New Paramount Grading Service at FUN?

if pcgs is the third party, who are the first and second parties?

@MsMorrisine said:
if pcgs is the third party, who are the first and second parties?

Buyers and sellers?

Edited to add: I see that @You had already posted that by the time I wrote and saved my reply.

@MsMorrisine said:
so it's a two party grading service

What?

@MsMorrisine said:
so it's a two party grading service

No. TPG means the party doing the grading is neither the buyer nor the seller. But only one party is ever doing the grading.

And the point some are making is that is not necessarily strictly true if the party doing the submitting also has an ownership interest in the TPG. As many prominent coin dealers do with CACG.

That said, going to the trouble of creating a corporate entity separate and apart from the coin dealership makes it very easy to put the proper controls in place to avoid conflicts of interest if the people involved are motivated to do so. As the people behind both PCGS and NGC very successfully did once upon a time, and as CACG appears to have done now.

Not so much when you are sitting in a shop, or at a show, selling what you personally slabbed, or had slabbed at your direction and with your oversight. And certainly not when your self slab is deceptively designed to look like that of a well known TPG.

At the end of the day, we all have to understand, as many seem to with VB, WitterBrick, etc., that the industry is entirely unregulated, beyond basic consumer and civil fraud type protections. As long as appropriate disclosures are made, the players can do pretty much anything they want.

Including running lotteries, self slabbing inventory, having equity stakes in TPGs, deciding not to honor grade guarantees when coins develop spots in slabs, etc. Ethics are in the eye of the beholder, and assuming disclosures are made, we all get to decide who to do business with.

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2ndPG - there's no good TLA for it - is a bit of a odd duck out. It basically means you are hiring somebody to give you a grading opinion, but there's still the for pay relationship to worry about, if they don't give you the grades you like, you might not hire them again.