Ep.7 - Grading Rare Coins as a Professional - with Owen Seymour
Welcome back to the CABG Coins podcast. I'm very excited today to have Owen Seymour. Owen is a former professional grader, so we're gonna be talking a lot about US coin grading today. He's also the owner operator of Seymour Rare Coins, So you might see him at the upcoming ANA World's Fair Money coming up here in Oklahoma. I forgot to ask, are you going to are you going to that?
Owen Seymour:Yes. I'm going to that.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yep. Okay. So you will actually see Owen at that at that show. I met Owen over at the ANA grading seminar, so I just attended that at the end of the last part of June. I've already talked about that in previous episodes.
Tony Gryckiewicz:It was a fantastic opportunity for me. I took an advanced grading and problem coin seminar. Owen was teaching the beginner level or entry level grading seminar. And we we had a chance to have a bunch of lunches together and catch up a little bit. And I thought this would be a fantastic episode for the podcast.
Tony Gryckiewicz:So Owen, welcome to the podcast. Why don't you go ahead and just maybe tell tell us a little bit about, like, why you first got into coins and if it was a childhood hobby of yours. Did you pick it up later on? And, how did you get into becoming a professional coin grader?
Owen Seymour:Yeah. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. I got started off in coins. It was definitely a childhood hobby.
Owen Seymour:I think my dad got me into it like like most of us. You know, it started out with, like, the old school Blue Whitman album of you know, I think I had wheat cents and Jefferson nickels, you know, and that was just filled with, like, you know, 3 and 5ยข coins from the local coin shop. And I kinda grew out of it. You know, I think I collected from probably three years old to 10 or so. I aged out of it for a bit and got back into it when I was about 13.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Okay.
Owen Seymour:And when I got into it when I was 13, I was definitely looking at it from a business angle. I've always wanted to be a business owner and was looking for avenues to explore that. And I really enjoyed coin. So I thought, well, you know, it'd certainly be great if I could participate in a business that that I could do well and professionally and personally enjoy. So I, you know, coins was one of my my first thoughts.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Mhmm.
Owen Seymour:So I I dove in head first and somehow it paid off and and worked out really well. So I I started business at 14 years old.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Oh, wow.
Owen Seymour:Yep. And and dealt for a couple years until I I graded at PCGS. Obviously, stopped dealing then and then resumed dealing last year.
Tony Gryckiewicz:So at what point did you realize you had an eye for grading? So you just mentioned you worked at PCGS, Professional Coin Grading Service, I think is what it stands for. Correct? Yep. So at what point kind of did you realize you had an eye for grading?
Tony Gryckiewicz:What was the road like that led to working for a major grading company?
Owen Seymour:Yeah. I never honestly, I don't I don't know if there was any moment in time where I was like, oh, you know, I I'm at, you know, better than average at grading. It was kinda just something that happened. Okay. And as I was a coin dealer, in my early on in my career, I didn't really go to many national shows.
Owen Seymour:So I was kind of insulated from, you know, the very top end of the hobby. I was doing like local shows and and small small coin shops in in Pennsylvania. But I wouldn't say that there was any one point where I I thought that I was, you know, better than average.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Okay. Okay. Well, you are better. But
Owen Seymour:Yeah. No. I realized that now.
Tony Gryckiewicz:This point, you're teaching courses on it. So Yeah. You're kind of the man.
Owen Seymour:And starting at PCGS, you know, it was something I always wanted to do. Even when I was, you know, 14 and first getting into business, I thought, oh my god. How cool is that? You know, there's people that like, not only they in the coin industry, you know, but you get to work alongside, you know, some of the most talented people in the world every day and and hang out and and look at phenomenal coins all day. And I dismissed it as a dream.
Owen Seymour:Yeah. But the more and more I became involved in business and continuing my career, it started to look more like a real possibility. You have to have a mentor. Yeah, points to advance your career and your knowledge base. And one of the most important mentors in my career was Steve Feltner.
Owen Seymour:A a PCGS grader now and has been, you know, for a long time since I've I knew him in, 2014. Met him. He was grading at PCGS then.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Mhmm.
Owen Seymour:And we got really close, and he taught me a lot about grading and the business. You know, I I I owe a significant part of my, career to him.
