Maybe I am an NGC owner.

Michael Cooper wonders whether I might secretly be an NGC owner. I wish Michael! I haven't seen a dividend check yet (chuckle)! But I would make the following statement. By owning coins in NGC and PCGS holders, we are owners of the companies. We definitely have a vested interest in the performance of these companies. If they don't do well, we all own a bunch of worthless plastic!

To illustrate my point, for those of you that are old enough, recall what the coin market was like prior to PCGS and NGC. Since I am a hardcore Morgan Dollar nut, I'll use them as an example. Prior to certfied grading, you could buy a coin at a certain grade. If you took it to another dealer, it was immediately at least 1 grade and usually 2 grades lower. And this was in the days when Morgans were 60/63/65 and there were no other grades. If you took it back to the same dealer, the coin had to be in its original marked flip or the same treatment applied.

On top of all this, when buying, no dealer would grade any dollar, no matter how much of a gem it was as anything more than a 65. So if you sunk a bunch of money into a 67, an auction was your only avenue to sell a coin for anything even close to what you paid for it. In short, liquidity at grade, non-existent.

With the market acceptance of NGC and PCGS, that has all changed. Coins are immediately saleable AT GRADE. But all of this changes if dealers, collectors and investors don't accept the system. So the next time your coin comes back body bagged. Or your early-bird special took forever, stop and think about the way things were and could be again. No, NGC and PCGS are not perfect and should be called to task when they screw up. But, I'll take things the way they are now as opposed to the alternatives.