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Re: Anyone have any experience buying at ma-shops for world coins?

MA-Shops is based out of Germany, but I think they have expanded into the US some.

When you buy something on MA-Shops, you are not buying an item from MA-Shops but rather from a dealer that lists items on MA-Shops. Your experience on MA-Shops will be more tied to the dealer you are buying from than from MA-Shops itself. Some dealers have great material at great prices. Some dealers will overprice certain types of coins. Some dealers will not always call out problem coins. I have bought on MA-Shops many times from dealers in Germany (and sometimes France and Austria) with good results. The vast majority of dealers on MA-Shops are real, established professionals that have good reputations that go beyond MA-Shops. I would shop there without fear.

neildrobertson

6

Re: Fairmont Collection of Liberty Double Eagles

Excellent read

Namvet69

5

Re: Bidding Strategy For Great Collection Auctions

@NJCoin said:

@jmlanzaf said:

@humanssuck said:

@NJCoin said:

@Alpha2814 said:
There's this, from a 2023 paper: "By incorporating limited-attention into online auctions, we explain this phenomenon by demonstrating that the soft-close ending rule may fail to eliminate the strategic advantage of sniping. However, sellers’ expected revenues are higher than in hard-close auctions, snipers’ winning probabilities are lower and winning prices are higher, indicating that soft-close ending rule does in some sense solve the problem caused by sniping." -- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4676973

As with @jmlanzaf's article, if true, your obscure Chinese researchers are far sharper than the minds behind eBay and GC. My vote still goes to those behind the highly successful platforms. Not the obscure authors publishing in the equally obscure journals.

As always, YMMV. The good news is that there is a platform for everyone.

(edited because i mis-read a statistic and have updated Ebays results based on merchandise volume, not ebays revenue)

Great Collections did annual revenue in 2023 of over 200 million. They use hard close timed auctions.

Stack Bowers in 2022 (last reported year I could find data on) was over 250 million. They are larger than GC. They use soft close auctions.

Heritage Auctions in 2023 did 1.76 Billion. They are much larger than GC. They do soft close auctions.

Ebay is over 10.1 Billion in 2023 revenue, with Gross merchandising volume of $73.2 billion. That figure includes all of their fixed price listings as well as the auctions. The info I see online (2022 data from eDesk) says 88% of their sales are buy it now fixed price. While we cant extrapolate for sure based on the % of listings because we dont know the price breakdown of those items, if we take the 12% of their sales that are auction and assume its 12% of volume, in terms of auctions, that makes them around 8.8 billion in auction revenue.

Sothebys (7.9 Billion) and Christies (6.2 Billion) are the biggest auction houses. They do soft close auctions.

So by your logic of back the format used by the largest most successful players....the larger share of the auction market seems to be soft close auctions.

We forgot that we're arguing with someone with whom facts are irrelevant.

Someone should call Heritage @MFeld and tell them they are doing it wrong.

Or not. Do you honestly think HA has the same business model as GC and eBay? Or that they are all not extremely successful, even with different models, because the only correct one is the one that benefits you the most?

No, "HA is not doing it wrong." Neither is SB, Christie's, Sotheby's, etc. By same token, GC and eBay also seem to be doing just fine, even if you think they could be doing even better if they put you in charge.

GC is not eBay. GC is closer to Heritage than eBay. But that's not really the point.

I don't know why GC chose a hard close. And neither do you. You've assumed it was because it yields higher hammer prices despite ALL THE EVIDENCE to the contrary. And, as is your style, you are running with your assumption as though it were a fact.

Hard closes lead to sniping. Sniping leads to slightly lower hammers in many studies. There are no studies that demonstrate the opposite. I've seen some that claim minimal effect.

Ebay didn't adopt it for higher prices, they basically invented it. Prior to eBay, the only auctions that had hard closes were mail bid auctions which operate differently as you cannot see any of the bids. There were also essentially hard close "by the candle" auctions in certain settings but almost all commercial auctions were "soft close".

The whole sniping industry developed in order to provide a way for bidders to game the system to the benefit of the bidders. Some entities actually make money by selling sniping software or services. So you have to assume that all of those bidders are irrational, including the ones in this very thread who advised sniping to save money not to maximize the price paid.

Hard closes are more predictable from a timing standpoint and there's nothing wrong with that for either eBay or GC. The reason they both adopted it is probably related to the number of simultaneous auctions as pointed out by a poster above. Heritage et al do not run soft close auctions with more than 1000 items.

I would just like you to provide one scintilla of evidence that it yields higher hammer prices, contrary to all evidence. But, don't worry, I'm not really waiting around for it.