| by James Halperin
If you’ve ever seen me at a coin show, chances are good that
I was sitting at my table looking through boxes of coins, one coin
at a time. Naturally some coins take much longer to look at than
others. My staff and I look at thousands of coins at every show,
and we often consult on major, or even minor decisions. It’s
fairly rare that we spend less than $1 million at any show we
attend. If you worked for me, would you tend to spend more time
examining a coin priced at ten thousand dollars than one offered
for sale at a hundred? Would you pay more attention to flaws that
appeared on the more valuable coin? If you were about to spend ten
thousand dollars, instead of a hundred, would you be more
concerned about the coin’s technical grade?
If you didn’t answer yes to all of these questions, your job
interview is over!
I’ve purchased at least a hundred million dollars worth of
coins valued at ten thousand dollars or more, yet each of these
purchase opportunities remains special and never routine.
In theory, all coins are graded using the same standards. In
practice, I haven’t found this to be the case. It’s only
reasonable to assume that when making major financial decisions
most everyone becomes extra diligent and cautious. The rarities
are more carefully inspected. The importance of imperfections, and
the correctness of the technical grade become magnified by value.
That said, would it surprise you to learn that in many if not
most cases, I believe that very rare coins are more liberally
graded by third-party grading services than their less important
counterparts are? This surprising irony stems from the fact that
expensive coins tend to be submitted (and resubmitted) more often.
A $25 grading fee is significant on a $200 coin, but meaningless
for a $20,000 coin. When you think about it, it’s completely
logical.
Age can also influence the way coins are graded. The tendency
is to forgive some imperfections that wouldn’t be tolerated when
examining more modern relatives. Method of manufacture is also
taken into account. For example, due to older equipment and lower
skill of the staff, the gold coins produced at the Charlotte and
Dahlonega Mints were often weakly struck compared to same year
issues from Philadelphia, so such deficiencies are often
discounted when grading and evaluating these coins.
Perhaps someday all coins will be graded by computers
programmed with one universal standard. Until this happens, we
should content ourselves with the current system and perhaps even
revel in its charming idiosyncrasies.
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