Do you sense a waning interest for CAC?
topstuf
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It's "seeming" to me that the emphasis on CAC is slowing quite a bit.
Not in the value of the service or price differential if any, but just general interest in the CAC topic.
Anyone else get this "feeling?"
???
Do you sense a waning interest for CAC?
This is a private poll: no-one will see what you voted for.
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I was hoping there would be a choice stating "I think it's ludicrous to pay for a TPG opinion and then pay again for someone else's opinion of that opinion"...
RIP Mom- 1932-2012
It may depend on which "end of the pool" you are swimming in....
I never felt that CAC was all that, and a bag of chips, at the sub $300-$500 level. Yeah, being CAC'ed might help the value somewhat. But it's so easy to assume that many at that level had never been submitted, that any Non-CAC coin still stands on it's own merit. I'd never pass by a coin just because it wasn't stickered.
Now, for a really EXPENSIVE coin....($1000+, your milage may vary)....it becomes less likely that it hasn't been through CAC review, and you have to start wondering why they aren't stickered. Or, at least, you need to be pretty sure of your own opinion.
Maybe my impression is wrong....wouldn't be the first time.
I sense no change in the market's perception of the sticker.
I agree with Tommy but think that virtually regardless of value, many would-be buyers looking at a slabbed piece that's not stickered now tend to wonder why it hasn't been, and look at it as somehow inferior.
RIP Mom- 1932-2012
Like the Registry, CAC introduced a real or perceived new service, which experienced its initial surge of enthusiasm, followed by a mature leveling-off as those folks with the relevant desires were more or less satisfied.
I expect coins will still drift in to CAC at a steady pace in response to the clear market advantage. For coins the price of which matters a good deal, I expect the bean will remain important as long as their managers retain respect among hobbyists.
But the initial bloom has certainly (and inevitably) faded.
Here's a warning parable for coin collectors...
I am no fan of CAC except that it makes selling coins easier, as dealers are telling me they are having a hard time getting certain buyers to accept newly graded coins that do not have a sticker.
I think that thread showing an MS65 Morgan with contact marks on the nose, cheek and neck are the reason CAC will be around for awhile longer.
Commems and Early Type
No.
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I am no fan of CAC except that it makes selling coins easier,
I'm no fan of money except that it makes buying things easier...
Absolutely.
Well over half the coins upon which I bid at auctions have no CAC stickers. Yet they go for more, often far more, than the "Coin Facts" price guide and previous auction results. I voted "I don't care one way or the other." The lack of a CAC sticker seems to have no influence on the auction bids for coins that interest me.
I have ten or twelve CAC approved coins. The CAC sticker influenced my purchase only twice for the two Pan-Pac $50 gold pieces I have, and that was early in the game. Since then I bought the coin only when the price and preservation matched. The CAC sticker had nothing to do with it.
IMO...as long as the top 2 TPG's use only a few precious seconds to render a grade for a coin under review...there will always be a need for CAC
How rare are the coins you are looking for? If you are buying truly rare material of which another might not appear for several years, I can see why the coins would still fetch large sums of money. For coins that do appear every year or two, I do not think the same would hold true. My guess is that your set is so advanced and substantially complete that you need only the rarest of the rare.
I don't see any waning interest in the coin market for CAC, but I might sense the natural ebb and flow of the coin boards as being in the CAC doldrums. The coin boards, however, are far from the coin market.
In honor of the memory of Cpl. Michael E. Thompson
No change. CAC or something similar, will be around as long as there is grade inflation.
The CAC bean helped me sell this in a few hours.
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You can't tease us like that. Please show the reverse as well. That is a sweet coin.
Some of them are not that tough. I purchased many coins in prior years that are much scarcer and more main stream than the pieces I need to complete my lists now.
Two of them are the 1835 and 1838 quarter eagles in AU or low end MS. I would prefer original surfaces, but I can tolerate "slightly messed with" if it still has some eye appeal. At the last FUN auction, there was an 1835 quarter eagle in the Internet portion of the sale not the live portion of the sale. It was not original, but it had a decent look. I bid 100% of the "Coin Facts" amount and didn't get it.
Another coin on my list is now at double the "Coin Facts" number in an auction. There are probably 300 examples known, and this piece well below the finest graded. The coin is a 63 and it's probably going to bring 65 money, and there is no way it will up grade unless the grading standards are thrown totally away. Every coin is now a burial, and that is no fun.
You might say, but people are bidding stuff up. Isn't that the REAL market? The trouble there is a 17.5% buyers' fee, which people who bid in auctions seem to ignore. Buying coins in this market no fun, and I'm tired of messing with it.
