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Message:: [QUOTE="mikenoodle, post: 1293708, member: 307"]...or you could learn the TPG standards, learn to grade by them, make offers to purchase your coins based upon them like the industry that sells them does. I can see what you're trying for, early, and that's to get people to stop thinking of things inside of the TPG grading box, and that's commendable. I think that people need to learn to be able to grade coins for themselves instead of relying on a TPGs grade. People need not "disregard the grade", but rather learn to evaluate a coin on their own (by the TPG standards) and assign their own grade, and then buy accordingly. If you don't understand the TPG standards, you will never know whether the seller wants too much or too little because you won't understand his or her grade in order to compare it to your own. We constantly preach: "Buy the coin, not the slab" and to a large extent that's what you're proposing here. We understand that using the Sheldon scale is less than perfect, but it gives us all a meter on which to equally evaluate. A dealer may call a coin, Choice XF, and if I know what I am grading, I may think it to be an over-graded VF, but if we don't start with the same scale, I have no idea what he is grading it and therefore know nothing about what he expects me to pay. The system may be flawed, but it at least gives us all a common nomenclature.[/QUOTE]