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Anyone know why U.S. coins seem to be more beat up than darkside?
Dawg144
Posts: 670 ✭✭✭
This struck me as a question that could probably be explained by a lot of different factors. Anyway, here's the story:
I'm not a very focused collector, and I like to dabble in both liteside and darkside stuff. Although I haven't bought anything through the forum yet, I check out the darkside BST very often and see a lot of very high quality graded coins. What strikes me is the quality of these coins relative to their prices. I see plenty of impeccable Swiss and German coins from the early 20th c, and it is not uncommon whatsoever to see these grade between 66-68. In fact, anything below 64 is pretty low-end and hard to come by.
On the other hand, there are a lot of U.S. coins from the same era, in fairly low MS grades, that still command a large amount of money. When a 67 or 68 coin comes along, it's a really really big deal. For instance, while I was able to pick up an NGC-65 Vatican gold piece for about twice its melt value, a similar grade U.S. Indian could be worth up to $30K, with no coins graded higher than ~66.
Here are a couple explanations I can come up with for this phenomenon:
1) U.S. coins are simply more knocked around than their foreign counterparts, and thus are worth money even in lower grades.
2) There is relatively little demand for darkside material (which IMHO, is an abomination), thus making only the top quality coins worth premiums. Sort of connected to 3) below:
3) Since there are less darkside coins being slabbed, only the near-perfect gems are graded, leading to seemingly inflated grades. It also seems like every graded darkside coin is a top pop. In fact, there are probably just as many liteside as there are darkside gems, but the litesiders come out the woodwork at a much lower rate.
4) The TPGs are more lenient with darkside material.
Does anyone else have any thoughts on this question? I thought it was interesting, and I hope other people do too.
I'm not a very focused collector, and I like to dabble in both liteside and darkside stuff. Although I haven't bought anything through the forum yet, I check out the darkside BST very often and see a lot of very high quality graded coins. What strikes me is the quality of these coins relative to their prices. I see plenty of impeccable Swiss and German coins from the early 20th c, and it is not uncommon whatsoever to see these grade between 66-68. In fact, anything below 64 is pretty low-end and hard to come by.
On the other hand, there are a lot of U.S. coins from the same era, in fairly low MS grades, that still command a large amount of money. When a 67 or 68 coin comes along, it's a really really big deal. For instance, while I was able to pick up an NGC-65 Vatican gold piece for about twice its melt value, a similar grade U.S. Indian could be worth up to $30K, with no coins graded higher than ~66.
Here are a couple explanations I can come up with for this phenomenon:
1) U.S. coins are simply more knocked around than their foreign counterparts, and thus are worth money even in lower grades.
2) There is relatively little demand for darkside material (which IMHO, is an abomination), thus making only the top quality coins worth premiums. Sort of connected to 3) below:
3) Since there are less darkside coins being slabbed, only the near-perfect gems are graded, leading to seemingly inflated grades. It also seems like every graded darkside coin is a top pop. In fact, there are probably just as many liteside as there are darkside gems, but the litesiders come out the woodwork at a much lower rate.
4) The TPGs are more lenient with darkside material.
Does anyone else have any thoughts on this question? I thought it was interesting, and I hope other people do too.
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