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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;GDJMSP, post: 1938196, member: 112&quot;]Matt - </p><p><br /></p><p>You have discovered what has been posted about here many times. But quite frankly many refuse to listen because they don&#039;t want to believe that it is true. So even though they may have read about it numerous times they tend to forget it because they dismiss it as being inaccurate information. </p><p><br /></p><p>That said, when discussing rarity all by itself, let alone discussing the relationship between rarity and value, there are several things that have to be considered. First and foremost, who is determining the rarity, and what are they basing that rarity on. The who is often easy, the what is somewhat more difficult.</p><p><br /></p><p>For example, the what: when PCGS provides their rarity number does that number only take into account coins graded by PCGS, or does it take into account all coins known to exist ? Including those not graded and slabbed at all as well as all of those graded &amp; slabbed by somebody else ?</p><p><br /></p><p>The reason I am mentioning this is because quite often the published rarity of a given coin is, shall we say, misleading and often bit more than inaccurate. But the only way to determine that and prove it is by independent study. Of course very few are ever willing to do that given the amount of work it entails and so they tend to accept the information they are given, never questioning its accuracy. But it is not uncommon to find when ones does do the work that the rarity being reported by an acknowledged authority for a given coin is completely inaccurate. And sometimes wildly inaccurate.</p><p><br /></p><p>In that paragraph you quoted above, notice how drastically the rarity can change depending on the grade of the given coin. For that 1881-S dollar it almost doubles from an overall rarity to that of one in 65. The same kind of thing happens with most coins, with some to a lesser degree and with others to a greater degree. And every now and then you will run across a given coin in a given grade where the rarity is extremely disparate with the value. But that can often be attributed to the fact that there are simply very few examples known in that particular given grade. There may well be many, many, more examples in grades above or below that specific grade, but because only a few are known in that specific grade, the rarity is skewed way out of proportion. So it is best not to read too much into it.</p><p><br /></p><p>Also, published rarity numbers are often old, sometimes very old, and they are merely copied &amp; repeated over and over again by each subsequent author reporting them. And they are accepted as being accurate by most even though those doing the accepting have no understanding of how those numbers were determined. Or if those numbers could have, even might have, changed over the years due to subsequent discoveries that were unknown when the original study was conducted.</p><p><br /></p><p>So what is one to do if you cannot trust the published information ? Well the simple answer is you ignore it. And instead you watch and learn the coin market. The coin market is everything, all of the information you could ever want to know about any given coin, conveniently rolled up into a nice neat package for you. But the coin market is the big picture, so it must be viewed an open mind instead of a closed or biased mind. When you see something in the coin market that seemingly disproves what you previously believed to be true you must sit up and take notice instead of dismissing it because the coin market is rarely wrong. Yes it can be wrong at times, just not very often, because instead of one small group or even 1 individual disseminating information, you have the aggregate of all knowledgeable individuals providing their consensus.</p><p><br /></p><p>But the thing about the coin market that you always have to remember is that it will reflect the value of a coin while often completely discounting the true rarity of that coin. And that is because rarity often has nothing to do with value. Value is often an emotionally driven function while rarity is a statistically driven function. And once you know that and realize it, well then you can finally begin to understand the coin market.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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