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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;afantiques, post: 77494, member: 25&quot;]I started to learn to &#039;grade&#039; coins with my childhood collections, simply deciding which of two coins was the one to retain. Later I learned the formal names for various grades, always bearing in mind that a lot of other factors determine the value of a coin. So&nbsp; did pretty well all British and I suppose European collectors.</p><p><br /></p><p>The introduction of third party grading in the US was greeted with a shrug and &#039;Those crazy Americans, more money than sense.&#039; When I recently read here about companies that grade graded coins I was vastly amused. The introduction of micrograding with arguments over something being MS64&nbsp; or 65 just made me shrug.</p><p>Next thing will be fully automated dealing, modern junk will come off the production line, be passed straight to graders who will slab the things and feed them into an automated selling machine and people will pay as they do for shares, leaving the actual coins in a big warehouse, like shares with a nominee company.</p><p><br /></p><p>No need to actually see and handle any coins at all. </p><p><br /></p><p>Still,if that&#039;s the way lots of people want to do it, best of luck to them. We very rarely see anything in a slab here, and if I did I&#039;d just throw away the plastic.</p><p><br /></p><p>As for grading your bond specimens, forget it. Waste of money. They are what they are.</p><p><br /></p><p>I think non US collectors have much wider collecting horizons, so they are less obsessive about tiny differences in a fairly limited range of coins and have no real interest in trivial errors at all.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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