Rob

I think we will have to agree that there is no simple answer to any of the prices quoted. I don't know how CCGB, CMV or CYB compile their data, other than I suspect, to take a rough average of the data supplied by the people who collect the numbers. Where do people do their sampling? Do they all adjust a bit based on gut feeling? I don't think any of them have an axe to grind as collectors are not forced to buy at any price. It has been quite obvious that alongside the highly priced pieces are a considerable number of bargains in coins of average quality. The market focusses on different qualities that vary with time, but only a crystal ball could forecast these in advance. As most collections are made up of coins of average quality, a little patience when buying will not result in a huge uplift in prices paid as long as you don't expect to always find the rarity at the price of the common variety instantly. (Instant gratification) Spink will almost certainly exclude data from eBay, whereas I think it likely that there will be some contribution from this source for the others. eBay can distort figures lower for the higher value items, just as the prestige sales can do the opposite. In the case of common or low value items, eBay is probably closer to the mark - if you are prepared to risk bidding on the basis of dodgy photos and descriptions and assume that most people will underbid on principle. As a source, eBay is too inconsistent in prices obtained to give a good indication of where the market is at for any item in a given grade. A bigger influence than the guides on pricing is the collector. Most people have a list of things they need, resulting in a tendency to pay a bit more when the opportunity arises to fill a gap. The longer the gap has existed, the more inclined they will be to pay more. The specialist collector will exacerbate this price differential, seeing a die combination that is known to be rare for example is likely to result in a willingness to push the boat out. Another factor in recent times is the volume of money held in non-interest bearing accounts that has been desperately searching for a new home. Since the banks went tits up 5 years ago, there has been a marked increase across the board in the prices paid for any asset as people scramble to diversify. At the end of the day, price guides are no more or less dysfunctional than coin collectors, TPGs, vendors of the finest tulips or any of the Ponzi schemes that have existed. Know your area and work within your budget relative to your aims. Knowledge is the key to pricing.

It's just a case of working out what the prices should be for rarities that's the problem. You can easily take an average of common things because everyone is familiar with them and demand is quite easily satisfied. With rarer coins you are always going to operate at a premium to an uncompetitive price because collectors are, well..... competitive beasts. I think that as a rule, all the guides keep the prices of common things high because they are omnipresent, and people want to maximise their return on something that is essentially easy to obtain. A somewhat greyer area is that of prices determined by desirability. This is amply played out by the penny collectors, yet groats (which also have quite a good following) can be bought for a fraction of the price paid for a 'slim 3' 1863. I know this is only one example, but at the base level things are reasonably balanced where a few hundred will buy a good quality common groat or a nice common bun head penny. The problems come when you have virtually unobtainable (as in the case of the York groat above) or historically desirable pieces. Richard III groats are not rare, though usually touted as such. The usual figure of £1500-3000 is based entirely on demand for the name. The late Henry VI groats are much more difficult to find in both good condition and in total, yet fail to match the former in price by a wide margin.

Booking at roughly 10x the common ones, I suspect this is one of those where the number has been plucked out of the air.

Several questions need to be taken into consideration when pricing rarities. Where did the coin come from? If purchased privately, then there will have been no sales data to back up the CofE price and may additionally reflect the cost to them in acquiring a coin for which there have not been any recent transactions. As I understand it, there is a furious amount of number crunching done after the September sales, which are then entered into the database to provide a revised figure for December publication. In the case of the York groat, Jon purchased it out of the Brady sale for a hammer price of £2300 (£2852). For it to return to the market with a price tag of £3500 is not unreasonable. In the case of very rare pieces, it is always a case of how much someone is willing to pay, rather than adhering to the book. They tend to work on the principle of ignoring the prices for those where people with bottomless pockets slug it out to the bitter end, as they tend not to be indicative of prices in general. You can however find that rare pieces will outdo the book as a matter of course, however low the price is. When discussing the revised prices for the groats post Brady, it was clear that some of the sections which had not been internally revised for a while needed doing so. In the current market, anything decent will do well, anything decent and rare even better. This comes into the latter category. With so little data available, and as described, known from only 15 examples, I think it is a case of the downward adjustment in the price being too severe. The Brady sale had its fair share of chased coins which meant inflated prices over and above the expected price. To compare with another repriced example, I bought one coin in Brady - the Rawlins signed 1644 F2 groat. As far as I am aware there are only two examples - one in the BM and mine. The Oxford groats were all priced around 700 give or take a bit prior to Brady. Mine is now at £1350, but I paid just over £1750 for a coin that's a bit less than VF and it appears to be the only one. Is the book too low? Should prices be double? Clearly I wouldn't sell the coin for around the £1K mark which would be what the book suggests I do. Any relisting would have to be around a minimum of £2500-3000. What cannot be excluded is the ability of the market to produce multiple examples of rarities once a high price is achieved in a sale. Suddenly the unique coin is clearly less than unique, which means it is always better to err on the side of caution. Consequently, in the knowledge that I would have gone a bit higher than I did, the price was set at £1350. In the current climate it is obvious when a coin is being chased. The difficult/impossible bit is to come up with a number which satisfies all trains of thought, as deciding the uncompetitive price requires you to assume that the people who buy the coin don't particularly want it. Sort that one out!! The number crunching is sub-contracted to some extent.