Tony Gryckiewicz:So This is a pretty serious job. I mean, for those that are that are familiar, this is a pretty pretty legit job within the industry. PCGS is is is a titan or a huge part of of, the the industry. And to be able to be a professional grader there is, you're really talking about the the the cream of the crop when it come cream of the crop when it comes to being able to recognize and identify these, the the the proper grades for the coins that PCGS is putting their their name on and the reputation behind and having go out to collectors into the market. But I actually wanna kinda back things up just a little bit because, for a lot of our views viewers out there who may be new to collecting, so what exactly is coin grading, and why does it does it matter?
Owen Seymour:So coin grading is how the hobby assigns a numerical value to a coin to indicate its condition. Mhmm. So coins are graded on a scale from one to 70. They may be precluded from having a numerical grade due to a severe problem like cleaning or damage or scratch or anything like that. So what the industry calls a straight graded coin, which is a coin that's eligible for one of those those one to 70 grades is going to be problem free.
Owen Seymour:And and coin grading is important in the industry because it it adds a layer of unbiased third party opinion. So before certification existed, you know, coins were transacted on the premises of, you know, essentially a dealer's grade and and hopefully the buyer was educated and could kinda double check it. But that wasn't always the case, and of course, still isn't today. So third party grading really helps add a layer of liquidity and trust to a transaction because you have this unbiased third party that's that's kind of stepping in and saying, you know, I'm about to pay, you know, $3,000 for this coin because it's a 65. Well, it's one thing if a coin dealer says it's a 65 and it's their own coin.
Owen Seymour:Right? They have a stake in that coin being really high. I think it means something else if an unbiased third party can come in and validate that grade as well. It it kind of helps in enhance confidence, not only for the buyer, but for the seller that you're not you're not underselling your coin. So it Yeah.
Owen Seymour:It helps both parties have confidence in a transaction.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. And so we're referring to when we say 65, we're referring to a mid state 65. The mid state grade started MS MS 60 or mid states level 60, and they go all the way up to mid state level 70. Essentially, a perfect coin that comes directly off of the presses at the mint, assuming there's no imperfections at all with the the with the planchet. I'm assuming that would go into MS 70.
Tony Gryckiewicz:It's basically a virtually perfect coin. Right? Because at the high end of the high end of the scale. Right? I'm assuming.
Owen Seymour:Yep. Yep. 7 would be perfect coin. It can't have any any mid made flaws like you mentioned. It would have to be a, you know, a perfect planchet with if there would have been no flaws visible to the naked eye.
Owen Seymour:Maybe if you have a 40 x loop and you might be able to find one. Yeah. But but
Tony Gryckiewicz:So if you're
Owen Seymour:on a 70, but it it should be a coin that's that's flawless to the naked eye and even under light magnification, so it'd still be flawless.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Gotcha. So yeah. So a little pro tip if you're watching late night TV and you see some infomercial selling MS 100 coins saying that these are a lot better and, like, the real per there's no such thing as as unfortunately as as Mid State 100. It only goes up to 70 folks. And so from your opinion, what makes, coin grading so challenging?
Tony Gryckiewicz:I mean, there's only, some people who do this professionally. There's a lot of dealers who probably maybe could do it professionally that have chosen choose instead to to run a business dealing in coins. But it's not something that the average person just, you know, picks up and, you know, I and to put this in perspective, like the ANA grading seminar, I've been to three times. In each of those cases, I believe the seminar is four full days and those days are, I don't know, roughly six to eight hours. I can't remember what the total number of hours is in classroom.
Tony Gryckiewicz:But if you add all that up, we're talking about a lot of hours, sixty some odd, seventy hours worth of of instruction just to to learn how to do this kind of properly, let alone, you know, go on to become a professional at it. So from your perspective, what makes it so challenging to do grading? What kinds of things do even the experienced graders oh, I'm sorry. What kinds of things do experienced graders see that the average person, let's say, misses?
Owen Seymour:Yeah. It's an interesting question. I think there's two main things that make coin grading very challenging at a professional level. One is just and and I don't really know how to explain this, but some people, I think, just see coins differently than others. There's some people who you could attempt to teach grading to for, you know, you know, a full four year, you know, class, and they might not comprehend it by the end of it, not professional.
Owen Seymour:Yeah. And there's other people who can pick it up really quick and exercise what they learn, you know, very quickly. So there's some people who who kind of have the trait and those who don't. And then on top of that, to become a fluent professional grader, you have to have such a vast pool of knowledge that you're constantly drawing from. You you have to understand what the luster of an 1882 s Morgan should look like, versus what should a '19 $0.01 Morgan look like?
