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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;calcol, post: 4608238, member: 77639&quot;]For those who think pre-TPG days were the good ole days&nbsp; ... nope ... selective memory or good luck.&nbsp; I started with US coins in the early 1980&#039;s.&nbsp; As soon as I sold a few, I was done with US coins.&nbsp; Virtually every coin that had been bought from a dealer ... and I bought from many&nbsp; dealers, local and national ... was considered lower grade on selling.&nbsp; It was the beginning of TPGs when I quit.&nbsp; The few PCGS and NGC coins I bought went up nicely in value.</p><p><br /></p><p>So I collected ancients for a while, then for financial reasons gave up the hobby altogether.&nbsp; Started again with US coins in the 2010&#039;s, and would not have done so without TPGs.</p><p><br /></p><p>I do believe there has been some gradeflation with TPGs since the early days, but not by much.&nbsp; And some of this is inevitable grade-ratcheting because graded coins can be submitted for re-grading with no risk of them going down in grade.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>With ten&#039;s of millions of coins graded, there will be errors.&nbsp; I&#039;ve seen slabs with the wrong denomination on them.&nbsp; Wrong grade?&nbsp; Well, could have been a labeling error or coincidence of temporary neuron misfiring of graders.&nbsp; Pointing out errors is fun and interesting, but what really counts is the error rate.&nbsp; I don&#039;t know that a large scale study of this has been done and made public.</p><p><br /></p><p>The fact that there are demonstrable errors is compounded by the subjectivity of grading.&nbsp; Add the two together and, yeah, there will be slabs where the coin and label seem well out of whack.&nbsp;&nbsp; Again though, what&#039;s the rate on this?&nbsp; What percentage of&nbsp; graded coins fall in this territory? It&#039;s pretty low in my (very subjective) experience.</p><p><br /></p><p>We can all find reasons to criticize the major TPGs.&nbsp; I do it on occasion ... I could tell you about my late uncle&#039;s Morgan dollar that had been in a paper wrapper for 50 years and came back with an AT label ... so it was dipped by an expert and came back as ... not interested?&nbsp; OK.&nbsp; A lot of this though is bringing our own erroneously perceived objectivity to an activity that is inherently subjective.</p><p><br /></p><p>Keep on posting grading and labeling errors ... fun to see and read, and may help keep TPGs on their toes.&nbsp; But posts of this type are too few and too subjective to prove a lot about TPGs other than they aren&#039;t perfect.</p><p><br /></p><p>Cal[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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