Revenant

On 4/2/2020 at 2:50 AM, KarenHolcomb said:

Has anybody ever heard anything from Mohawk?

He was writing a dissertation and preparing to defend. That's a rough time. You wouldn't have (and didn't) see me burning much time here or on any other chat boards when I wrote mine.

We may see him back when the dust settles if it is related to that.

How much is this coin even worth? Is it a common date or a rare one?

Someone paid to have NGC grade it (and shipping) and you paid at least part of that fee in the increased price of the coin if you bought it after the fact. Now you've paid PCGS to grade it (and shipping) and now you're talking about paying NGC another chunk of cash to maybe grade it again...

Why? Any money you were hoping to get out of this is surely kissed good-bye in grading fees by now.

I don't get these cross-over games. I don't. The whole thing is a waste.

7 hours ago, kbbpll said:

You would, but would ebay? That was my concern all along. The seller apparently can retract a counteroffer, but I can't retract my original offer. I was worried that the seller could magically resurrect my offer and accept it, the same way they magically made it disappear, and then I would be obligated to purchase it. I must be having trouble explaining the scenario. Typically the seller or buyer accepts an offer, and it's done. Or either party rejects an offer or counteroffer, and it's done. There's a paper trail. This time, it was in limbo. I don't mean to drag this out, it's over with. Just be aware that if a seller counters and then immediately retracts their counter, there's no indication as to what happened to your offer. It just disappears.

It probably didn't completely disappear. They cap you to I think 4-5 offers on an item to keep you from harassing the seller I guess.

7 minutes ago, GoldFinger1969 said:

This isn't systemic failure.  It's a natural catastrophe -- like an asteroid hitting a city.  2008-09 was systemic.

Not saying it is one I'm saying we're going to have one at some point. The Coronavirus is the pin that the bubble, it isn't the cause or the bubble itself. We may limp on after this and something else will get the blame later.

1 hour ago, GoldFinger1969 said:

Rev, you sound like the late Richard Russell of Dow Theory Letters or Geraldine Weiss of Investment Quality Trends when I used to read them in the 1980's !! 

Guess I'll take your word for it. I was 3 when the 1980s ended.

People always say it's different this time. I think it's even a meme now.

It's different until it's not. You can pretend you're flying until you hit the ground.

I guess we'll all see who is right in the fullness of time. For what it's worth, I'd love for you to be right. WC and I don't want this to be a bubble. We don't want a collapse or systemic failure, but I think it will happen.

54 minutes ago, LINCOLNMAN said:

FWIW I only make offers on items that are priced reasonably. If the seller is way off I assume I'm wasting my time with a realistic offer. Plus, as the OP has encountered, I then have to wait for what is likely to be an unrealistic counter. Maybe others have had some luck with unreasonably priced OBO's? 

I've had some luck but it involves patience.

I found a seller a while back offering the last notes I needed to complete my Zimbabwean 4th dollar set. The prices he wanted weren't reflective of the current market though - prices are way down in the last 4 years. He only offered to lower his ask by $1 per note so I walked and waited. 2 months later he lowered his ask but it was still high. 2 months later he lowered it again and took off the OBO but his prices were still too high. So a month or so later I sent him a message and said "Will you give me these 3 notes together for this price." He came back with a modestly higher price and I took it.

42 minutes ago, World Colonial said:

You did a better job of being more concise than I was in my post below yours...

You make great points and it certainly wasn't my goal to out words in your mouth on time frames. If 01 and 08 and the last 20 years proved anything it's that they've been able to keep the music playing when it shouldn't have continued. I think we'll limp along a while yet or I wouldn't be doing some of the things I'm doing but I have a high degree of confidence that this is a bubble and one day it will collapse.

I don't get into negative interest rates and bond maturities because they just don't make sense. I don't know how it happened. I can't get my brain around why someone would ever buy a negative yielding bond and not just keep cash. 0.1% from BoA is still better than -0.5%. It makes no sense to buy a bond that will not mature until after you're dead. None whatsoever. It doesn't really make sense to me to buy any bond with a maturity of longer than 5 years unless the bond is explicitly for making something with a useful life / service life of more than 5 years. And, yet, it happens. I still can't figure out why a Toyota dealership let me buy a new car 4 years ago with no money down and a 0% interest rate - makes no sense, but they did it.

1 hour ago, GoldFinger1969 said:

... but they were not anywhere near prior "bubble" levels.

