How many times have you heard in your collecting experience a dealer or fellow collector say ?Buy the coin, not the holder.?

Obviously, I?m referring to coins that have been professionally graded. There is much truth in this statement largely due to the fact that not all grading companies are created equal. Seasoned collectors are well aware that education is their best weapon against spending hard earned money on an improperly graded coin. If you spend the time necessary to learn about a specific series, how to properly grade the series and then the strike characteristics of specific dates you will do just fine regardless of the grading company. In fact, I would venture to say that you may even come across the OCCASSIONAL coin that should be submitted for a re-grade. I say occasional as I am so tired of everyone under the sun touting every coin they own as under graded. I mean on one hand you hear so many people say that PCGS and NGC are the best in their respective business but then they turnaround and state that their coins, graded by these services, are under graded. It makes you wonder why they buy graded coins to begin with or why they don?t send them back for a re-grade to reap the financial reward of a higher grade. Anyway, I?m off the track here. We?ll save that discussion for another day.

Amazingly, with so much information available today unlike earlier days, there are still plenty of folks who just dive right in and buy a coin based on some grade that is applied to the holder without any regard for the coin contained inside. An expensive lesson will be learned here soon enough.

What about the day when you decide to sell your prized coin or your entire collection for that matter? If you take your coins to a dealer do they buy the coin and not holder? Don?t you find that coins in a certain holders are treated with ?more respect? than others?

If you have been collecting coins, especially graded coins long enough, you know first hand what I am talking about here. It is no secret that one service is preferred for certain coin series and another service for an entirely different series. In the end, when selling day comes the dealer looks at the same coin from a different perspective. Many of these same dealers told you to buy the coin, not the holder. The same dealer buys the holder, not the coin. OK, that is probably a bit extreme but dealers are certainly attracted to specific holders over others as they know they can move them quickly. At times you hear that he just can?t sell that coin in its current holder nobody will want to buy it. On the other hand, no premium is being paid for a properly graded coin in a desired grading company?s holder.

It makes me wonder if we as collectors, all of us, became educated on coins, grading etc. what difference the holder would ever make and what that might do to the business of buying and selling as a whole. I guess the saying would become: ?Buy the Coin, Sell the Coin.?