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Message:: [QUOTE="GDJMSP, post: 908066, member: 112"]Well so far only 2 people have attempted to answer my question completely - raider and Lehigh. They are also correct for the most part. Everybody else gave partial answers or mentioned single elements/aspects of market grading. And what rlm posted is also correct - "A numerical grade that matches the grade at which a particular coin generally is traded in the marketplace." Now that seems like a very broad and vague definition, but it is an accurate definition of how PCGS grades. And if you read the pages in the PCGS standards that explain what market grading is you'll understand it. To use another popular term it means "market accpetable". In other words, if the majority of the people who make up the market are willing to accept a coin that is pretty much covered with marks, some major and a lot of minor ones as MS63 then the coin is graded as MS63. But if people balk at that grade and complain that the coin is over-graded - then the TPG changes their standards to a more strict interpretation and grades that coin 62 or even 61. It also works in the reverse direction and coins can sometimes go up in grade. Now none of this happens over-night, it takes time for the changes in the standards to occur. But if you follow coins closely and have a good memory which is supplemented by an archive of picture examples for comparison purposes, you can see it happen. Most people however never even notice it because it changes gradually. But what no one has mentioned so far is how market grading has changed over the years. In the beginning and for many years afterward the aspects of value, rarity, popularity and pedigree had no influence and played no part whatsoever in market grading. None of those things influenced or had any effect whatsoever on the grade assigned to a coin. And so they had no part in defining what market grading is - none. It pretty much stayed this way for the first 15 years of TPG grading. It started slowly at first, but by 2004 the changes had taken off. It became common for the coins in big name collections to be over-graded. It became common for coins of rarity to be over-graded. It became common for popular coins to be over-graded. And value came into play because prices took off like a rocket. Things that help confirm all of this are articles in coin mags, letters to the editor, internet discussions and coin forums, and most of all the coins themselves and the grades they are assigned - and when they were assigned.  All of these things are a matter of record and they can be examined by those willing to take the time to do so. Of course there are always those who scoff and say it isn't so. But then they've never checked either, they've never done the work to see if it is true or not. In the beginning market grading was a good thing. It took into account the aspects of a coin that had long been neglected by the technical grading system. Things like quality of luster and eye appeal. And this allowed coins to be more accurately graded and to have that grade be a better description of the coin. But that market acceptability, that allowed the other stuff, the bad stuff, to creep into the grading of coins. Why ? Because we accepted it, we allowed it to happen. We after all, are the market. Now maybe not you, and definitely not me - but the majority did. They ate it up like candy. They loved having their coins go up in grade 1 and sometimes even 2 grades from what they ever would have been before. For those selling, it allowed them to get more money. For those holding, it allowed them to stick more feathers in their caps. That is the nature of people. And that is today's market grading.[/QUOTE]

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