Not often that I sell a coin I sent off for grading myself.

I've never been one to make a lot of coin submissions. Generally I'm happier to just buy the coin already graded. I'm sure that cuts me out of some potential steals and great deals but it's just what's worked best for me. I've never been much of a risk taker and ultimately there are elements of risk in every coin submission, not all of which are the ones you suspect. One of the few times I sent in a submission the postal service was nice enough to completely ruin the shipping box to such a degree that they had to hand it over to NGC held together by shrink-wrap and positive thinking.

When I was working on a signature set based around world bullion coins the other year though I ran into a problem. I wanted a NGC graded Mexican Libertad and there weren't very many out there at the time. I can see from the population reports and eBay auctions that people are grading the Libertads a lot more now but that picked up a couple of years after I was looking to get one -- so I decided to submit a couple of my own. I submitted two 2008 Libertads and one got an MS69. To this day it remains one of 6 NGC MS69s for that year.

I really wasn't looking to create a condition rarity at that time but there you go, there it was -- and since then it has sat in the safe with the other coins for most of the last 5 years. I wasn't anticipating that 2-3 years later people would start grading these coins by the hundreds, and there'd be hundreds of MS69s for the last few years on eBay for $50 or less. If I had I probably wouldn't have submitted those 2008s. I would have just waited and maybe submitted something else instead.

I think I sell coins less often than I grade them. Recently though I got a message from someone with a much more complete and higher ranking Libertad set that was hoping I'd be willing to sell the MS69.

It was surprising getting the offer, but after thinking about it I decided to sell the coin. I can pick up another MS69 Libertad from another year pretty easy. He wanted to pick it up for his set, was willing to give a fair price for it and I think it'll make him happier than it was making me (which does mean something). That, and I think it amuses me on some level to think of that Libertad that I got graded sitting in a #1 ranked set -- which, as of today, it is.

... and, of course, the money is going towards getting me a coin that I'm going to be a lot happier to own, one that doesn't come up for sale very often either and one that I'm hoping will make one of my sets finally the top in its category for the NGC registry.

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