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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 934212, member: 19463&quot;]Yes, if you have $600 to spend on their services and only collect high end coins offered by major auction houses, Coin Archives is a great resource.&nbsp; If you collect something that has not sold in the last few months (where they cut off the free listings) or if you are interested in the 99% of ancient coins that are beneath the notice of major auction houses, searching there can be less fruitful.&nbsp; A bit better is acsearch but most of their listings are still not what beginners are likely to be considering.&nbsp; </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>The problem with a price guide is that ancients do not grade easily.&nbsp; Modern coins fit to a degree into the Sheldon 70 (or is it 700 now?) but 99% of ancients have a stituation (damaged, cleaned, artificially toned etc.) that would cause them to be body bagged by standards used for modern coins.&nbsp; How much each of these factors applies to price is very much a hard thing to predict acccurately.&nbsp;&nbsp; Every auction of ancient coins includes many coins that sell for substantually more or less than the auction house suspected based on their years of experience.&nbsp; Every day very similar coins sell for very dissimilar prices depending on venue and chance of who shows up at the sale.&nbsp; </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>This discussion has suggested several potential guides but the skill to use those guides effectively is a long shot from opening up the 2011 Red Book.&nbsp; Perhaps this is also the situation in US coins in that reference since it lists every cent as having left the mint worth 20 cents or more.&nbsp; By that standard, a fudge factor of 2000%, perhaps we could have a workable price guide for ancients if we could only find agreement on the subject of standards for grading them.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>A question:&nbsp; What is the mean time between transactions for common and popular US coins?&nbsp; How often is a MS 1909s VDB cent sold?&nbsp; Daily? Hourly? Three a second?&nbsp; This statistic would seem important in keeping the book value of such coins current.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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