GoldFinger1969

It's just an estimate based on available knowledge to-date. Better than nothing.

It's increasing...gold and OTHER coins......the 2020 and 2021 staying-at-home Covid buyers are now working back at the office and/or don't have the $$$ they did 2+ years ago. Ebay is the worst, GC is seeing more (but I'd estimate for the stuff I follow maybe 20% tops have too high a reserve)...HA and SB and other top-end houses see the fewest.

Yes...saw it......not a BAD coin but the price is a bit high. Notice no bids. At $3,200 it gets sold. $4,000+ when you include fees is too high.

The 1910 is one of those coins I call a "tweener" -- it isn't super-rare but it's not common enough to survive in quantity enough to satiate Registry and Type collectors and move down to the Investor class (~30,000 or so). RWB estimates about 16,000 survivors. Nice coins !

Nothing right now, looking down the line at a 1908 WF NM MS-66. Probably my next purchase in the Saint series. Further down the line.....awaiting a drop in MCMVII HRs if estate sales increase the supply. We'll see.....

I should have added (7) check out local coin shops (LCS) and (8) Attend coin shows from 1-day local shows to multi-day regional shows to Big Nationals like FUN.

I'll buy that....but still lots never saw anything but a bag. That was the recurring theme for decades....the minting of Morgans was seen as a favor to silver state politicians. They circulated out West in the hundreds of thousands, but there were almost 87 million MSDs, even more than the Saints which at least got used in trade settlements.

Does it cost anything to list at that price if no sale happens ? If not, you can just keep it there for months or years and wait for the market to move towards you or pray for that One Dumb Buyer.

I don't know about relevant but it's another tool I check. Premiums at various times tell me if I am chasing hot money or buying closer to a bottom. For Saints...when the premiums to spot gold get to be about 100-300%, it's time to lighten up and sell. When they get to 500%, it's time to sell it all. Even if there's not much useful information for my buying.....I still like seeing what a given coin commanded over time knowing the underlying gold prices. You can see the time periods when there were buying frenzies and if you're anywhere close to that today, exercise caution.

The amount they are high is much worse on Ebay and especially with lower-priced coins. You're more likely to get $600 for a $350 coin if there aren't many like it than you are to get the same price on GC let alone HA or SB. Ditto higher-priced gold coins. I did notice that unique stuff like modern commemoratives, 5-ounce silvers, etc....got bid up higher by the at-home Covid Crowd and especially if there were unique labels on them. NGC had some nifty ones at that time.

I think virtually ALL Morgans were at one time bank bag coins. Unless a great great relative got one direct from the Mint back in the late-1800's or early-1900's. I think I read where the "average" or median grade of Morgan GSA's was 62 or 63. But many did grade 65-66 with an occasional 67 I believe.

Hopefully we're both around when these collections become public. I've always wondered if a super-scarce coin like a 1927-D Saint might be in someone's collection raw and thus uncounted in the population census.

Just knowing what they commanded at a certain point in time...maybe relative to the price of gold....before, during, or after a price spike or bubble. I find it interesting to know and I do use it as a guide for current prospective purchases. I find it fascinating to track the prices of a generic common Saint over time and see the premium soar and collapse at various times. Let's me know if I am paying a "rich" or "cheap" price when I am considering pulling the trigger.

First, yes....GC. Second, it's not as bad as Ebay with as many coins or the amount that is too high...but yes, the non-bids are out there. And since GC has a pretty savvy clientele, I am kind of surprised folks are high. For instance, I see Superb Gem MS-67 1924 Saints asking $17,000 which is what much rarer 1927's and 1928's command. For a 1924 MS-67 Saint, you probably need to be closer to $12,000. Also see 1908 No-Motto WF MS-66 OGH's asking ~ $3,700 when it has to be $3,200 and under. That's about 20% too high. Any Saint buyer spending that amount of money is going to know the market and not be that high except for a unique, special coin. These are all pretty ordinary, not even CACs.

Jimbo just re-submitted a MSD and posted about it here.....don't know if it's a clear-cut example of gradeflation, but he (apparently correctly) re-submitted and got an MS-61 up from an AU-58 with VAM designations.

