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Message:: [QUOTE="princeofwaldo, post: 1260564, member: 24091"]Every time I see auction results like that, I wonder if it wasn't staged by interested parties. Would work something like this: Dealer "A" dealer "B" and dealer "C" all have a lot of similar material, all of it slabbed, all of it sent in huge lots to the grading services. Like most modern coins, the grading service doesn't even look at the coin, they simply decide 10% will be MS70, and the rest MS69 unless they have some obvious flaw. They slap them in slabs, then send them back to the dealers. Next, dealer "A" takes the nicest looking, and "rarest" coin and puts it in a leading auction house event ran concurent to a big show. Dealers "B" and "C" then step in to bid the coin to outlandish levels. Say, $300,000 for a common coin with some triffle of uniquness. The auction closes at that level, and the 3 dealers agree to split the commision owed the auction firm 3 ways. They have now spent about $15,000 each to promote a whole new area of specialization that hertofore didn't exist. And just by coincidence, they also happen to be sitting on tens of thousands of very similar coins, all of them slabbed, and ready for the buyers who were "blown-away" by the previous auction results.  The only thing necessary going forward is marketing and suffecient hype.  Call me a conspiracy nut, but in the world of business (and not just the coin business) that sort of stuff happens all the time).[/QUOTE]