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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;DonnaML, post: 4507915, member: 110350&quot;]I have never owned a slabbed coin and doubt I would ever buy one except with the express intention of taking it out.&nbsp; I can&#039;t afford the kind of coin that should really be kept in its slab (if it already has one) for economic/investment reasons.&nbsp; I hope never to have to sell my coins again, since I don&#039;t buy them for investment purposes.&nbsp; And if I ever am in the position again of having to sell, I will leave it to the buyer to slab them, with the understanding that the cost of having them slabbed would presumably be deducted from the purchase price.&nbsp; When I sold all of my more valuable British gold and silver coins and historical medals to Stack&#039;s Bowers on several occasions between two and six years ago --- as a series of direct sales rather than by auction, because I needed the money right away to pay my rent and bills, and couldn&#039;t wait the multiple months between consignment and receipt of proceeds, even though I was well aware that I was receiving less money by proceeding that way -- I knew that all of them would end up slabbed, but preferred not to think about it!&nbsp; Which is why I never even sought out the auction catalogues in which they ultimately appeared.&nbsp; Too painful.&nbsp; Plus I didn&#039;t really want to know how much money I really lost by not taking them through the auction process.&nbsp; The fact remains that I still ended up receiving more money than I had paid for everything, given how long I had owned most of what I sold.&nbsp; Even though Stack&#039;s paid me only about 35-40% of the then-retail value.&nbsp; Who knows how much more I would have gained had I sold the coins through auctioning them, after paying the fees and assigning a value to the time I would have had to wait?</p><p><br /></p><p>By the way, out of all the (unslabbed) coins and medals I offered to Stack&#039;s -- totaling perhaps 150-200 individual items -- they didn&#039;t reject a single one, whether for reasons related to authenticity or for any other reason.</p><p><br /></p><p>I recently expressed my opinion of slabbing on an aesthetic level in the Coin Storage thread, and might as well repeat what I said here, as somewhat intemperate as my comments may have been:</p><p><br /></p><p>&quot;To me, from an aesthetic viewpoint (wholly apart from the investment motives), slabbing coins is almost as pernicious. Once a coin is slabbed, in my opinion, it&#039;s no longer an actual coin. It&#039;s become a commodity. Like pork belly futures. Frankly, there might as well be a hologram inside the slab instead of a coin. Because all you&#039;re really seeing when you look at a slab is the image of a coin, mediated through plastic -- not terribly well, I think -- rather than the coin itself, which was intended to be seen directly, and to be experienced through the sense of touch as well as sight.</p><p><br /></p><p>I expect that one of these days people will be slabbing rare first editions of books, making them impossible to read. (I&#039;ve already seen that done with old magazines.) Or valuable paintings -- should all the Vermeers and Van Goghs and Rembrandts be graded by TPG&#039;s and encased in plastic slabs? Anyone who&#039;s ever been in a museum knows the vast difference between the experience of seeing a painting with and without glass in the frame -- the latter is incomparably superior, given that it allows the viewer to see the texture of the paint in all its three-dimensionality, an effect that&#039;s nearly destroyed when it&#039;s behind glass. Plastic is far worse than glass in detracting from the viewer&#039;s experience. Never mind that slabbing makes it physically impossible to display coins together in an appealing manner, as I have tried to do with my collection in its trays, as shown in some of the photos I&#039;ve posted here.</p><p><br /></p><p>Rant over -- I just get tired of the obnoxiousness of those who look down on ancient coin collectors who refuse to slab their coins. Even if I do understand the reasons why some do it.&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>And I didn&#039;t even mention some of the other practical problems with ancient coin slabs pointed out above, such as the almost complete absence of identifying information (catalog numbers, etc.) on the slabs, and the many mistakes in the identifying information that certain companies do provide on their slabs.</p><p><br /></p><p>Also, I have recently looked several times through the ancient coins for sale on Ebay, and have noticed that the percentage of slabbed coins among them is far higher than on VCoins or Ma-Shops -- presumably because of the assurance of authenticity that slabbing supposedly provides.&nbsp; However, I have become convinced that many Ebay sellers exploit slabbing as a way of knowingly attempting to deceive naive buyers into paying far more than the actual fair market value for common Roman coins in average condition.&nbsp; The prices asked are often preposterously, laughably high.&nbsp; I understand that a slab can justifiably attach a certain premium to an ancient coin because of the assurance of authenticity it supposedly provides.&nbsp; But not a premium of 5x or 10x fair market value.&nbsp; And I wonder if the slabbing companies, when they slab common coins for such sellers, are aware that they&#039;re participating in such deceptive practices.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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