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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 2550923, member: 19463&quot;]NGC lists 1500+ registered dealers of which 56 claim to deal in ancients.&nbsp; Of these about a quarter checked the box that they will help people submit their coins to NGC.&nbsp; I do not know exactly what help that is in each case but I have talked to collectors who showed obvious fakes to a dealer and were saved the trouble of mailing it in.&nbsp; A negative service occurs if a dealer of the 1500 convinces a customer that his status as a registered dealer means he is in some way speaking for NGC when offering his opinion on a coin.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>My main objection to slabs remains their not being openable and reclosable and the implication that the money spent getting their opinion should be recoverable when the original owner resells the coin.&nbsp; Slabs are the only form of coin storage that are part of the investment.&nbsp; Flips are part of the cost of doing business.&nbsp; Slabs have brought some new <span style="color: #00b300">collectors</span> to the hobby but it has brought more new owners and dealers who have no intention of learning about ancient coins other than that some coins in slabs sell for more than coins not in slabs by more than the cost of slabbing.&nbsp; These are not part of the hobby as practiced for the preceding several centuries.&nbsp; Neither were the guys that came up with the Athena Fund where investors bought shares in coins they would never see. Owning stock in Apple does not make me a computer scientist.&nbsp; I prefer a hobby populated by people who could replace the labels on their coins if they got separated.&nbsp; Buying and selling is different from collecting.&nbsp;&nbsp; In US coins, we have learned that it is worth resubmitting MS 64 coins in the hope getting an MS65 this time around.&nbsp;&nbsp; In ancients we have learned that new people who do not want to learn about their coins don&#039;t stick around Coin Talk very long so the rest of us can get along and talk about something other than our choice of storage units.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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