Truer words have never been said Bruce. And btw, that's a perfect bumper sticker for a Ferrari or Bentley
Now more than ever you need that sticker to sell a coin. Sold some yesterday, and with the sticker, I got my asking price, no questioned asked. Those without, might as well have left them home.
So who is wrong here PCGS or CAC? Either the coin is an AU58 and the Gold Bean makes no sense as there is no higher circulated grade than AU58 or the coin is an MS65 and PCGS blew it big time.
That 1914-D is Sweet!
I don't go searching for CAC, PCGS, or NGC.... I merely decide if the coins I'm dealing with are worthy of entry into that realm.
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Either way that is a good looking 1914-d
It was an NGC MS62. (Interesting it was Green CAC'd at that grade).
Submitted it for crossing at the 62 level w PCGS where it came back DNC.
Then I sent it in raw, PCGS thought it was an AU58.
Then it gold CAC'd at the 58 level.
CAC thought it was a 62 all along most likely.
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This reminds me when I get a nice original raw coin and list it on the bay. Inevitably I will get the question why hasn't it been sent to PCGS or elsewhere! Well...the last coin I was queried on I have listed for $425. The last coin that sold on Heritage that I am certain this coin will grade...went for well over $600. I wait until I have a descent sized submission before I have coins graded...in the mean time I list them raw. Guess what! When I get that $425 coin graded it's going to be priced north of $600!
While this may sound like a plug for CAC...it's not. I have never been influenced on what I am willing to pay for a coin...CAC or not!
That coin looks like it sold itself.
Can't vote, terrible set of choices in the original question (available choices don't cover all range of possibilities).
Seems little change to me, CAC has a good eye for coins in my book.
You can do a more perfect poll that should supersede this one.
How could an AU-58 get a gold bean? This question has already been asked but I'm asking again. If pcgs calls this 58 I guess CAC is calling them out. Just what grade is it this Lincoln?
@ OP
Why?
I have seen A58+ on some holders!
@WingedLiberty1957 I've had nearly the same scenario but with a different coin.
That's why in different thread about gradeflation I said that I don't see it. I see the opposite.
I like CAC.
CAC is still the big dog in the hood. We just don't know the breed yet.
This thread brings up another issue. I can see different grading services assigning a coin which is difficult to grade, like a Capped Bust Half, an AU 58 or an MS 62. Each grader has only a few seconds to look at the coin, its value in either grade doesn't merit that it spend more time in the grading room than that, and for a coin of that value, no one is going to get out the Overton Book and look for strike weaknesses based on a coin's variety.
But the Lincoln Cent is a closed collar coin, and imo, in general, not difficult to grade. NGC graded this coin Unc, PCGS graded it AU 58, and CAC will pay a premium for the coin in the AU 58 holder.
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"Sou Mangueira......."
I think people still see value in CAC. As far as the 14D its a nice piece of copper. I'm guessing PCGS might not like the coloring on the coin and are sending a subtle message by grading it AU rather than MS. to me the coin looks like a 62 possibly 63 but like I said I think some are not happy with the coloring.
"A dog breaks your heart only one time and that is when they pass on". Unknown
CAC is solidly engrained into the hobby.
Some of the comments above reflect the personal distaste for CAC that some members have seemingly as one of many reason they are now disenfranchised with aspects of the hobby. If you bought marginal coins pre-CAC and you now are underwater, tough luck, should have had higher standards I guess.
If you think you know your series better than JA, you are either ignorant or named Rick Snow.
I have see many CAC that I don't like. That doesn't change the fact that the model is firmly engrained into the fabric of the hobby. Like it or not.
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It happens, I have a 1872-S H10C PCGS AU58 with a Gold Bean.
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So Rick Snow is the only Numismatist that can possibly be more knowledgeable than John Albanese, and that is only in a single series?
That is the problem with the CAC setup. Out of all the skilled collectors and graders in the hobby, we have appointed one fellow to be the Messiah and all others are imposters. Really Boosibri... Is that what you believe?
And who is capable of filling the shoes of the Messiah if he decides to retire or can no longer carry on as coin demigod? You have excluded Rick Snow as he is by your assessment only capable in a narrow channel.
After 243 years of USA coinage we are blessed with a single pair of eyes that says Yeah or Nay and all others are false prophets?
Do you see a danger in that thinking?
I take especial exception to this statement. There are no gods in this hobby. It is utterly foolish to cite one person and make the claim that no one else can compare with his level of knowledge in EVERY series. Such hero worship is shortsighted, unwarranted and potentially dangerous. We don't need to turn the numismatic community into a cult of Kool Aid drinkers.