I thought that most of the oil is off the Shetlands and the previous time independence came up the Shetlands said they would stay with the English. Hmm. Shades of Alaska? Anyway, if the Scots raised the price of Brent crude it wouldn't make a lot of difference at the pumps given how much Dick Turpin George Osborne takes in fuel duty. Quite right. The extortionate quantities of money taken by all governments just so they can buy votes and help their mates is excessive. Reduce the tax take and reduce the handouts, irrespective of the direction they are heading. Most vibrant economies are so because of less, not more government intervention which is invariably skewed with a view to political gain. Remove the bias and we could all do better.

Given we are all aware of the impracticalities of a single price in a guide representing a series across the board, surely the best advice has to be research your own little area. If prices have increased by 10% over the past year, add on 10% to what you would have paid a year ago. Whether you use a price guide or not is irrelevant. Buyers presumably will quote the lower ref. value, whilst sellers the highest figure. Somewhere in the middle it should be possible to agree, but any two transactions are still likely to differ. If you all want fixed prices for a given coin, the TPGs already offer this service by pricing a specific grade at $xxx, otherwise known as roughly twice a raw graded coin's value. All the debate in the world won't change the fact that unless individual varieties are specifically priced, any number has to be plucked out of the air. Just accept it and move on. All this is just un-necessary holding hands.

That reminds me of a brief time back in the 80's I spent in Texas. The guy I was working with took me for a drive through a predominantly Mexican area. Row upon row of poor, run down housing stock but with latest Cadillac or Buick parked proudly outside! I guess we all choose our priorities. Some might spend more on coins than their house!

The main difference is still the huge houses in gated estates. We have a handful up here in the more select areas, but nothing like the number down south. Gated houses are common enough, replete with the obligatory expensive motor or three outside. Mind you, not having a swimming pool could be a blessing in disguise given the weather. One bizarre feature which you probably don't see so much is the terraced house with 100Ks worth of cars sticking out into the road from the postage stamp area in front of the house. Not infrequently the cars cost more than the property is worth.

It's the concentration of high value housing and the steep increase in their prices that is the main difference between the south-east and the rest of the country. Relatively small LTV mortgages on the primary home is why so many can have a second home in Dorset or even down to Devon and Cornwall. Whilst there are clearly many wealthy people living in the south-east, I often wonder what percentage of total wealth is tied up in property, the amount of gearing per household and how much free capital in physical £sd is available, as the latter will buy non-housing items at much the same price across the country. A stark example of the difference came out a couple days ago when a couple announced they were retiring and selling the business up here and their house and moving near Henley to be close to their family. £190K for the house here, over 1/2 a million for a smaller bungalow down south, albeit in a fairly desirable area.

Why would a counterfeit be overstruck in the first place? It could be dated 2771 for all it matters. It doesn't have to be overstruck as it could just be a spot of die disintegration around the digit. I don't have any examples of a 2 over 1 which you might expect given they aren't particularly rare in good grade. Better example from the same die required.

Unfortunately I was unable to find many ex members of the BNS living in Elmbridge. It appears that most of my cast-offs have come from Kensington and Mayfair .............................or Yorkshire.

With all that money taken in tax down south, it is little wonder that us oop north can't afford proper coins. Always having to make do with other people's cast-offs.

You must be mistaken. JEB on truncation is the rare one. Ebay only has rare things, ipso facto it is as described.

Can someone please help me get my head around the description. 'The error 1895 is reversed' implies it used to be an 1895 G4 coin, or what? The year in the description box is 1826 which may be ok (can't make out the image), Certainly one in a million as you couldn't arrive at a listing like this if you tried. Was 1826 'corrected' to 1895 - who knows? I will leave this to the man who has the 1952 Elizabeth II brass 3d as the two coins will complement each other.

The wide variety of prices paid on ebay, at coin fairs and at auction makes pricing anything quite difficult. Combine that with collector inertia to price changes (because we all remember such and such selling for x pounds) and arriving at a fair price is extremely difficult. As a seller, you can always get rid of something by pricing it low, but whether this a fair market price is a moot point. I think the moral of the story is not to get too hung up on any price given and if you like the coin, buy it, within reason.

The vacuous wittering of arts/tv/film/media critics such as the eponymous Mr Commode, whose gushing output is akin to one of Thomas Crapper's patented finest.

Ditto to the first two sentences.

