Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;cwtokenman, post: 516121, member: 2100&quot;]I personally have no use for the tpgs, but I do think they have value as an authentication service. In general, I don&#039;t care if someone wants to send their coins in for grading either. I would rather have more tokens than receipts from a tpg, but that&#039;s just me.</p><p><br /></p><p>What I dislike about slabs the most is when they are used primarily as a marketing tool (read as profit generator). With exonumia, the majority of items are so scarce that things like a cleaning, altered surfaces, or being recolored have little impact on value to a collector. George Fuld even states on page 31 of his Patriotic cwt book that Group &quot;B&quot; damage, which includes holes, rim nicks, stains and other damage, that unless those influences are quite severe or many in number, value reductions will seldom exceed 15%, and a figure of 5 to 10% is more commonly the average reduction in value. </p><p><br /></p><p>While fake cwts do exist, they are extremely low in numbers. I would challenge anyone to search ebay, a haven for fakes, and if more than one or two are found over the course of a year, I would be extremely surprised. I have bought every fake cwt that I have seen on ebay, and I have purchased 3 in over 8 years of buying on that site. The guarantees of the tpgs have expiration dates with copper. What I&#039;m saying is that most of the &quot;protectionist&quot; features of slabs have greatly reduced meaning regarding exonumia. </p><p><br /></p><p>As far as the tpgs being accurate graders, I am a bit skeptical of their abilities. If someone can convince me that there is a good reason for coins such as the King of Siam set to improve overall in grade EVERY time it has been submitted, perhaps I&#039;ll reconsider. As far as their getting the grade right more than they get it wrong, well, I would certainly hope so - they are supposed to be professionals aren&#039;t they? There are times though when their relative lack of experience with tokens is obvious. I think that the current grading system is flawed and unable to be accurately used by the collecting populace in general. That is a shame IMO, and something that I feel the dealers and tpgs capitalize on.</p><p><br /></p><p>Some of you may find it a little difficult to believe, but on the whole, dealers and collectors of exonumia are a rather honest and trustworthy lot. Dealers tend to be very honest about descriptions of condition. In part that may be due to the fact that tokens rarely have the sharp increase in value from one grade to the next, so the financial incentive is greatly diminished. A cwt for example, is often worth only twice as much in Uncirculated condition as it is in Fine condition. I&#039;ve had sellers routinely send me (and others that I know) thousands of dollars worth of tokens at a time before I even send in payment.</p><p><br /></p><p>Of all of the sellers of cwts that I have seen and dealt with over the years, it has been my observation that only a few sellers seem to deal with in cwt slabs. But those sellers tend to have A LOT of cwt slabs. While it may be a flawed opinion, the opinion that I hold is that those few sellers represent the driving force behind cwts becoming slabbed. Why do those sellers make all of those submissions? Primarily because there are those people currently participating in the market that willingly pay multiples of list value if there is plastic involved. If the populations of cwts were higher, I would really not care how those people spend their money. But since there are so many low pops, often only in the single digits, that one up for sale in the slab may be my only crack at that variety in my lifetime. While raw cwts often sell for around the listed value, ones in plastic often go for ridiculous amounts, even in the circulated grades.</p><p><br /></p><p>To provide examples of how much plastic affects the hammer price, I searched completed ebay cwt auctions for NGC, and here are the first 10 results found (I skipped the unlisted ones as there is no value for comparison):</p><p><br /></p><p>1.&nbsp; WI510M-1a 1.7x list</p><p><br /></p><p>2.&nbsp; 131A/349Aa&nbsp; opening bid at 4x list (did not sell)</p><p><br /></p><p>3.&nbsp; 60/200ao&nbsp; 3x list</p><p><br /></p><p>4.&nbsp; 1/359j&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; 1.8x list</p><p><br /></p><p>5.&nbsp; OH385B-2a&nbsp; 2.3x list</p><p><br /></p><p>6.&nbsp; OH745B-3b&nbsp; 3.4x list</p><p><br /></p><p>7.&nbsp; OH165FF-4a&nbsp; 6.2x list</p><p><br /></p><p>8.&nbsp; 93/362a&nbsp; 3.3x list</p><p><br /></p><p>9.&nbsp; RI700E-2c&nbsp; 2.8x list</p><p><br /></p><p>10.&nbsp; MI300B-1a&nbsp; 3.2x list</p><p><br /></p><p>For the 9 slabbed tokens that sold, the selling price averaged about 3.1x list price.</p><p>For disclosure, the only cwt value listing is several years old now, and while the prices were fairly accurate when it was published, even raw coins in today&#039;s market typically bring 1x to 1.5x the listed values. But even in that light, a token in plastic will still cost you 2x to 3x that of a comparable raw token. </p><p><br /></p><p>That is paying pretty dearly for something that does not improve the entombed item in any way. The buyer may not have wasted his money on a fake, but IMO wasted even more on plastic![/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in