Best Of

Finish the set!

@DDP1964 said:
I am trying my best. Went thru about 40 lbs. of coins this last weekend. Only found 4 that could be errors. Also have been looking around this site trying to learn from other people's posts. It's my second week looking at coins. I do have an error coin folder. Has only 2 in it so far. 3 more coins that I would like a second opinion on.

If you only pulled 4 potential errors out of 40 lbs of coins then you're doing extremely well. Truly clueless people would have found dozens, do you're not one of those.

If you'll notice, there isn't even agreement in the answers here about what caused the anomaly on your dime, so no one can say it's obvious to everyone what it is.

Unfortunately, you're reaping some of the frustration caused by the endless parade of newbies who think their damaged coins are errors.

Do the free admissions qualify for the drawings or do only the paid admissions qualify?

@BryceM said:
Greed.

The huge bump in the vigorish during my few years of peak buying and selling is one of the primary reasons I decided to quit the hobby. It really doesn't matter what you call it or who you think pays it. Pretty much every auction house did it more or less simultaneously. If I was a big shareholder in the big auction houses, I'd see it differently, no doubt. The bottom line is that it increases the transaction cost of buying and selling coins. This changed dramatically. It affects everyone too and one way or another it gets passed on to collectors. Dealers with their own websites have to get inventory from somewhere and they need a place to liquidate coins that aren't moving.

It's a great hobby, but I enjoyed the chase and acquisition more than the owning and examining. Doing it that way is fun in a rising market with cheap transaction cots (easy to liquidate mistakes). Pulling 20% of the value out of a coin each time it changes hands makes it much harder. Yeah, I know most auction houses negotiate a percent higher than hammer, at least if you bring a good quantity to auction, but that isn't the only expense. Don't forget shipping, regrades, stickers, and photography. There are other ways to sell, of course, but every other method competes with the auction houses.

It also rubbed me the wrong way that gradeflation made it important to resubmit almost everything (unless in certain desirable plastic) a time or two to avoid leaving money on the table. Figure in the time it takes to fill out forms, package, drive to the PO, sit around for a third of a year to get the coins back, then do it all again for the sticker people. After all of that you send off the stuff and trust the auction house to put it in a favorable auction and to take quality photos.

At the end of the day there are a tremendous number of people working very hard and very smartly to extract money from coin collectors. It's the market, it's legal, and it's part of capitalism, but eventually, it just took some of the fun out of it.

There, I said it, but I'm not sure I was devoid of cynicism. Sorry.

They provide a service. You don’t think they should get paid for that service? A single digit net margin is hardly excessive.

Back around the late 1950s, early 1960s there were a huge amount of counterfeit gold coins made in Beirut Lebanon to be imported into the US to get around the laws of importing gold into the US. The exception in the law was you could import numismatic US gold coins. The gold content of these fake gold coins was very close to what real US gold were. Usually only common dates were made to avoid suspicion.

I've come to really like the latest few generations of the ANACS holder.