Morgan Dollars and grading issues & confussion
JV36
Posts: 59 ✭
I am still very new to this and am trying to make sense of the grading. I have a red book been looking at the PCGS price guides and photo and still a little confused. I thought I had it figured out took some coins ungraded to 2 different local coin dealers and one says some for sure are AU 58 or ms60s high... the other says hmmm oh a lot of these are xf40 and you just might break into the low end of a AU but there not that great. So have to bit my lip. Thinking of just getting them all graded but trying to figure out the cost. Ya one guy says a lot are cleaned the other says no... makes me laugh
My issues to name a few is..
1. is there a set price for grading all Morgan dollars? have about 80 in total
2. USA 1800's half and one cents half dollars ect is it a fixed price for grading them? have a lot of pre 1900 back to 1700s with tokens
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Comments
You might want to buy a few PCGS graded MS 63's and compare your coins to them , anything that looks worse put in the don't grade pile unless maybe its a better date. That should weed out a lot of them and give you an idea of what PCGS likes in a morgan. Going forward you should develop a better eye
Agree with bronco....Really the only way to get an eye for "uncirculated" vs. "AU" is to look at a lot of coins.
Same goes for cleaned/overdipped/processed coins, or even the XF to AU range. Until you've seen enough "true MS" coins, it's easy to be fooled.
The price for grading is pretty much set. Having a lot of them doesn't really help you out, and Morgans don't have a special cut-rate price.
If you can't stop yourself from sending some in RIGHT NOW....(I understand the desire....)....I'd pick your favorite/best 3 or 4, and send ONLY them in. If you get the grades you thought they should be, then you are to be congratulated, and might prove you can trust your eye to send in some others.
Dropping all 80 coins in the mail might end up being a very expensive lesson...Most Morgans are NOT rare, so they don't get a whole lot of free passes or get forgiven for any issues. They have to be all there to get the grades. A scratch, nick, bump, or patch of hairlines means they won't make the grade!
As for your dealer opinions: They might be trying to talk you out of spending too much on grading, without aggressively knocking your coins. There is room for differing opinions, but the XF to AU-58 difference is something you should be able to determine on your own, if you are 100% honest with yourself, and have seen enough coins. (Online PCGS Photograde link below).
https://www.pcgs.com/photograde/#/Morgan/Grades
My only advice: Don't go too fast, and expect to figure it all out overnight. Some of us are still trying to figure it out.
@TommyType said: "My only advice: Don't go too fast, and expect to figure it all out overnight. Some of us are still trying to figure it out.
"
AMEN to that and while you are learning to grade coins, you'll need to also "grade" the dealers as you become a better grader.
I agree with the advice to look at some PCGS graded Morgans in hand. PCGS online photo grade, linked above is also great.
Sending Morgans in to be graded would be a money losing proposition unless they are scarce dates. Today, only bulk grading dealers can make money on any common submissions grading 64 and lower. A regular submission would have to grade MS 65 to make money, with how low prices have gotten.
If you have 20 more you can get them all graded rsther cheaply under bulk grading. Back when I first got into coins (and before I found forums) I spent a lot of money sending Morgans to PCGS to learn how they grade and by extension how to grade. A year or so on the forums doing guess the grade threads will gove you a good feeling of how to grade specific series. Especially Morgans. Each series is graded slightly differently, that is there are general grading guidlines but then each series has their own rules so to speak.
Sadly, there are a large percentage of coin "dealers" who cannot grade coins and who can't be bothered to learn anything about the subject. Their guesses are monetary, not objective.
As others suggest, purchase a small number of pre-graded (PCGS or NGC) Morgans and use them to help calibrate your thoughts. Get a really good coin grading guide - one with enlarge photos or illustrations, then haunt coin shows comparing graded coins with your book and your mental images of your samples. This will take time -- also, take the ANA grading class.
Try this. Carefully sort the coins out by date / mintmark first. If any of them are more desirable using the Red Book and PCGS price guide as a roadmap then consider getting those looked at more closely. The more common ones sort again and put the better ones aside to look at more closely. The common ones that are not in the best shape are most likely worth the going rate for 90% and the cost to have them graded might exceed the value of the coin.
If you have a chance go to a coin show and look at some Morgans that the dealers are selling noting their condition and selling price. Beware though, you can get very overloaded! There are hundreds of them at your typical show. Grading can take some time to get a base knowledge but can be well worth it.
I have a semi complete grading set of 1879-S Morgans from PO-1 through MS-67 with quite a few duplicates in the lower MS grades. You would be surprised of the variances...grading is an art!
Have fun and good luck!
K
Thank you all for the honesty and love the AMEN comment.. Glad to know that people are humble and admit there still learning.
There is excellent advice above.... another thing to try - prior to spending a lot of money - is to pick a few specific Morgans, using photograde or Redbook, grade them yourself. Then post them here as a GTG (Guess the Grade) and see what the consensus is and how accurate your grade was. Understand that grading from pictures is not the best, but the forum members will get pretty close after the years of practice here. Just a suggestion... Cheers, RickO