I agree. The Labour Government may have 'caused' the deficit by spending billions to bail out the banks, but the alternative would have been total economic collapse, worse even than Greece. Unfortunately I've read that the banks are back to some of their worst excesses, and haven't learned a thing it seems except how to make irresponsible profits. One thing that's certain is that only a small minority of people have the ability to remember more than a week or two ago. Sure the last government borrowed lots of money to bail out the banks, but that was because they had already p'd up any reserves against the wall buying votes with uncosted and unsustainable benefits. Banks making excessive profits now? Maybe, but that is a politicised statement. Payday loans are slated for their high rates of interest, but the admin costs of a £5 loan are no different to a £500 loan. Borrow £5 for a few days and it is little wonder that the APR is so large. Collecting the money is expensive too, but has to be done if the case is to be made for a business model. The economy is stumbling along on the back of consumer spending funded by borrowing now that banks aren't so restrictive in their lending. Why are people borrowing at the first opportunity when interest rates increases are a one way bet? Making a profit is not irresponsible. Shops that make a profit due to bumper sales are not considered irresponsible. Apple makes huge profits because it sells something the public wants. So do banks. They pander to the instant gratification mob, such as many purchasers of 'must have items'. Ed Balls is still shadow Chancellor, despite having been GB's right hand man for a significant period of the economic irresponsibility pursued by the last government and in which he presumably had a say. Milliband can't remember that far back, so carries on, regarding him as the right tool for the job. Right tool? Yes, yes or no depending on how you read it. Don't forget that as Chancellor, he would be responsible for wasting far more money than anyone else, whilst at the same time increasing the indebtedness of all the taxpayers in this country. Virtually no politician thinks beyond how to get elected next time round. Osborne, Balls, Cameron, Milliband, the names are irrelevant. Solve that one and the country might be in a better position.

That will be a mistake I believe, from creating this listing from other listings. Some of his other offerings also have the same 'additional information'. Ok, fair enough. I haven't the patience to trawl through ebay listings - in fact, this and the eBay laughs thread are just about the only time I bother viewing.

I'm sorry Rob I don't agree with that. The financial crisis got dramatically worse when the American government allowed Lehman Bros. to go to the wall. Allowing Northern Rock to go tits up would have put even greater pressure on the UK economy and would certainly have meant that the cost of bailing out the other miscreants would have increased exponentially, perhaps to the point that it became unviable. This would have then led to the UK going cap in hand to the IMF and conceivably to global economic meltdown. Don't forget it was a very close-run thing and the odd percentage point here or there could have tipped the whole thing over the edge.Somewhere along the line it is necessary for sufficient numbers of people to get hurt in order for the sytemic failures to be drummed home. Whether it was Northern Rock or some other institution is not material I feel we live in a society where nobody takes responsibility for their own actions. In the case of the banks it should also include borrowers who for some reason seem to think that the same economic conditions will prevail for the length of their mortgage. Why should they when economies have always been cyclical? Why were banks offering loans of over 100%, and why were people taking them out. If you don't have to put your own equity into a purchase, it isn't yours, you don't have a stake, so may not care? Would anyone here lend their own money on that basis? I think not. Couple that with the ridiculous arrangement we have now where you can bankrupt yourself and be completely rehabilitated after 12 months is crass and a recipe for default. Moral compasses need to be aligned on all fronts. If you can't afford it with some level of safety margin, don't borrow. People feel the need to get a new car (see where all the PPI payouts have been spent), why? I was 33 before I bought my first new car - but not before I had paid off my mortgage which I always viewed as a 'Sword of Damocles' hanging over me. Prior to that I lived on cheap second-hand vehicles. A car is a depreciating liability, not a status symbol.

If you do a lengthy scroll to the bottom of the page, the following information is provided for 'the medal'. If the florin has an inscribed edge as written, that is seriously naughty given there is no mention of it in the normal listing. I guess the inability to edit the original listing is just eBay's way of helping underhand behaviour. Additional information re the medal: Edge of the medal reads as follows: 05853 CPL A.E. HUNTER A.O.C

Welcome to the forum Lee. I started by collecting everythimg and anything I could lay my hands on when young, migrated to a collection of shillings and halfpennies when I finally found a focus, but after finding it difficult to fill some of the gaps in suitable grade plus the monotony of date runs, decided to go for maximum diversity within the British series from Celtic through to the modern day. By avoiding duplication of design wherever possible, it means that I have effectively become a type collector. However, old habits die hard, so I still have mini collections of George III pattern halfpennies and Freeman based halfpennies where I try to get an example of each Peck type and obverse/reverse examples respectively. Plus I often find myself buying an example of a reign/type that although strictly duplicating a design, is too attractive to ignore.

Northern Rock should have been allowed to go to the wall. For people to cry that their life savings were in danger should be a salutory lesson in the art of not putting all eggs in one basket. For those who put more than the compensation limit on deposit - you took a gamble and by rights should have lost.

The Nicholson images show a reasonable comparison between what is considered a specimen and that which is a proof. Nicholson 400 is a Heaton 'proof', but the fields are misty relative to the RM proofs because they are not so finely polished. Mine is definitely better than N's, but still not quite as good as the RM pieces.