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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;robp, post: 3233288, member: 96746&quot;]Population reports will forever be unreliable because from the outset the TPGs have been inconsistent in their grading (and for that matter attribution whether it be year or denomination). Their inconsistency is the main motivation for cracking out and resubmitting - hence the oxymoron of adherents to slabbing sending in their coins to be &#039;accurately&#039; graded in the hope that they are graded differently to last time. Until the sacred cows up their game and grade consistently, the issue will remain. Crossing over to the collector&#039;s preferred TPG label compounds the problem.</p><p><br /></p><p>Whilst I am not a lover of slabbed coins, I have still acquired about 100 down the years, but 20% of those were purchased on the basis of incorrect attribution or undergrading.</p><p><br /></p><p>For a practical example of erroneous population reports, the coin below was NGC&#039;s &#039;1673&#039; halfpenny slabbed 65. Ok, except that it wasn&#039;t 1673, rather it is 1675 over 3 over 2, and for a 65, the wear to Britannia said to me it wasn&#039;t uncirculated. Apart from that I didn&#039;t have a problem. Although overgraded IMO and the wrong date, I bought it as I could see it was obviously 1675/3 even without magnification. It is no longer in a slab as I bought it to replace one of PCGS&#039;s &#039;1673&#039; 64s, which was also a 5/3, but considerably more overgraded and struggled past EF in my view. These two plus another couple graded 63&nbsp; or 64 are now no longer in plastic. i.e. the population of MS coins for this series is thus reduced by around 1/3, though it is possible that someone might have resubmitted them in the past after I disposed of them. This situation must be replicated many times across the world&#039;s coinage.[ATTACH=full]844924[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>I am also of the view that for a common coin, the numbers available dwarf any resubmitted duplicates, but clearly at the rarer end, there potentially is a really large discrepancy in absolute numbers vs pop reports. It&#039;s a lottery.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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