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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;BC Chicago, post: 2458082, member: 80070&quot;]On the subject of Morgan ratings, I should be more specific. My reference for ratings was the ANA Grading Standards for United States Coins, 6th ed., along with the 2015 &#039;Red Book&#039; and the 2009 Professional Edition Guidebook. The grading standards permit, and define, MS-70 for Morgan silver dollars. However, the probability that a professional rating service would provide any existing Morgan with an MS-70 rating or not is indeed low. The professional edition guidebook does not indicate any auction records (as of 2009) for coins rated MS-70, but it indicates a number of MS-68&#039;s and a couple of 69&#039;s. The sale prices for these ranged from $20,000 to $450,000. If budging a rating of MS-68 to MS-70 could run the price up into the millions, I fear the pressure on those doing the rating would be enormous. At that level of coin quality, given a ten-fold increase in value, it really gets down to &quot;picking the barely-visible fecal matter with the extremely keen-eyed chickens&quot;. But you are correct that the guidebook does not provide any prices reported at auction for MS-70 Morgans. Doesn&#039;t mean that none exist, of course, but I agree that their existence is not reported, though the rating is defined in the manual.</p><p>As for my own study, if a Morgan dollar had excellent full-field luster on both the obverse and reverse, and if the only traces of imperfection I saw (under 8x lens) were very slight bag and handling scratches that were not clearly visible to the naked eye, then I (very arbitrarily) deemed it &quot;MS-70&quot; for my purposes. However, I only rated my population (118 coins) as: MS-70, MS-60, AU-50, AU/EF-45, EF-40, EF/VF-35, VF-30, VF/F-20, F-12, VG-8, G-4, and &quot;AG&quot; (=&quot;sucks&quot;). So you could argue that I &quot;bastardized&quot; the scale for my purposes, bending the ratings (slightly) to fit my actual population. Ironically, since I frequented upscale coin shops rather than bulk silver dealers, I had almost as much trouble finding truly nasty &quot;AG&quot; Morgans as I did finding near-perfect &quot;MS&quot; coins. Dealers didn&#039;t bother to put AG Morgan dollars out under the glass on the assumption that nobody would want them. They always have &quot;scrap buckets&quot; with heavily worn silver dimes, quarters, and halves, but I actually had to ask them to dig around for the junk-level Morgans. My suspicion is that a lot of these get melted for scrap when silver is high, because they contain slightly more Ag per dollar face-value than do the lower denominations. Anyway, that&#039;s what I did. If there is a numismatic &quot;Commission of High Inquisitors&quot; who want to charge me with heresy, then I freely confess my guilt. &quot;Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.&quot;[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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