Red Book Podcast#11 w/ John Albanese

This was a fun one!

Enjoyed it!

Cool 😎

Great post and content! Well deserving of a bookmark/star so I can find this thread hopefully in 7 yrs….or 7 days. Thx!

Fun and informative to watch.

Awesome! Loved it!

Found this quote from John interesting. Sounds like the coin-buying public values the holder much more than I realized.

"I've talked to a lot of marketers out there and they'd rather have a subpar coin in a nice holder with a nice hologram than a really nice coin [in a subpar holder] ... It's about the sizzle now."

@EastonCollection A fine may have to do! I’ve never seen a really nice VF 1822 B2

Interesting comments regarding gradeflation and how the high price spreads between MS grades in the early TPG days caused tighter grading. I certainly remember how the coins I submitted back then had to be real solid “gems” to get a 65 and how spectacular the few 66’s looked.

"[Modern quarters] don't rise to getting graded."

There are several reasons for this and I know John Feigenbaum is working on one of them and that is the catalog prices do not reflect value. The quarters, especially the older clad quarters, are simply not readily available and do not trade extensively because they are perceived as being too common. They simply aren't collected widely because of low prices and the few who do seek them are put off when sellers want more than catalog. Of course none of these are scarce except in high grade which brings us to the second problem: Moderns tend to be graded on the same standards as the vintage coins. This means poorly struck coins and coins struck by worn dies can get high grades. This problem is somewhat more difficult to correct because not all collectors care how poorly struck coins are so there's no demand to change the grading standards in a barely existing market.

All of these same things really affect the memorial cents which are going the way of the buggy whip (finally) and this will be noticed by the general population. Nice attractive Gem memorial cents are all common but they are far tougher than price guides and graders make them out to be. No market has developed because nobody can acquire, process, and ship coins for anywhere near catalog prices. If you think you can just try to buy a stock of 1968 one cent coins well struck by good dies and free of blemishes and carbon spots you are very wrong. You can't do it because most of the '68 mint sets are gone and the few survivors have tarnished AND spotted philly cents. Only 10% of them were Gem back in 1968. You can find rolls but the percentage of tarnished coins is far higher than the percentage of Gem.

While I believe moderns are collectible in their own right and are a sufficient end point for any collector the commentators are certainly correct that many modern collectors do go on to collect vintage coins. I believe the pool of potential modern collectors is far far larger than what is being tapped at this time and the best way to tap it is to address the numerous specific impediments to collecting these coins. This is the ideal time to act because the penny elimination and 250th anniversary celebration will draw a great deal of attention to circulating coinage,