Dr Sheldon would be laughing, if he were here , and on a scale of what's right and wrong, we have no shortage of experts.
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The fact that the "big" grading services and CAC all disagree, and frequently, all tells me that you really shouldn't be paying anything beyond small premiums for numeric grades that are only 1 or 2 grades apart. The standards are too unstable for that.
The grading standards are a bubble waiting to pop in my opinion.
There should be a place to send poll threads to have them rated.
YAC will do it!
That's what you are saying. That's certainly not what he said.
mark
Fellas, leave the tight pants to the ladies. If I can count the coins in your pockets you better use them to call a tailor. Stay thirsty my friends......
Grading is still just a snap shot opinion of 3 graders at a given moment in time. It's more of a fluid art than a hard science. I think this sort of Gaussian distribution idea might sum up most third party grades. So I suppose my 1914-D is somewhere between AU58 and MS62, depending on who you ask. I guess if you believed in a true consensus, you might say it's an MS61.
One other interesting thing I've heard is that MS60 and MS61 are sort of phantom grades for problematic coins. It's sort of a tangent track and not on the continuum of grades. Not sure if that is true or not. So maybe saying the distinct grades of AU58 and MS62 are really 2 adjacent grades, might be the right way to look at this. Thoughts?
If that is true, the CAC gold bean on the AU58 slab meant that they thought it was MS62 all along.
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With mint errors (pretty much all I deal in) coins are collected based on demand for the error type, rarity and last of all, grade (also, grading standards for mint errors are much looser than they are for "regular" U.S. coins.) Error collectors are concerned about the coin, not it's grade. They are more "coin collectors" than they are "grade collectors."
This approach actually makes a lot of sense for collectors who are collecting U.S. coins. Within any given coin series, a coin's rarity should be the primary concern, and the "grade rarity", should not matter that much beyond perhaps 3 tiers of mintstate (MS-60, MS-65 and MS-70), with prices reasonably reflective of those grades, but not of that much concern. Things like surface quality, ugly toning/spotting, distracting marks, strike, etc should be more concerning to collectors than a numeric grade number.
Grading standards for mintstate coins are unstable and changing, and are actually very hard to even define, so why is everyone buying based on this unstable "grade system" of collecting? People seem to be "grade collecting", when they should be "coin collecting."
I am very much an eye appeal collector. If I don't care for the look of coin chances are slim that I will buy it despite what the number grade is on the holder. I bought this coin for a big, inflated price because it matched up well with the rest of coins in my Classic Head half eagle set. I would not have been happy with placing an EF or VF grade coin in the 1834, Crosslet 4 slot when the rest of the collection graded from AU-58 to MS-63. This is a rare coin in AU to Unc., and this was the best piece that I could afford.
Still the grade on the holder does matter because it sets the price. At one time this coin was in an AU-58 holder and was worth $12 to $13 thousand. Now it's in an MS-61 holder and the retail value is $27 thousand. I was able to get it for $20 thousand because the dealer had been unable to get the retail price for it. Grade-flation added to the cost of this piece.
At the same time I was looking at this piece another one became available in an AU-55 holder. That would have been an ideal piece for me price-wise, but the dealer warned me that I wouldn't like it. He was hesitant to show it to me. When he did show it to me, I knew why; it looked awful. In the old days it would have been lucky to have been called EF.
Unfortunately the grade sets the price, and for items that are rarely seen in AU and Mint State small differences make big differences. That's why grade-flation has the potential to set this hobby back 25 years to the days when some dealers routinely over graded everything and took collectors and would be investors to the cleaners. It gave numismatics a big, bad black eye, and third party grading offered a solution.
Now the product life cycle for third party grading is in its mature stage, and the leading companies are looking to re-energize their markets. Some that includes special labels and notations. Some of us might question that, but it doesn't hurt anyone if you chose to ignore it. Grade-flation is more insidious, however. Like I said before it could set us back 25 years.
****The fact that the "big" grading services and CAC all disagree, and frequently, all tells me that you really shouldn't be paying anything beyond small premiums for numeric grades that are only 1 or 2 grades apart. The standards are too unstable for that**. **
Very insightful. This, and the minor differences (to my eyes) in the higher MS grades, is what drew me to pursue AU walkers years ago. Then genuine scarcity is what drew me to the early dates.
I don't think the interest in CAC has faded, but the use for it is now more understood than it was when it was new, which probably makes people more selective in what they send them.
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