Well, you're free to think that but I'd disagree. I don't know how the next few years and the next 10-20 years will play out but the debt levels in our society are completely insane and they just keep going up. Interest rates getting up to 1.5% percent starts to become problematic when 5-6% is historically normal because people and companies are in too much debt. Interest rates can't rise because if they rise then bonds become more attractive then high P/E stocks and the stocks start to crash. They can't rise because home prices are too high and if interest rates go up the home prices have to come down for mortgages to be affordable. We have 25 year olds with $125,000 in student debt that can't be cleared through bankruptcy because they had to make it that way because these kids are bankrupt and if they could declare bankruptcy all of them would as soon as they graduated because they are bankrupt by definition...

At some point something is going to break, and when that happens a lot of other things are going to break.

7 hours ago, Coinbuf said:

If you check the dates my post was from last December before the announcement of the ANA registry   old thread alert!

yeah... Didn't look close enough at that. Lol 

On 12/13/2019 at 3:24 PM, Coinbuf said:

@Ali E.  Is there any official update available?

I suspect a lot of their effort (the effort that isn't being derailed by Covid-19) is going to be focused on the launch of the ANA Registry. We might see a few new features roll out concurrently with the launch of that Registry but I'm not going to be expecting much before then. Just my 2 cents.

4 minutes ago, World Colonial said:

To most, this is almost certainly even less appealing with (set) collecting which isn't at FV, like the IHC example I gave in my prior post.  You either buy it at a noticeable percentage spread from a B&M (if one is even available in your area). Or, pay almost as much or even more for the shipping as for the coin buying it on eBay.  Then when you go to sell, either no one wants it or you get a very low fraction of the amount you paid.  It's affordable as a recreational activity but it's evident far fewer find it sufficiently interesting or else more would choose it.

To the extent that it happens, now and in the future, I think it's mostly going to be current issue coins from circulation / that you get from the bank in rolls, bags and boxes. I agree completely that you're not going to see a lot of people trying to build albums of circulated or mint state mercs by going to shows and dealers and online shopping.

1 hour ago, roy herbst said:

Basically NGC got greedy when they decided to no longer allow pcgs coins, they pissed off so many collectors who couldn't add any of their pcgs new purchases

so when so many people left the forum they decided its better to re allow pcgs coins

whoever is making these business decisions for them should be fired at once

I think it's a privately held company and I think the people making those decisions are pretty "high up the chain." I think the president of the company even wrote an article / letter in 2017 justifying and defending the decision to pull the PCGS coins. I don't think they'll be firing themselves any time soon - but it's just a guess. Aren't we all greedy though?

I think we'll still be arguing about whether those PCGS coins should be allowed here or not is something we'll all be debating and arguing about until there's no more registry to argue about. Lots of people with lots of strong opinions.

2 minutes ago, World Colonial said:

The coinage collectors used to buy to fill albums and folders in the past exists in huge number and it must be a lot less marketable.  It also isn't nearly as interesting to (prospective) collectors since it has to compete with so much more due to the internet.

They may not be "the next thing," they may not be "the future," and they may not be "investments," but I wouldn't count them out completely yet.

When I came back to collecting in my early 20s after years away / at school in 2006 one of the first things I did was try to fill some albums / folders up by buying lots of wheat pennies and searching coin rolls I got from the bank. It was fun - in some ways more enjoyable than the registry. There was a taste of childhood in it - I used to look at change with my mother and check dates while we rolled them up to take to the bank. I fully intend to try that with Ben when he gets a little older - He just needs to know his numbers a little better first.

7 hours ago, World Colonial said:

I'm positive on metal prices longer term but I don't think the decline from the 2011 peak for both is over.  I expect both to sell for noticeably less first before going much higher.

I was quite shocked by the hit that Gold and Silver spot prices took (at least in the paper contracts market, premiums for physical are insane at the moment) and by how much some of the major, established Gold mining stocks took a hit even as the FED was cutting rates to zero and announcing massive stimulus and the government was announcing massive new deficit spending. I probably shouldn't have been and felt silly for being shocked afterwards. Everyone is so levered up on average and there was so much panic selling around the middle of the month. The last crash hit in 2008 and it took 3 years for the metals to power to the peak, after initially declining. Nice to know we're consistent.

11 hours ago, World Colonial said:

There is little if any analogy between now and the 1930's on this aspect.  1930's was predominantly collecting out of circulation at FV.  No noticeable proportion of the population who aren't collectors now are going to go out and start spending any of their predominantly limited discretionary income on coins.  If they do so at FV, it will do nothing to support the price level.  They have no affinity for collecting whatsoever which is why they aren't collectors and the number of recreational alternatives is a multiple of the 1930's.

