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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;IdesOfMarch01, post: 3126053, member: 39084&quot;]I find the differing points of view in these posts to be interesting and thought-provoking, and have some observations of my own about the topic(s) raised.</p><p><br /></p><p>First, with the extensive research on ancient coin prices and auctions that can be done via the Internet, it&#039;s almost always possible to find relevant data on a potential purchase -- whether you&#039;re purchasing from a dealer or bidding at an auction.&nbsp; Many times it&#039;s even possible to find the exact coin on which you&#039;re contemplating a bid when it was sold previously by a dealer or auctioneer. </p><p><br /></p><p>Forearmed with this information, you can estimate a realistic price for the coin in today&#039;s market, set your budget (including buyer&#039;s fees et al.), and figure out whether you think there will be a lot of interest and consequently lots of bids, so you can readjust your top bid if necessary.&nbsp; Once in a while you might not be able to find enough information to do this, but&nbsp; those situations are infrequent.</p><p><br /></p><p>So there&#039;s rarely an excuse for entering into an auction without a good idea of what the coin is worth <i>to you</i>, and how aggressively you&#039;re going to pursue the coin.&nbsp; If you&#039;ve done sufficient due diligence, the main (and I would argue only) relevance of the auctioneer&#039;s &quot;estimate&quot; is that the starting price is usually a percentage of the estimate (e.g., 80%) and whether or not this estimate is too high for your budget. </p><p><br /></p><p>It&#039;s irrelevant whether it&#039;s too low.&nbsp; Yes, maybe the auction house has set the estimate at an artificially low price in the hopes of encouraging more bidding, but bargain hunters won&#039;t win a coin against a serious collector who has set his/her budget appropriately. </p><p><br /></p><p>The estimate also makes no difference if you have two or more bidders who get carried away and bid way over their budgets so that the hammer price is artificially high.&nbsp; If you&#039;ve set your top bid realistically, you&#039;re not going to win the coin in this situation.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;m not specifically in agreement with either these positions, since as I&#039;ve observed above, I think the only relevance of an estimate is how high it sets the opening bid.&nbsp; If the estimate is too high, the opening bid will be too high.&nbsp; As an example, in the first auction that this coin appeared, the estimate was so high that I told my dealer I would not bid even at the 80% opening bid:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]796582[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>Not surprisingly, the coin garnered no bids.&nbsp; I subsequently made an offer (through my dealer) to the auction house, an offer that failed since the auction house wanted its full commission and offered no return guarantee if the coin didn&#039;t meet my standards when in hand.&nbsp; When the coin appeared at a different auction a few months later, I won it for a price that was not only lower than its previous opening bid, but also lower than I had offered the first auction house for the coin.&nbsp; In this case, the first auction house&#039;s estimate was too high and fatal to selling the coin.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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