Owen Seymour:Those are two coins that we'll we'll cover here today. Yeah, they're gonna have very different looks to them. You have to understand all this. So, you know, just just understanding all the information that you need to know to be a fluent professional grader. Yeah.
Owen Seymour:It's very challenging. I mean, requires an impressive memory. Yeah. It's a lot of information for sure.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. So because you guys are experts and and able to grade pretty much every series, right? Every series of US coins. Correct?
Owen Seymour:Yeah. I mean, PCGS, there's there's certainly people who have their specialties right. You know, I I I worked with, you know, people who were maybe very good at early American copper colonials. But that doesn't mean that I, you know, didn't grade those coins, you have to grade everything before you at PCGS. It's not like if there's an order of, of early American coins that it goes to some specialist, everybody has to be a specialist.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So to say a little more about that, I guess where I was, I was leaning or trying to explain a little bit would be that there's a lot of different denominations and within those denominations, there's all sorts of different years as well as different types and varieties, you know, of those, of all those types. And some series, some particular years, like Owen just mentioned, the eighth and a two s is a classic example where these coins all typically have a lot of booming luster and shine to the coin.
Tony Gryckiewicz:So they are you know, the coins we we use a vernacular like they come a certain way, like they usually come really lustery and bright and so forth. So having that knowledge about what to expect in a particular coin, a particular date, in a particular of a of a series when it comes to your in front of you is this incredible, you know, vast, like, library of knowledge that these guys have acquired, not just on one series, but, know, a lot of different American series. Gives you guys a perspective about there, about how talented a lot of these a lot of these folks are, you know, that, that, that do this and that do this, you know, professionally. So, yeah, so, before we get into looking at some of the examples, which I'm excited about that we have, I think we have a total of five side by side comparisons to do. I wanna ask you the question, which is a lot of people think about coin grading.
Tony Gryckiewicz:You always think about the guy my loop's back behind. I'm not gonna grab it, but the guy that's looking through the loop, you know, looking at the coin that everyone's think yeah. That's kind of what you think about. How important from your perspective is lighting, you know, magnification, and even just like the mindset that you're bringing to the coin when you when you grade?
Owen Seymour:Yeah. Lighting is certainly important. You should be in a a room with just one light source. Right? You shouldn't have a bunch of open windows with a bunch of sunlight shining through that that will is not a a a good way to view coins.
Owen Seymour:You should have a single light source. I I agree with an incandescent light bulb. I think it's a 75 watt incandescent bulb.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Okay.
Owen Seymour:And I keep the lamp like you wanna have the lamp too close to your head. If the lamp is far away or you think the lamp might be far away, it's too far away. It should be closer to you than you think it should be.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Interesting. Okay.
Owen Seymour:I think when I graded it when I would grade it PCGS, I mean, I would have my lamp just a matter of inches away from my head. So lighting is definitely important. And it's important to look at the coins the way that the professional is going to look at them. You wanna have a consistent, you know, viewing process from your own to the professional graders. If you're sending coins in for grading, you want to see them like the graders are going to see them.
Owen Seymour:Graders grade with, you know, single source lighting, incandescent bulbs, 75 watt or 100 watts, I think most most graders use. Magnification is also important. I think every year at summer seminar, instruct one of the grading courses there. And I I think five times a day, every day, I have to tell people to put down their loops. And and Kyle, my co instructor, and I are always telling people, if you're using a 10 x loop and you're grading every coin through a loop, the marks are 10 x larger than
Tony Gryckiewicz:they actually are.
Owen Seymour:Yeah. So it's one thing if you need magnification to see. Right? If if you're if you don't have great up close vision and you need to use like magnification just to get a better look at a coin fine, that's you know, do what you need to do. But if your vision is adequate enough that you can comfortably grade without a loop, you really should not be using a loop unless you see something that you feel like you need to investigate.
Owen Seymour:Yeah. So if I'm grading, you know, even a small coin like a seated quarter, if I don't see anything in it that I feel like needs to be looped, I don't loop it. Now if I'm looking at it, and, you know, I flip over the reverse and, hey, there's, an interesting looking scratch over here. I'm not sure. Is that graffiti?
Owen Seymour:Is that tooling? That's when you take out a loop to investigate a problem or to authenticate a coin. Yeah. But but coins are collected and transacted and enjoyed at, you know, an arm's length. And Yeah.
