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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;SuperDave, post: 2569595, member: 1892&quot;]My &quot;recommendation&quot; is to practice the two most difficult behaviors for <b>any</b> human being, much less a collector: <i>patience</i> and <i>iteration</i>. <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie1" alt=":)" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" /></p><p><br /></p><p>Your lack of comfort in certain venues is wholly due to inexperience, and not any insufficient capability on your part. Me, I buy almost exclusively online and at what coin shows I&#039;m able to attend; I&#039;ve been in a B&amp;M coin shop once in the last five years and that was to sell. I don&#039;t buy in sufficient volume to get onto a dealer&#039;s &quot;A list,&quot; and to do so I&#039;d have to give the guy pretty much all my business which isn&#039;t a good look for me because I&#039;m then dependent upon him having everything I want. I have dealers and Ebay sellers I &quot;know&quot; and trust, and I always check everything offered for sale at places like Coin Talk against the possibility of buying from a peer here (I just bought a Morgan from C-B-D, for instance).</p><p><br /></p><p>The trouble for you is, I can say this because I&#039;ve been actively buying and selling on Ebay since 1999, and know enough about both coin photography and interpreting coin images of varying quality to teach it here. That&#039;s where &quot;patience and iteration&quot; comes in. You&#039;re only going to hurt yourself if you set out to fill the entire list above in, say, a six-month period. Sometimes the &quot;right&quot; coin for you doesn&#039;t appear within a calendar year, much less some self-imposed timeframe. And when you consider the sheer volume of coinage available online (as we speak, there are almost 100 1842 Seated Dollars listed on Ebay alone), it becomes obvious that the opportunities are boundless if you&#039;ll just avail yourself of them.</p><p><br /></p><p>That means <b>patience</b>. I have the impression of you that, in hand, you&#039;ll be up to making intelligent decisions about grade and originality. So, your next steps involve learning how to translate online imagery into in-hand reality, and iterative searching of the various online venues (retail as well as auction) to acquire comfort levels with the process. With experience, you can minimize the downside of buying online.</p><p><br /></p><p>Make use of the exhaustive imagery database at Heritage Auctions (membership is free; no financial information required). They have over 600 auction records of 1842 Dollars alone, and many/most will have high-resolution imagery to help you to learn what the grade on the slab looks like in digital imagery. Bookmark the PCGS Auction Results site (the entire Heritage archive is just a subset of PCGS&#039; records of existing sales; they have 800 records of 1842 Dollars) and have it open in a tab whenever you browse online sales.</p><p><br /></p><p>Use the aggregators (Ebay, Collectors Corner, and the like) to determine who has what, and then - when possible - visit the individual dealer&#039;s Web presence for the coin that catches your eye. The coin they list on Ebay or CC is priced to compensate the overhead related to that listing, and often they&#039;ll have the same coin for less money on their own website.</p><p><br /></p><p>Buying on Ebay is as much about evaluating the seller as it is evaluating the coin. There are high-volume Ebay sellers with Feedback ratings of &quot;99.7%&quot; who sell so much that that statistic still means they&#039;re getting three or four Negatives a month; you want to find this and identify why they&#039;re getting those black marks. It&#039;s not always their fault, but sometimes it is....</p><p><br /></p><p>The amount if numismatic stock available for purchase online is staggering and overwhelming. From that standpoint, we live in the Golden Age of buying. It&#039;s never been so easy to find the coin you want. But by the same token, knowledge and due diligence has never been so important either.</p><p><br /></p><p>And never forget the <b>immense</b> concentration of experience and knowledge available at online communities like this one.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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