A dual layer of trust was involved in this coin and grading transaction

[MarkFeld]

Fairly recently, a client had some of his coins shipped to me so that I could make offers on them and/or help him sell them and provide some guidance/suggestions.

 

I ended up recommending that two of them be submitted for grading, a 1921 Peace Dollar and a 1934-S Peace Dollar. I thought that each of them should grade MS63 at a minimum and that they stood a good chance to grade MS64, but they had a film on them which looked as if it might contain a bit of PVC.

 

My thinking was that if I bought them before getting them graded, either I or my client would get a bad deal, and neither of those results was appealing to me.

 

So, I forwarded them to a dealer friend who is a much larger submitter than I am, asked him to look at them for me and if he thought it necessary, remove any PVC and then submit them for grading. He informed me that he decided not to do anything to the coins and submitted them.

 

He called me a few weeks later with grading results, informed me that both coins graded MS64 and let me know what he would pay for them. I then called my client with the good news. I say good news, partly because before sending the coins to me, he had been offered $2000 for a group which included the 1921 and the 1934-S in addition to some other pieces. The coins other than the 1921 and 1934-S were worth about $500 combined, so in effect, he was offered roughly $1500 for the two in question.

 

I told him what I could sell them for and agreed upon a price to pay him (roughly 93% of what I was going to sell them for).

 

And now to the main point of this post...

 

Situations like this probably aren't exceptionally rare, but I was reminded that I was trusting my dealer friend to tell me and my client was trusting me to tell him the truth about the grading results. He was also trusting me to tell him the truth about the prices I was going to sell the coins for. Yes, my dealer friend and I each would have been taking risks if we lied, but we almost certainly would have gotten away with it had we done so.

 

There is a lot of trust involved in this hobby/business and this was but one recent example. I am afraid I might be posting an example of the downside to trust, some time next week.

[MikeInFL]

Very interesting story.

 

It begs the question, is trust transitive? Should it be?

 

I'm not looking forward to the next installment, however.

[IGWT]

Situations like this probably aren't exceptionally rare . . . .

In fact, I hope that they're still commonplace, and I'm concerned if we've reached the point where stories like this qualify as noteworthy. Many more problems arise by misunderstandings than by misplaced trust.

 

I am afraid I might be posting an example of the downside to trust, some time next week.

Confession is good for the soul.