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Why Dreck Will Never Go Away

CoinosaurusCoinosaurus Posts: 9,645 ✭✭✭✭✭
I don't get this dreck thing. Am I supposed to take my scudzy 1803 R1 large cent, AG with many problems, and just send it to the copper recyclers?

Please.

No one is going to throw rare coins in the garbage, they are going to collect, buy, sell, and trade them.

Even if someone proves that PQ material is more liquid and appreciates faster, so WTF.

Someone downstream still has to own the dreck.

What do you want them to do with it.

Bury it in the ground? Eat it? Swallow it down with cyanide?

It's great to tell people to get rid of their dreck. It's probably even good advice. But the dreck is still there. It's just that someone else owns it.

Comments

  • SouthcountySouthcounty Posts: 681 ✭✭✭✭
    As you know when you collect seated or bust material by die marriage and die state you become a dreck magnet at times.
    Problem coins and low grade coins with high R values for various die marriages are par for the course.
    Besides, everyone has to start somewhere and one man's dreck is another man's treasure.
    So I agree, dreck is here to stay....a toast to dreck!
  • joebb21joebb21 Posts: 4,772 ✭✭✭✭✭
    perhaps they will trade on a diamond scale with vs1 vs2...
    may the fonz be with you...always...
  • WoodenJeffersonWoodenJefferson Posts: 6,491 ✭✭✭✭
    Bottom line is "Market Makers" just don't have the time for common dreck.

    I say dreck is the base material, the foundation of our hobby. Everything else is built on top of the dreck.

    Take away the dreck, the walls and roof collapses.
    Chat Board Lingo

    "Keep your malarkey filter in good operating order" -Walter Breen
  • GrumpyEdGrumpyEd Posts: 4,749 ✭✭✭


    << <i>Besides, everyone has to start somewhere and one man's dreck is another man's treasure. >>



    Exactly, even the ugly coin can make someone happy.
    Ed
  • I think the "dreck" being mentioned are bad coins in holders. Those are real problems.

    Sure, there will always be a market for them, but today they are being traded on the same level as nice high end coins-which is wrong.

    It is a combination of uneducated eyed collectors and dealers (yes there incompetent dealers) who have made this garbage hang around longer then it should. Thats why CAC is thriving right now.

    When the prices of "dreck" fall to levels equal to the quality, then the stuff will move off the market.

  • RYKRYK Posts: 35,800 ✭✭✭✭✭
    I guess the point is, and I am being serious now, that you should not have serious money tied up in low-end coins, especially if you collect with an investment objective. Make dreck someone else's problem, not yours. At some price point, even the horribly conserved and overgraded material is worthwhile, but we are nowhere near that level in most cases.

  • The other factor is that a lot of this "dreck" is created by the TPG's. I have many a times looked at a WLH and said I love that coin as a 64 but feel it is overgraded as a 65... It is not just the collector who is involved with dreck. I have a 1904-s Barber Half and I wonder how it holdered- Now I am sitting with a coin that has PMD yet sits in a XF40 holder. To me it is like having a coin in a genuine holder. This dreck was created by the TPG's.

    I agree with RYK- If you are in this as an investor, speculator, or as a profession- You cannot trade in overpriced overgraded coins or you will lose your reputation, your money, and your perspective.

  • rickoricko Posts: 98,724 ✭✭✭✭✭
    And the beat goes on..... so sad. Cheers, RickO
  • True or False: if the dreck did not exist the spectular coins would not shine as brightly.image
  • AnkurJAnkurJ Posts: 11,370 ✭✭✭✭
    I have to ask, what is actually considered to be "dreck"? There are a lot of early american coins that have a variety of problems from being cleaned, corroded, polished, scratched etc etc. Frankly, I cant afford some of these early coins in problem free condition, so I have to settle for some problems. I don't consider these dreck as they do have a place in the market, and collectors on a budget do buy them. Thoughts??
    All coins kept in bank vaults.
    PCGS Registries
    Box of 20
    SeaEagleCoins: 11/14/54-4/5/12. Miss you Larry!
  • shorecollshorecoll Posts: 5,447 ✭✭✭✭✭
    I think we still confuse low grade with doctored. Give me a Sheldon set of 1793's in AG3, and I'll do fine from an investment perspective. Give me a set of doctored 65 saints and I'll get hosed.
    ANA-LM, NBS, EAC
  • RYKRYK Posts: 35,800 ✭✭✭✭✭
    I suspect that it is easier to sell dreck than nice coins, and this fact allows for a steady flow of dreck to the market.
  • MrEurekaMrEureka Posts: 24,419 ✭✭✭✭✭
    I suspect that it is easier to sell dreck than nice coins

