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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;SuperDave, post: 2527965, member: 1892&quot;]1. I go <b>everywhere I can think of</b> to search for coins. Ebay has the exact same problem with coins as it does watches, and worse. Counterfeits, of course, but the key to a coin&#039;s value is condition, and you can not necessarily reliably determine a coin&#039;s condition from typical Ebay images. You sometimes have to work carefully and deliberately, with professional skill, to capture a cleaned coin so it&#039;s obvious to the viewer, and many Ebay sellers aren&#039;t worthy of the term &quot;skill&quot; when it comes to imagery. Worse yet, some will deliberately hide that cleaning. So, in addition to developing grading skills (you should not be buying raw coins without the ability to accurately determine grade, and therefore value), you need the skill of evaluating coin photography. Completely different skills requiring the same steps for learning - look at a bazillion coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>There are hundreds/thousands of dealers with online presences. In fact, many who also sell on Ebay will have the same coin on their business website for less, because Ebay imposes additional cost-of-business on them which needs to be compensated (and Ebay contains bidiots, who seem to prefer overpaying for a given coin, therefore the dealer can get away with higher prices).</p><p><br /></p><p>Get me a feel for what you like, and what you&#039;re going to be paying per coin, and I&#039;ll offer more specific advice.</p><p><br /></p><p>2. Only you can decide what you like for condition. You&#039;ll find preferences all over the map among CT members. There will be coins you can collect in high Mint State grade, and others which will cost you a fortune to find one at all in any condition. Get a feel for what you like first. See? I said that again - coin collecting is at its&#039; heart a very subjective, personal activity and only you can decide what appeals to you. If you don&#039;t like liver, I cannot &quot;advise you&quot; to like it. <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie1" alt=":)" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" /></p><p><br /></p><p>3. Published price guides are not where you determine what to pay for a coin. They are slow to react to market changes, and virtually all of them are published by people with a vested interest in high coin prices. You determine the price to pay for a coin by <i>learning what your competition - other potential buyers of the same coin - is paying for it today, in the real world</i>. Ebay results are a great help, once you learn to factor in the bidiots because there will be &quot;outlier&quot; prices from them. There will also be &quot;outlier&quot; prices caused by unlucky auctions - poor timing, maybe, or just the poor luck of selling something nobody was really looking for at the time. A big news story will drag a bunch of potential buyers away from Ebay and onto CNN.</p><p><br /></p><p>For slabbed coins, PCGS has an <b>enormous</b> database of auction results:</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="http://www.pcgs.com/auctionprices/" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.pcgs.com/auctionprices/" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcgs.com/auctionprices/</a></p><p><br /></p><p>All the major auction houses combined, going back nearly 25 years. For coins in slabs - or raw coins whose value indicates they ought to be in a slab - this is your hookup.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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