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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;GDJMSP, post: 1848791, member: 112&quot;]You are quite correct. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;ve often said that the TPGs are the best thing that ever happened to this hobby. So yes, of course they are helpful to a great many. But them being helpful doesn&#039;t have anything to do with the subject that I was talking about. There is a difference between slabs having value because they are helpful, and them making the coin inside more valuable. Books about coins have value because they are helpful. And if more people bought them, read them and studied them, they wouldn&#039;t need the TPGs or their slabs. But books don&#039;t make coins more valuable either.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Yes of course to both questions, assuming I wanted the coins being offered. Why ? Because I started studying and learning about coins in 1960 and have been ever since. I have a numismatic library that rivals that of most any other private individual, and exceeds that of most professionals. And over the years I have bought and sold tens of thousands of coins. And looked at and examined millions more in person. Because of the knowledge I have gained over the course of virtually my entire life I have never once needed a TPG to tell me about a coin, and I have never once submitted even 1 coin to a TPG - because I never needed to. I could grade the coin accurately and correctly and tell if it was genuine by myself.</p><p><br /></p><p>Let me ask you something. If you went back to the day before a TPG opened its doors for business all of the coins had a given value, yes ? Well, if on the next day the TPG slabbed those coins did they automatically become more valuable ? No of course they didn&#039;t. The value didn&#039;t change a bit. And if on the 3rd day you took all of those coins back out of the slabs the value wouldn&#039;t change then either. That&#039;s because it&#039;s the coin that has value, not the plastic holder that it is in or the opinion regarding grade of the people who put it in that holder.</p><p><br /></p><p>Would it surprise you to learn that I can buy a given coin already slabbed by NGC or PCGS. Then I can crack that coin out of the holder so it is raw, offer it for sale to any of several dealers, and get more money than I paid for it ? I can, and I have done so many times. So if the slabbed coin had more value than it would were it raw - how could I possibly do that ?</p><p><br /></p><p>I can do it because when the coin is raw it is an unknown and the person I am offering to sell it to may think it would grade higher than the TPG had graded it. So based on their own opinion of the coin, they offer me more money than I paid for the coin.</p><p><br /></p><p>There are more than just a few people who do exactly what I just described and they make their living at it. And they make a very good living at it. And big companies like Heritage, Stacks, and any of the larger dealers, they have people they pay a lot of money to do it for them. This happens every single day, numerous times a day.</p><p><br /></p><p>A coin being slabbed does not increase the value of the coin, it just makes it easier to sell to people who don&#039;t know coins.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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