    That's a fact. As long as the price is right, of course.
    Andy Lustig

    Doggedly collecting coins of the Central American Republic.

    Visit the Society of US Pattern Collectors at USPatterns.com.
  • <<...As long as the price is right, of course.>>

    If the price is right is it still dreck?image
  • DennisHDennisH Posts: 14,011 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Look at many of the raw coins selling on eBay.
    Look at most of the coins being sold by self-slabbers.

    Long ago I realized that what I was once told by a dealer friend about low-end and problem "stuff" is true:
    "There's a home for every coin out there somewhere."
    When in doubt, don't.
  • ecichlidecichlid Posts: 1,212 ✭✭✭
    The people who tell you to "sell now!" are typically the tools of those who want to buy.
    There is no "AT" or "NT". We only have "market acceptable" or "not market acceptable.
  • CoinosaurusCoinosaurus Posts: 9,645 ✭✭✭✭✭


    << <i>I think the "dreck" being mentioned are bad coins in holders. Those are real problems. >>



    The services can quit making those - true enough. But that does nothing to get rid of the ones already out there. Somehow I can't see the services ponying up to take your marginal MS63 Morgan off the market.
  • BlackhawkBlackhawk Posts: 3,899 ✭✭✭
    Maybe if we tell the average collector that he's wasting his time collecting, he'll give up the hobby. Can you imagine how much your high exalted, PQ, star, beaner coins would be worth with a collector base of 50 people in the US? Grow up...if you want to make yourself look better, quit the coin self-promotion and get plastic surgery.
    "Have a nice day!"
  • JedPlanchetJedPlanchet Posts: 908 ✭✭✭
    Perhaps the problem is an imprecise term like "dreck" which seems to encompass:
    • overgraded examples in holders
    • properly graded examples in holders with ugly eye appeal
    • certified "problem" coins
    • raw low grade coins
    • etc.
    Plus, there's something about Yiddish which manages to tweak people emotionally ...

    At the Bar; Oy! One misused Yiddish word in court, and just listen to all the kvetching going on.
    By David Margolick
    Published: NY Times: June 26, 1992

    Monica Santiago v. Sherwin-Williams et al. had already droned on for four years when counsel for the defense filed its umpteenth otherwise unmemorable motion in the case last August. "It is unfortunate," it declared, "that this court must wade through the dreck of plaintiff's statement of undisputed facts."

    Jonathan Shapiro of Stern, Shapiro, Rosenfeld & Weissberg in Boston, one of the plaintiff's four lawyers, was startled by the choice of words. Dreck, he knew from his grandparents, was Yiddish for doo-doo, though a tad more tart. Even by the standards of the nareshkaytn normally filed by opposing lawyers, he thought such chutzpah intolerable. So last September he and a co-counsel, Neil Leifer of Boston, resolved to talk takhles with Judge Joseph L. Tauro, the tsadik hearing the case.

    "For almost four years now, plaintiff and her attorneys have been subjected to constant kvetching by defendants' counsel, who have made a big tsimis about the quantity and quality of plaintiff's responses to discovery requests," it stated. "This has been the source of much tsores among plaintiff's counsel and a big megillah for the court."

    It was hardly balebatish , the lawyers complained, to call a fellow lawyer's work "dreck," particularly "in view of the khazeray which they have filed." Finally, "since not all of plaintiff's lawyers are yeshiva bokhers ," it was presumptuous as well. "Plaintiff prays that the court put an end to this mishugas and strike "dreck," he concluded.

