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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;John Anthony, post: 2217458, member: 42773&quot;]Sorry, I just can&#039;t be as genteel as my colleagues. You got taken to the cleaners. It&#039;s a nice coin to be sure, but the grade is bogus. Hard-core collectors of ancients never use the grade MS. How can a coin that&#039;s been buried in a pot for 1700 years and then cleaned be considered Mint State, by any stretch of the imagination? And yes, it&#039;s been thoroughly cleaned, both mechanically and chemically. This is what hoard finds in pots look like when they come out of the ground...</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]433920[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>Forget about the grade, forget about the star. They mean nothing. Also, it&#039;s a bit of selling sliminess to say there were only 8 examples in the Bridgnorth Hoard. There were only 8 examples from the Trier mint. The full disposition shows 30 examples of the FEL TEMP hut types from all mints. Now, the hoard contained 2,839 coins, so you might think 30 huts still makes them rare, but it doesn&#039;t. These are some of the most common folles of the 4th-century. The Romans churned them out by the millions, and they can be had in this condition for a fraction of what you paid. Here is one of mine, from the Antioch mint, for which I paid $50...</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]433921[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>The Bridgnorth Hoard was significant for collectors, not because it was a hoard - many ancient coins come from documented hoards. That&#039;s nothing special. But this hoard contained many high-grade coins. I have one coin from the Bridgnorth Hoard for which I paid $65...</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]433922[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>What happens with British hoard finds is that the antiquity authorities eventually release the coins and they get put up for auction, and most of the coins are bought by European dealers who are not obsessed with slabbing to the extent that US dealers are. But then some US dealers buy the coins for under $100 apiece, get them into NGC slabs with silly grades, and charge $400.</p><p><br /></p><p>This is a marketing tactic whose sole purpose is to prey on uninformed collectors of modern coins. Collectors of US coins are accustomed to paying high prices for &quot;old&quot; coins in slabs with high grades. A truly old Roman coin in such a high grade must surely be worth $400, yes?? <b>No.</b> You paid about $350 for a piece of plastic.</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;m sorry if any of this sounds like a personal scolding. I honestly don&#039;t mean it as such. If you have a chance to return this coin, do it, and use the money to buy yourself a <u>handful</u> of equally lovely raw coins.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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