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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;SuperDave, post: 2614037, member: 1892&quot;]This is generalizing, and like all generalities, exceptions abound. But....</p><p><br /></p><p>TPG&#039;s originally hewed pretty closely to ANA grading standards, how you and I learned to grade back in the day. As time went by, they gradually loosened those standards, because it was in their best financial interest to offer their customers higher numbers (therefore more value for them) on the slab. It reached a head when John Albanese, who had been in on the founding of both PCGS and NGC and was NGC&#039;s first President, got so sick and tired of not being able to trust the numbers on the slabs that he founded CAC to cull the dogs away from the coins actually worthy of the grade. </p><p><br /></p><p>In response, the TPG&#039;s kinda lurched back into stricter grading. I say &quot;lurched&quot; because they&#039;re running their operations so tightly these days that mistakes - although perhaps not as frequent as before - are far more egregious. These days, we seem to see equal amounts of &quot;what <b>were</b> they thinking?&quot; to <i>either</i> side of the appropriate grade number. And, they&#039;re so paranoid about artificial color that it&#039;s pretty hard to get a toned coin into a genuine slab.</p><p><br /></p><p>So, even after a decade or more of the older slabs being cracked as fast as people could buy them for the new, higher grade, even the ones that are left tend to show more consistent and accurate grading than anything since.</p><p><br /></p><p>If you buy a nice PL coin in an older MS65 slab, it might well become 66PL today.</p><p><br /></p><p>Or 63. <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie7" alt=":p" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" />[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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