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Message:: [QUOTE="GDJMSP, post: 2101948, member: 112"] <ol> <li></li> </ol>That's just it, it isn't impossible, and I've never said it was. Every US business strike coin ever minted has come off the press and into a hopper, and then has gone into a bag. Every one of them. And yet there are countless examples of MS coins out there. And yes I mean coins that I would grade MS, that would be graded MS by ANA standards.  The reasoning of the TPGs is quite simple, they say that wear from any other source, other than a coin being in actual circulation, doesn't count as wear or is not really wear, because the coin was not in actual circulation. How do you define actual circulation ? Again, quite simple, as a coin being used in commerce. Now that right there is exactly the problem. Why is it a problem ? Because there is no way to say that any given coin was or was not in actual circulation. And since there is no way to say that, then there can be no way to say that any wear a coin may have came from that coin being in actual circulation, or not. What the TPGs choose to do, and yes it is a conscious and deliberate choice, is to assume that any light wear "might have been" or "may have been" caused by friction between coins when they were in a roll or a bag, a coin album, a coin cabinet, a coin flip, or from mishandling. And yes I quote those cause directly from their book. One obvious problem with that thinking is that the they do not know, they cannot prove, that the wear came from any of those sources, they merely choose to assume that it did, because it might have. Well, it is equally possible that the wear did not come from any of those sources. It is equally possible that the wear was caused by the coin being in actual circulation. The other, and even bigger obvious problem, is that wear caused by anything, is still wear. And the definition of an uncirculated coin is a coin with no wear. So if a coin has any wear at all, then it cannot, by definition, be uncirculated. I have no idea what the % would be, but yeah, it would be a lot. But so what ? The only reason that would have any meaning at all is because few collectors would like it if that happened. And of course that is exactly why the TPGs do what they do, why they call coins MS even when they are not MS, and why they get away with doing it, because people want their coins to be graded as MS. They don't want to own a bunch of AU coins. In the first pace they are not "my" standards. I didn't invent them, I didn't create them. They are the written and published grading standards of the ANA. Standards that were created, developed, and chosen to be accepted by the most widely known and respected people in numismatics. All I do is follow their lead, follow their standards. How do I buy stuff ? Well, as just about everybody on this forum already knows, except you apparently, and probably some other new members, I no longer collect coins. I sold my last collection in 2006 after starting collecting in 1960. Today all I do is to continue to study coins. That said I do help quite a few people who do still buy and collect coins. What I advise them to do is to buy the coin, not the slab. In other words I advise them to completely ignore the slab and the grade on it. And that is the most widely and often repeated mantra there is in coin collecting. Unfortunately there are way too few people who actually practice it. It is also important to note that there are a great many coins in TPG slabs that are graded correctly, though not as many as there used to be due to upgrading in recent years.[/QUOTE]

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