Rob

You often find that there is a rare moneyer for a common mint, or a common moneyer at that mint who is rare for a particular issue. That requires a lot of reading and data collection. Single moneyer mints are invariably at least scarce. Roughly 50 % of the Saxon coinage comes from the 5 main mints of London, York, Canterbury, Lincoln and Winchester.

Will do. Not sure why the email bounced, maybe the local area was having remedial work done. Can't be a full inbox because there are 7273 messages in it - that's neither a power of two, nor a very round number. Admin: Is there any way for the size of the mailbox to be increased? It's just that I have had more than 50 interesting conversations that I wanted to keep, but haven't the time or patience to copy, paste, name and file accordingly under the relevant heading.

Less so than mints. Moneyers are one level up in specialisation. If you think in terms of one of..... each reign, then each type, then each mint, then each moneyer, then each die. By the time you have reached the last level, you should be reassuringly on top of your subject (and probably living in splendid isolation)

Looking at the list, Goda is shown, but is probably the same person as God and Oda. Depending on the consistency of spelling and literacy levels of inner city London in the 10th-11th century, there may be more duplication. I haven't looked too hard, but the above stood out.

And the next page. It doesn't break them down into issues that individuals struck. There may be one that has turned up since 1992.

Taken from the last edition of North

I will leave counting the number on eBay to someone else. You can always rely on the British public.......... Mine will have to stay as it is considerably more interesting than the 2007 Britannia reverse or the 2012 silver 5 ounce lump of bullion, though to its credit, Pegasus isn't bad.

wow. I thought siding with sellers was against eBay policy? Or have they had a change of heart?

I know! And that one has a Smurfette on it! Admittedly one engraved by WJ Taylor, who I believe was associated with Heaton for a while, before unsuccessfully trying to make his fortune in Australia. Taylor returned from Australia before 1862, as 1862 was the year he is generally thought to have commenced his Soho restrikes.

In the case of Spink, I think they use the catalogue description, which, although potentially liable to enhancement, is far more likely to represent reality than any eBay summary

A quadruped of the highest order.

3 examples coming up a total of 5 times in the past 60 years in the case of the Oxford 2/6d.

He's havin' a larf. 'nice olde copper jeton' shurely shome mishtake.

Saying they are only a guide has been said many times before, but people still get hung up on the variable and frequently inapplicable values quoted. So, not of the slightest use is not too far OTT. Maybe I should retract that a little, as auction lots use the reference numbers in the description. It doesn't make the price any more accurate though.

10-12 seems a bit low for an overall total though. That's all that have come to light on this forum. I have one which I bought from Mark Ray (Collectors' World) in Nottingham. Happened to be passing, called in the shop and took a random full set of 29. He had a few sets bagged up and I assume that all of the batch he bought at the time from the mint were likely to be the same variety. These were bought from the mint on release, so perhaps the first run of acquatics 50ps was the error. I'm sure that most full sets bought at the time of release won't have been checked.

An example for consideration. Yesterday I bought an Oxford 2/6d, so making a timely comparison in various references I see the following - CMV (2013) has Oxford halfcrown from £325 Fine, £750 VF; Spink (2014) doesn't have the variety fully listed, but based on the obverse which is and what I interpret as the correct ref for the reverse, Fine is £250, VF £750. CCGB doesn't go this far back, and CYB I haven't got. So CMV lists a catch all figure starting at 325 but this number has to cover over 100 die combinations, some of which are very common, others are unique. Spink have 25 different references for Oxford halfcrowns which is considerably better, but still don't have the reverse description for the coin I purchased included in the list. I paid twice book on the basis that an example sold for roughly the same in Adams (2005) and in any case I only have a list of 5 coins from two die combinations in total to choose from once the BM's coin is taken off the list. The VF price has only gone up from £675 in 2006 to £750 today for the same ref no. The only conclusion to be drawn is that no reference is of the slightest use. Do your own spadework if you need a number.

All of which suggests to me that we are travelling more in hope than conviction, given everyone is putting their own slant on why it should be impossible to accurately price anything. As you were chaps. Live and die by your own actions, or more of the first and less of the second if you can make the effort to come up to speed in your chosen field.

The hard to find things nearly always sell over book. It only takes two people with the same degree of knowledge.

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!