bridp

Lots of interesting comments. My wife keeps telling me not to trust "Wiki" anything.

On 9/6/2022 at 4:00 PM, EagleRJO said:

You have to be very careful with raw trade dollars as they are commonly faked.  If you are going to go down that road reference a resource like Red Book or USA Coin Book to look up the physical properties to check and identify the various varieties and combinations of obverses and reverses for that year/mark, with an example of that attached.  Then look up certified examples from say PCGS CoinFacts and rotate/overlay the various features to carefully compare the two.  I have found a number of raw fakes just taking these basic steps.  Just be aware that for a raw Trade Dollar there is still a risk though as some of the fakes are very good.

Also, I don't agree that the turn of a Trade Dollar is horizontal as indicated in the article, it is vertical.  See the attached PCGS example which has the correct vertical coin turn (i.e. if you turn the coin vertically as in the PCGS example the eagle should be right-side-up). If you look at the source for that in the article, they correctly state that if you turn the coin horizontally the eagle should be upside down, but there is a typo on the direction the upside-down eagles head faces which is to the left, not the right as referenced.  The author should have known that so take the rest of the article with grains of salt.

First day in this site as a member, and already seeing great support like this. Thank you.

Thanks for the reply and the confirmation. (And I would never use step #7.). I will definitely buy certified.

I recently found an article in wikihow explaining how to identify a Trade Dollar fake. Below is the link.

https://www.wikihow.com/Detect-Counterfeit-Trade-Dollars#:~:text=On a fake coin%2C these may be unevenly spaced.&text=Trade Dollars also have reeded,unevenly spaced%2C or irregularly sized.

Step #9 says that if you flip the coin from left to right, the image of the eagle should be upright. Yet I see pictures all over Ebay showing the image being upright when flipping from top to bottom.

Is this article incorrect? I want to buy a nice Trade Dollar, but now I'm a little spooked.

BP