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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;rld14, post: 1073665, member: 16133&quot;]Morgans have been weak for quite a while, and on a wholesale basis generic dates in MS65 are still easily buyable for 20% back of CDN bid.</p><p><br /></p><p>Mid Grade Barbers are a whole different animal.. they get warm in Fine, red hot in VF, nuclear fission in XF and generally cool right down in AU.&nbsp; The market on these coins is also VERY fickle and, IMO, rather unstable.</p><p><br /></p><p>First, pretty much ANY VF-XF Barber Half is at least scarce, and that&#039;s for a &quot;common&quot; one like a 12-D, some are genuinely rare, much rarer than most people realize.&nbsp; Barber Halves were like the $10 or $20 bills of their day, they saw very heavy use in commerce, so once they entered circulation, they stayed there.&nbsp; I think that David Lawrence said that 95% of extant Barber Halves grade no better than VG and I tend to believe that.</p><p><br /></p><p>The problem with pricing them is that the published price guides, on numerous dates, have little, if any bearing on their actual market value.&nbsp; If they are &quot;crusty&quot; and have their original skin and are one of the TRULY rare dates, then they can bring as much as 3-4 times &quot;Sheet&quot; or &quot;guide&quot;.</p><p><br /></p><p>Also, it&#039;s the PCGS slabbed ones that generally bring crazy money, not the NGC coins.&nbsp; On top of that, the coins generally have to be original and not messed with, and that brings the already small pool of VF-XF coins down quite a bit.&nbsp; A great many of them have been cleaned, dipped out, dipped out and artificially toned back, whizzed, etc and on top of that they&#039;re big coins so they often attract damage.</p><p><br /></p><p>And that&#039;s the trick, knowing which ones really are rare.&nbsp; If you just look in the Red Book, you&#039;d think that the 13p, 14p and 15p are the rarest ones, they aren&#039;t.&nbsp; The 93-S, 05-O and then probably the 98-O are actually the toughest ones to find in truly original, problem-free VF-XF.&nbsp; The series is just flat-out full of &quot;sleeper dates&quot; like the 03-O, a coin which doesn&#039;t seem, per published guides, to be a rare coin.&nbsp; Now try and find an original-skin one.</p><p><br /></p><p>I was lucky to get a number of coins for my set due to the breakup of the Gettysburg set and my friend Mike Hayes selling off some duplicates, otherwise I&#039;d still be trying to complete my set.&nbsp; I have the #5 I think everyman set on the PCGS registry.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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