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 some
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.
