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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;tcore, post: 83699, member: 2949&quot;]Fred, when you want to post pictures, you do it through the &quot;Manage Attachments&quot; feature that&#039;s down below the area that you type.&nbsp; There is a &quot;Sticky&quot; post at the top of the main Coin Chat page that tells you how to do this.</p><p><br /></p><p>Well, I&#039;m not very experienced in this hobby yet either.&nbsp; However, from what I&#039;ve figured out so far, I can tell you this...&nbsp; I DO like to purchase graded and slabbed coins for now for the more expensive coins that I buy.&nbsp; I do this in part because I&#039;m not confident in my own grading/authenticating ability yet.&nbsp; At least until you are comfortable with your own skills, I would stick with only buying graded coins from what you&#039;ll hear refered to as &quot;The Big 4&quot;.&nbsp; These are four companies that are generally considered to be the best at what they do.&nbsp; They are NGC, PCGS, ANACS and ICG.</p><p><br /></p><p>Also, I would always want to look at whatever coin first before I buy it...even if it&#039;s a picture of the coin over the internet.&nbsp; I can tell you that I&#039;ve seen plenty of graded coins that I just don&#039;t like because they don&#039;t have good eye appeal.&nbsp; Also, even coins within the same grade can have vastly different appearances.&nbsp; You could have two 1983-S half dollars.&nbsp; Both could be graded MS-64.&nbsp; However, upon examination, one could have some kind of crazy looking toning to it and the other could be completely untoned.</p><p><br /></p><p>The last thing is to check out fair prices for the coins you&#039;re buying before you buy them.&nbsp; You can do this by looking at auction &quot;Prices Realized&quot; on several online auction sites that are mentioned in other threads here.</p><p><br /></p><p>I personally just bought my first coin over the internet by participating in a Teletrade (<a href="http://www.teletrade.com" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.teletrade.com" rel="nofollow">www.teletrade.com</a>) auction.&nbsp; So far, I really think Teletrade is a good company.&nbsp; They only sell graded/slabbed coins in their auctions from some of the more reputable third party grading companies.</p><p><br /></p><p>That&#039;s about it for now.&nbsp; I&#039;m sure others with have more to add.&nbsp; Welcome to the hobby.&nbsp; It is easy to get frustrated, but you&#039;ll feel your way around before too long.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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