True! But you could see an up-tick in interest in Whitman and Dansco Albums. And I suppose there's always the QVC suckers.

When I make a counter-offer it removes the option to take their offer - so I assume that "rejecting" their offer is part of making the counter. So I'd be surprised if the seller still had the option of just taking your prior offer after they sent you a counter.

I'd say I use the counter offer more than Coinbuf does. Even when I think the sellers ask price is decent / reasonable, if they list "make offer" as an option I'll usually try to get them to come down 10-20% just because, why not try to save a little if they're saying they'll negotiate.

Yeah, you get the jokers asking 2x what the coin is worth that are only willing to take $1-5 off their asking price, but some of them will actually haggle with you. I've also found that if I'm patient and let the coin or note sit in their inventory for 4-6 months some of the jokers will become more willing to hear me out and give me something a lot closer to what I want. But that's a process of patience and I've seen some that will keep a coin or not listed at an overly high price for 2-3 years, paying listing fees and never making a sale. Sometimes I think they're either a collector that doesn't really want to sell the thing in the first place or they just like to have the thing out there to generate hits and get traffic into their eBay store.

It's  mad mad world.

12 hours ago, cladking said:

Certainly putting it in the stock market right now requires courage.  

I think it's also about time and pain tolerance.

A nice thing about being in my mid-30s right now:

1) I don't have an over hang of bad memories from 08.

2) I don't have a big retirement account to mourn right now.

3) I can afford to be patient and have a distant time horizon.

I came to an agreement with my wife a month ago and we're both investing nearly equal sums in stocks - nothing we worry about losing or having tied up for 3-5 years. So far my picks are doing better than hers and she's regretting some jokes she made about making it a competition - she's down 56% at the moment and I'm down about 2-3%.

2 hours ago, GoldFinger1969 said:

Maybe...but the last thing I think you'll see is people not making a paycheck, or losing part of their paycheck, or worrying about their NEXT paycheck....and then saying that it's good to spend a few hundred (thousand ?) dollars on Ebay or HA on coins or currency.

It kind of depends. My wife and I are in a good, stable spot for now. I wont be spending extra on coins but I'm also not cutting back for now. With eBay bucks certificates coming out I probably will be dropping some money on eBay soon - probably a few hundred on a gold coin. But we're unusual - we both worked from home before this and our incomes are safe for the moment.

Glad you'll be working again soon!

My company is using a furlough program in the UK to let people be furloughed but get 100% normal pay for a while. Paid vacation for them but it means I'll actually be busier! 😆

That's unfortunate. Even Amazon makes you eat the shipping charges if you return it just because you changed your mind and there was nothing wrong with the item. I've never returned anything on eBay and I even sympathize with some dealers with a "no returns" policy. When there's clear pictures of what you're getting, unless they misrepresented something significant, you knew what you were buying - this is especially true with moderns.

On 3/23/2020 at 6:01 PM, Coinbuf said:

 

Perhaps this is an opportunity for someone (you perhaps) to start a competitive registry of your own where you can set the rules to your liking and not be constrained by the business aspect of running a TPG.  Who knows it could be the most popular registry the coin industry has ever seen.

The problem here that I'm sure you see but which others might not is that this place is "free," because it and the awards are paid for with a small part of the grading fees that NGC pulls in - including the fees for all those monster box submissions that people like the chuckle over.

A registry not associated with a grading service would have to be self supporting, which would probably mean membership fees - since I don't see ads doing the job. I don't think there are enough people willing to pay to join a registry. This one is free and still has only about 13,000-14,000 members that are mostly inactive.

On 3/23/2020 at 7:59 PM, Mike Elwell said:

Needless to say ...

 

Was it really though? 😆

You see the same things with Statehood quarters.

With the manganese brass presidential dollars this fortunately wasn't necessary - fewer coins to ruin.

On 3/14/2020 at 4:16 PM, Greenstang said:

If you want to take good pictures, get a camera with a macro lense. You can make more adjustments with a camera then with a microscope.

This is what I do for taking my pictures for my registry sets. You'll also wat to pop for some nice-ish lights or some kind of lighting solution for the phots. I've seen this take maybe forms - some work better than others.

On 1/18/2020 at 12:08 PM, BlakeEik said:

errh... you mean Hansen?  yeah, now he can dominate at NGC, too...  But at least if he does come over here, there is the "NGC best" category, and I believe most of his collection is PCGS, no?  So...just extremely dominant, not absolutely dominate perhaps? 

 

There's always World coins? I hear this guy doesn't go for those as much and PCGS isn't allowed for non-US.