Collectors Universe
 

I don't know where this should go, so I'm posting it here.
I thought this might be interesting to some. Of course, the last time I thought that, I was wrong. :o
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...,1962790.story

Interested...
 

Okay, so actually I was bored and went surfing through the watercooler section, but after reading through this CU article, I was indeed interested.
A couple sentences piqued my interest...
The article claims CU has cornered 90% of the sports cards business:eek:
Prior to professional grading, getting ripped off was called "paying your dues":eek:

Well that is troubling to read, albeit interesting.
Or should I say interesting to read , albeit troubling...
Thanks for posting!

If someone is spending $500 on a coin at age 15 they should be able to grade it themselves. The grading standards are much more fixed than they are for cards, and every guide I've seen has pictures of coins in different grades. Often pictures of each sort of popular coin too, since the wear happens at different places on each one.

It's not "paying your dues" or "getting ripped off" -it's being hasty and uninformed.

Steve B

Maybe he found a coin that was valuable and the dealer scammed him out of the $500 by downplaying the importance or grade. Valuable coins are floating around obscurely and uninformed collectors are more dangerous and self destructive than in other collecting hobbies.
My $0.02.

What I found interesting was that the article states that the stock rises and falls with the price of gold, something I haven't considered, but lately, during the pull back in gold prices, CLCT has had a nice run. I haven't checked the long term history, but short term it's certainly not the case.

They seem to be dedicated to paying their dividend, even though it exceeds earnings. Good for the investor, but risky, imo, for the company.

Thanks for the link. In my opinion it's a totally fluff article. Both the coin and card grading divisions have serious problems and in my opinion the stock is vastly overpriced. They may be able to detect some amateur coin alterations, but it's become obvious by PGCS' own admission that they have some serious credibility problems. If you look at their annual stock reports, they disclose how much money PGCS has lost in coins they've had to buy back for not initially detecting the unethical alterations. In fact in just in three months in 2008 they paid out $822,000 as revealed in this article:

http://www.coinlink.com/News/coin-gr...ms-hit-822000/

What was even worse is that many of these doctored coins were sold by PGCS' authorized dealers and as a result CU/PGCS filed a lawsuit against these dealers and the suit was dismissed. After reading the 51 page transcript of the final hearing, I found out that the Federal court dismissed the suit with prejudice since CU didn't adequately present factual evidence that the defendants violated Federal statutes for RICO and the Lanham Act. The judge told CU to pursue the remainder of their claims for relief in state court.

The main issue is that CU requires by contract that their authorized coin dealers can not submit doctored coins. The big problem is that CU/PCGS obviously has a problem detecting these unethical coin repairs and these doctored coins seem to show up their unscrupulous alterations over time and as a result CU/PCGS has to buy these coins back. Here's the link to the when the suit was filed:

http://www.coinlink.com/News/counter...universe-pcgs/

The sad thing is that after the suit went away, collectors and investors showed no concern of this massive problem and carried on with business as usual.

Good info Dan, I think there is a bit of irrational exuberance going on there.

That's certainly possible, but an uninformed collector probably wouldn't be sending the coin for grading even now.

One thng I did think of though....

The ANACS certs before slabbing were similar to the stamp certs, and it was a matter of trust between the buyer and seller as the cert was basically just a COA with a picture. Some dealers would get a coin certed as MS 60 - basically a coing that hasn't been used but isn't all that nice, and swap one with very slight wear. That wasn't usually something you could tell from the small picture on the certificate. Before prices got really crazy the honor system usually worked few dealers would chance several years of legit business for a few dollars here and there. (The guy I know took back a coin that was altered after something like 10-20 years)

But once a few companies started pushing certain coins as investments and a difference between having one small nick or 5 was thousands slabbing to prevent swaps became necessary.

And the skills of the alterers have obviously kept up with the graders.