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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 7781043, member: 19463&quot;]97%?&nbsp; I think you owe the two NGC experts an apology.&nbsp; Anyone who misses 3% would not be considered employable in the trade let alone selling their opinions as a third party grader. 3% would mean that I have about 100 fakes lurking in my collection unbeknownst to me.&nbsp; I do hope my number is smaller than that.&nbsp; I suppose I could ship off my coins to NGC along with a check for something like $175, 000 and find out which ones were mistakes I made over the last 55 years.&nbsp; The fact is I am not THAT curious.&nbsp; If 3% is not a fair number, what is?&nbsp; Coin Talk has seen one NGC slabbed fake so the number is not zero. If you search the CT posts for the last decade you will find it.&nbsp; I bought the same fake a few years ago and was allowed to keep it when the seller refunded my money.&nbsp; Later I gave the coin to the person who owned the slabbed fake since they were twins that needed to be together.&nbsp; Today, we on Coin Talk Ancients have publicized this coin so often that I would hope everyone here is familiar with it and would not be fooled. It is a bit embarrassing today that we were fooled by this one even for a minute.&nbsp; </p><p>[ATTACH=full]1334896[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Where did you get the idea that 5/5 means a coin is in the top 20% as opposed to being the best possible on an absolute scale and a 1/5 can not possibly be the best of the type ever seen?&nbsp; Consider the Poros tetradrachms of Alexander the Great.&nbsp; I have no idea how many have been &#039;graded&#039; but I can&#039;t recall seeing any that would allow better than 3/5 for strike.&nbsp; There are &#039;types&#039; of ancient coins known by very few specimens (of which very few are slabbed) where every known specimen would grade 5/5 or 1/5.&nbsp; I sincerely hope that were I to send in a small pot hoard of a thousand straight from the mint perfect coins of a previously unknown type, that the handful only 99% perfect would not be labeled 1/5 because there were hundreds and hundreds perhaps 1% better.&nbsp; This sounds like the sort of idea that someone carried over from the modern hobby where a &#039;rare&#039; coin might be represented by a few thousand specimens most of which have been slabbed (what IS the body count for 1909 S VDB cents?).&nbsp; Rules for Ancients are different for good reason.&nbsp; Am I wrong?&nbsp; Is NGC Ancients grading relative or absolute?&nbsp; I would be interested in hearing the percentage statistics of coins graded 1/5 vs 5/5.&nbsp; I would suspect that rather more really nice coins get sent in to be graded so there must be many more 5/5 labels for most types.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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