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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 1597529, member: 19463&quot;]I disagree with much of this.&nbsp; Ancient prices are condition sensitive but do not play the game of ten different levels of mint state with each selling for several times the one below it.&nbsp; Almost no ancients are MS grade.&nbsp; There are a few EF and many VF with price differences not all that different proportionally to the US grade system.&nbsp; However the vast majority of ancient coins would be ungradeable by US slabbing standards due to faults, cleaning problems or striking weakness.&nbsp; I hate to see beginners pay big money for ancients with little wear but horrid, rough surfaces or chipped edges just because a similarly wearless beauty was listed as selling for that much on acsearch.com.&nbsp; You will see ancients sold as&nbsp; &quot;rare in this grade&quot; and there are coins that do not exist above Fine grade.&nbsp; The system is not the same as US but there is a grade/price scale that is more based on eye appeal than on things that can be defined like the number of letters in Liberty that show or whether the steps on a monument are fully formed.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>I believe ancients comply rather well with the original Sheldon grading scale before the crazies hit.&nbsp; The original concept was that a basal coin worth $1 was worth $70 in perfect Proof and $35 for a VF in the middle.&nbsp; If an MS63 in this system were to be valued at $63 then an MS65 would sell for $2 more not 20 times more.&nbsp; I believe a denarius in Fine worth $20 might bring $35 in VF and $50 in EF with all other faults being equal.&nbsp; Of course all faults are never equal so we will never test this for sure.</p><p><br /></p><p>There are so few exact duplicate ancients that are seen regularly in a great range of grades and so very few that we see in super high degrees of perfection that each sale is a separate matter between buyer and seller rather than based on a Red Book.&nbsp; It is quite possible to find a dozen coins honestly graded VF that look absolutely nothing like each other because of their different strikes and different faults any one of which would cause the coin to be avoided like the plague by mainstream US collectors.&nbsp; How do you relate a coin with missing legends and better hair detail to one with worse hair but better legends?&nbsp; Several attempts have been made to set up a grading system for ancients that would rank coins in a way most of us could accept but all have failed.&nbsp; Many/most of us will pay more for a VF than a F but fewer of us will ever agree on what it takes to make a coin gradable by a couple letters rather than a paragraph.&nbsp; It might be fun to put together a group of ten examples of the same coin and see how many of us could even agree which was the nicest or the worst of the group let alone which was worth a dollar more or less.&nbsp; We are a strange bunch.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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