My grades have finally posted! I checked early this morning and the submission listed as shipped! Yay!

And the box is in the mail and so it will probably arrive at the house before we leave for a short vacation and won’t end up stuck in the Post Office until I get back – Double Yay!

I also now feel especially smart for getting the last post out on Wednesday night because I don’t like to make too many posts on the same day or too clos together. I had a feeling these were about to drop.

As I did with the Big Zimbabwe / Italy submission results I’m going to talk about the Venezuelan and the Italian Grade results separately, each in their own post, because 28 coins is a lot to talk about and the 2 countries make for a clean, easy, division.

So here are the results:

So… Getting the obvious pain point out of the way first… that 62… Man! Ouch! That stings and burns a little. I missed the mark on that one.

Other than that one really really low point, I’m very happy with how these did.

Only that one coin did not grade Gem (65) or better. Only 3 other coins got an MS65, so only 4 coins out of 22 got below an MS66. That’s pretty good for being not-a-pro and a lot better than I did back in the day. These results seem like they’re probably at least about even with what some more active submitters and dealers get based on things I’ve been seeing on eBay (more on that later). So I’ll take that as a collector with cornea scaring in one eye working with his wife. I’m not in this set to make money anyway.

There were 3 MS68s and a MS69 though, which I’m very excited to see. Another 5 scored an MS67 with MS66 being the most common grade with 9 coins.

It’s not lost on me that the low grades were heavily focused on larger coins like the 1B and 5B but the high grades were heavily concentrated on smaller coins – 1C, 5C, 10C. I’m wondering if I’m not giving enough attention to relatively small flaws on the larger coins that individually or collectively are still enough to pull the grades down on the larger coins. I feel like I also struggled in relative terms on some of the Larger Zimbabwean coins, hitting some of my lowest grades on things like the 50C and the $1 coins. But then, I also got some really good grades with those on the $1 and $2 bond coins. But that may have just been a factor of getting lucky with getting nice coins in my orders from the dealer.

At the end of the day, I’m buying usually 5 to 10 examples of each coin and sending in the one we think is the best. If I just get a “bad” batch the best of the bunch is the best of the bunch and still only a lower-gem grade. So then is the take away to just not send in anything and buy more raw examples hoping to get something better rather than just sending the best I have gotten so far to fill the hole, lay a foundation, and maybe build from there?

I feel a small measure of extra vindication with the 2007 1C, 5C and 25C coins coming back so high – There have been some coins already graded by NGC on eBay the last couple of months in MS66RD and MS67RD grades. I had seen these get listed when I was still planning and preparing my submission and I seriously thought about just buying those and taking the guaranteed MS67RD rather than rolling the dice on my eyes and skills. The problem I had was the sellers were asking $50-70 each for these 1C and 5C coins. There is also an MS66 12.5C and a MS67 25C that sellers are asking $65 each for + shipping.

If the sellers had been offering guaranteed MS68s for that price, I probably would have been more tempted. I still don’t know if I would have bit at that price, but it would have been tempting. But with what they were asking, for an 66 or 67, it wasn’t worth it to me. I was happier spending $20 per coin to roll the dice and see how I did.

I missed by one point on the 12.5C, but I did at least 1 point better on the three others. Overall, a big win for me.

Edited to add,

eBay also has a 2012 1B Bimetallic in MS66 with an asking price of $60 that I matched point-for-point. If I had bought those 5 coins pre-graded I would have been out about $300 and this entire 28 coin submission (including the Italian coins which we'll talk about tomorrow probably), set me back about $430 in grading fees (Well... and $150 in credits too i guess. But i got a discount there).

I guess, yeah, I spent a chunk buying all the raw examples to search though, but I'd already sunk that cost in deciding to send these in vs buying pre-graded, and I enjoyed looking at them all with my wife, and I still have all those other raw examples too now.

With Zimbabwe and now these Venezuelan and Italian coins, I've been enjoying collecting this way for these sets - looking at raw with the Wife and grading myself.