Visiting their son. Hey, I have no love lost for a pair of West Coast professors and their spoiled son. Both parents probably know that like Darren (Cosmo Kramer's intern at Kramerica, Inc. )....he's going away for a very long time.

What is CNG ?? If what you are saying is true, considering that is just one nondescript county (not exceptionally wealthy our adjacent to a major metropolitan area, either).....you wonder if that could be true for other counties, too. Or maybe PA just nurtured coin collectors better than other locales decades ago so more people collected in the state and therefore there are more of these "unknown hoards." When The Great Transfer takes place -- the trillions of financial and tangible assets that will be passed from the pre-WW II generation to the post-WW II generation -- you'll get these collections coming out. IF they exist. Any idea what kind of coins might be in those collections ? We talking gold/silver or U.S. Small Denominations or even foreign stuff ?

Interesting.....strange....but interesting.

If someone wants to know the prices for an MS-65 or MS-63 1923-D Saint-Gaudens for 1986 or 2006....I don't think the HA data is going to change today vs. when RWB computed it. Historical data doesn't change unless the data itself does (don't know how that could happen here) or there are benchmark revisions as with government GDP and economic statistics. CURRENT GC/HA/SB/Ebay data is the best for CURRENT pricing....I'm talking about the price for a specific coin in a certain grade 3 years ago or 10 years ago or 35 years ago (RWB's price grid goes back to 1976). Most of those archives you cited don't go back more than a decade except for HA and even their stuff is very sporadic before 1995.

This hobby has lots of down-time when we are not approaching or closing a final purchase of a coin. Do any of you spend time -- besides on forums like these -- doing stuff other than the acual buying/selling of a coin ? Here's what I do in between purchases: (1) Reading & posting on Forums, including this one (of course ! ). (2) Reading books on the coins I collect/enjoy. (3) Reading older articles from years ago or even decades ago for historical knowledge or relationship to contemporary events. Many of them are on the internet. (4) Reading current or older auction catalogs. Scanning and looking for them, too !! (5) Researching prices, recent and years ago, for major coin types I follow. I do this at HA and GC. (6) Reading the coin descriptions at HA or SB on Trophy Coins which usually have lots of interesting stuff on the coin type involved (i.e., Saints or Morgans). The information on higher-priced coins tends to increase the more the price does. Alot of the information I have -- especially from the Internet (articles, forum posts, columns, etc.) -- I cut-and-paste and will save in Word & PDF format so I have it permanently on my PC and can share it with others and preserve it (articles and websites go down or disappear). I wouldn't say it's new research or super-important stuff.....more of a compendium....but it has lots of useful information and some trivial that might be of interest to people looking for the backstory to particular coins, sales, coin types, the hobby, financial impacts, etc.

It's there, trust me. And there are lots of posts here (and maybe threads) that talk about it.

You get a coin collector elected president !!

I don't know about the age-thing, but yes it is fraud and embezzlement. Charlie Gasparino of FBC and The NY Post nailed it by saying SBF is trying to deflect blame with his "I f***** up" admissions. No evidence of that, I would be surprised if they had any inkling of the illlegal activities. This was a LEGIT COMPANY doing ILLEGITIMATE THINGS...it APPEARED to be on the up-and-up as with that hillarious FTX Super Bowl commercial with Larry David.

Any reason why that coin was graded "BU" by NGC with no grade ? Was it one of those things where you get a bulk discount if you eschew a numerical grade and just go for a more general classification ?

I think that the HISTORICAL data shouldn't change that much on something like past selling prices. Using the HA archives is a very good source....had it been an amalgamation of Ebay completed sales and asking prices, that's another thing. The data in the price grids for every Saint should be 99% accurate/good even if a 2nd edition needs to be done. What MIGHT change is 2014 and 2015, the most recent two years in the grid -- and of course, we don't have anything for 2016 to the present since the book was published in 2018 and the data covers 1976-2015. Right, for things that are fluid and change -- like a population census. That can change over time from hoards, new finds, etc. But something fixed like average selling price shouldn't be revised back too much, unless you changed the method of computation (i.e., instead of using HA solo, also incorporating GC or SB).