    Ever since the motion was filed, yentes at law firms have been photocopying and faxing the Shapiro-Leifer broadside throughout the country. In a way, the memo has challenged all of the bobe mayses about the death of Yiddish.

    The offending memo was written by Karen DeSantis, an associate at the Washington office of Kirkland & Ellis of Chicago. But it was signed by makhers from three other firms -- Goodwin, Proctor & Hoar and Bingham, Dana & Gould in Boston and Popham, Haik, Schnobrich & Kaufman in Minneapolis. And, Mr. Shapiro asserts, the word "dreck" was retained at the specific insistence of lawyers at Bingham, Dana.

    Lawyers at Bingham Dana at first tried to make Mr. Shapiro's request sound like bobkes . "We find it difficult to believe you would seriously have us all shlep to court to argue such a meshugganah motion," Meghan Magruder, a partner, wrote Mr. Shapiro. Had he called only to kibitz , she continued, he would have learned that the scriveners of the offensive motion "are all goyim " who innocently misused the word.

    Were Mr. Shapiro enough of a mentsh to withdraw the motion, she went on, the defense would happily stipulate that dreck be changed to "morass." "As the taxpayers must ultimately pay to resolve such a motion, it would be a mitzvah ," she concluded. "Moreover, your shtik may be lost on the court."

    But when he ruled on the motion last December, Judge Tauro showed the defense lawyers no rakhmones . "Any further use of inappropriate language in any proceeding before this court will result in the imposition of sanctions," he wrote in stern and unadulterated English.

    In the meantime the authors of the memo continue to get nakhes . Stanley G. Feldman, vice chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Arizona, awarded the Shapiro-Liefer collaboration his prestigious "motion of the year award." And in an article entitled "Plain Yiddish for Lawyers and Judges," in Trial magazine, Ralph Slovenko of Wayne State University Law School in Detroit quotes the memo at length.

    "With the almost complete extermination of European Jews during World War II, many scholars prophesied the end of the Yiddish language," he noted. Instead, he continued, with its "peculiar mix of toughness and compassion," Yiddish is "finding new and unprecedented application in American law."

    He might just as easily have said that Yiddish is supplanting Latin as the mame loshn of the law.


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    Whatever you are, be a good one. ---- Abraham Lincoln
  • rld14rld14 Posts: 2,390 ✭✭✭


    << <i>I have to ask, what is actually considered to be "dreck"? There are a lot of early american coins that have a variety of problems from being cleaned, corroded, polished, scratched etc etc. Frankly, I cant afford some of these early coins in problem free condition, so I have to settle for some problems. I don't consider these dreck as they do have a place in the market, and collectors on a budget do buy them. Thoughts?? >>



    Since this all ties into Legend's Market Reports...

    Laura defines "dreck" as anything that's overgraded, messed with, gradeflated, etc. A great example of dreck would be the 97-O Half Dollar in my VF set, it's in a PCGS holder and graded as a VF25 but it's been harshly cleaned, has some nasty spots, etc. Basically, it's a coin that has NO business being in a holder and it is NOT a nice coin.

    Now, were it in the PCGS Genuine holder that it should be in, then I wouldn't consider it dreck, but it has no business whatsoever being holdered, and as such it is dreck.

    There's nothing wrong with buying a problem coin, even Laura called Speety's 1870-S Dollar that was tooled well bought, but it was bought for cheap money, due to it being a tooled and therefore "problem" coin, and it's correctly holdered "Genuine". Had it slipped into a, say, VF35 holder, then it too would be dreck. If that's the only way you can afford an 1870-S Dollar, then there's nothing wrong with that coin, as long as you buy it know it's a problem coin and you pay problem coin money for it.

    At least that's how I interpret what she has to say.
    Bear's "Growl of Approval" award 10/09 & 3/10 | "YOU SUCK" - PonyExpress8|"F the doctors!" - homerunhall | I hate my car

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