI to justify the effort.</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;m not going to say, &quot;CAC does this,&quot; because that doesn&#039;t get the point across. What I&#039;ll say is, &quot;<i>This group of dealers backs their stickers with their own money</i>.&quot; In a <b>big</b> way. They started CAC to have sight-unseen coins to trade, and CAC coins are what they buy. To the tune of <b>close to half a billion Dollars so far</b>. How accurate would PCGS&#039; grading be if they were actually putting their own money at risk, by selling and more importantly <b>buying</b> their own product, placing their profitability potential in it?</p><p><br /></p><p>It would be accurate enough for CAC to quietly fold, which is what they&#039;d undoubtedly do, because every_single_person involved with that group can make more money elsewhere.</p><p><br /></p><p>And for the record, ANACS kind of sucks at Lincolns.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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