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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Conder101, post: 26057258, member: 66&quot;]The crazy price swings were the result of three things.&nbsp; First the creation of the grading services PCGS and NGC.&nbsp; Second the entry of Wall Steet into the coin market&nbsp; because they had been convinced that thanks to the grading services coins could now be treated as being fungible (Like stocks, one share of stock is just like, and interchangeable with, any other share of the same stock. one MS-65 slabbed coin was the same as any other MS-65 slabbed example of the same coin.&nbsp; Thus coins could be bought and sold sight-unseen.)&nbsp; And three the services were new and had not slabbed that many coins yet and were loathe to call anything better than MS-65.</p><p><br /></p><p>Since there were very few coins graded better than MS-65, MS-65 came to be known as an investment quality grade.&nbsp; As the investor money came chasing them those MS-65 quality coins skyrocketed.&nbsp; (Around that time MS-65 1881 S Morgan dollars were approaching $1,000 apiece!)</p><p><br /></p><p>The problems came from two fronts.&nbsp; One the idea that coins were fungible.&nbsp; We all know that one MS-65 is NOT the same as every other MS-65.&nbsp; And that killed the idea of sight-unseen trading which was absolutely necessary for the Wall Street crowd.&nbsp; (Many people have the wrong idea of what sight unseen trading was/is.&nbsp; Many people think it means &quot;I haven&#039;t had the chance to see the coin yet, and when it gets here I&#039;ll look at it and decide if I want it.&quot;.&nbsp; What it actually meant was if you ordered a MS-65, as long as the coin was graded MS-65 you were obligated to accept it.&nbsp; You ordered a &quot;MS-65&quot; and you got a &quot;MS-65&quot; which in theory was supposed to be equal to any other &quot;MS-65&quot;.&nbsp; Since you didn&#039;t know what piece of junk you might be sent this caused bids to start going way down.)</p><p><br /></p><p>The second problem was that the services eventually started grading more and more coins higher than MS-65.&nbsp; Most of todays MS-66, 67, 68 or better coins back in 1988 would have been or WERE called MS-65.&nbsp; So a lot of investors found that their &quot;investment grade MS-65&#039;s, were no longer &quot;investment&quot; grade coins.&nbsp; And this also caused the price of MS-65&#039;s to fall.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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