Owen Seymour:That's how they should be graded as well.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. And you just mentioned something that I wanna touch on real briefly, and that is about authentication. These these services, such as PCGS, they do coin grading to assess what the what the numerical grade of the coin should be, but they also do authentication because there's a lot of coins where the value of the coin is immensely more. I mean, incredibly more if the coin has an s, you know, San Francisco mint mark on it or it's without any any mint mark or, you know, there's a a variety of things that might cause a particular coin, to be worth a little bit worth a whole lot more. So fakes are fakes exist, and they're in the marketplace, and coins are sent to these guys in order to have the final say or the authoritative, word on whether this coin is, authentic, or or not.
Tony Gryckiewicz:And, something that Owen mentioned really early, he mentioned about problem free coins. And I just wanna talk I'd mention real briefly what what we mean by that. So there are some cases that make a coin ungradable from a numerical perspective. One example I'll will just pile off the top of my head would be a coin that's been very harshly scrubbed and cleaned where, a lot of the detail has been taken down and the coin is no longer really gradable. It's so far from what it was when it was created.
Tony Gryckiewicz:That coin is has, like, altered surfaces and is not gradable. A coin that is bent, a coin that has a hole in it, a coin that has, you know, some kind of repair job or something that's happened to the coin. These are things that are are we call, quote, unquote, problems that prevent a coin from being able to be assessed on this numerical 70 numerical scale. What are what are the other ones I might have missed there that would make a coin just just simply not gradable?
Owen Seymour:Alright. I mean, there's a lot of issues. Right? There's all forms of damage, which can cover a lot of things. That could be a hole in the coin, which is, you know, a literal piece of missing metal.
Owen Seymour:There could be a filled hole, which the industry calls plugged. There's tooling and graving, smooth surfaces, artificial toning. You know, I I think at PCGS, you know, we we had 20 or 30 more different problems that we could call a coin, and then there was often subsets of each of those. So there was many dozen different different no grades. I see.
Owen Seymour:Coins.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Cool. Alright. Without any further ado, let's pop into our examples here. Okay. So this is the first coin that we have for discussing a little bit about about specifics.
Tony Gryckiewicz:We got a little bit of a comparison of Morgan dollars here. What we have in is a nineteen o one, Morgan dollar in mid state '62. This is a particular year that I know the the Philadelphia $19.00 $1 in Mid State is a very valuable, difficult rare coin to to find. So, yeah. So tell us a little bit about how we'd approach this, and this is an MS 62 grade.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Go for it.
Owen Seymour:Yeah. So just to preface it, I selected a I I think we have ten ten comparisons or five comparisons. Right? Five sets
Tony Gryckiewicz:of 10 coins. 10.
Owen Seymour:Yep. And I selected those with the intent to demonstrate. I think a lot of people who are beginning to to collect and even deal, they fail to understand the components of, you know, what what attributes are appropriate for each grade.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Mhmm.
Owen Seymour:And I think a lot of people severely overestimate how much outright surface preservation, meaning abrasions or lack thereof contribute to a coin's grade.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Mhmm.
Owen Seymour:So with this coin here, this $19.00 1 Morgan dollar, I think that a lot of people look at this coin and say, well, it's not really that abraded and it you know, it's definitely uncirculated. I don't see any signs of wear. I think a lot of people would be quick to call this coin, you know, a 63 or a 64 or perhaps even higher.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. The cheek is pretty nice.
Owen Seymour:Yeah. That's making a grave mistake in in waiting that in in waiting abrasions too much.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Mhmm. Mhmm.
Owen Seymour:So when you look at this coin, it's it's definitely clean. Right? I mean, it has that positive attribute. There's no giant reed marks or anything, but there has a lot of negative attributes as well. Okay.
Owen Seymour:The luster is just kind of subdued. It doesn't really have a whole lot of life. It's kind of poorly struck at the peripheries here, like, where your cursor is going. We can see a lot of weakness at the lettering. I mean, some of those stars are almost gone.
Owen Seymour:Yeah. So it's a nice I mean, for a nineteen o one Philadelphia Morgan, this is a superb example, but it it it doesn't make the cut for a higher grade like 64 or 65. It's just too tired and dull looking.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is a coin that I on the surface immediately, I would think or I should say on the surface, what I mean is, kind of immediately, my first gut reaction would be more in a 64 range. Because again, I I mean, the luster certainly, I I don't know, but it's a lack of abrasions.
Tony Gryckiewicz:I think of like, just like you said, I mean, when I first approached this, I would just think about like counting up the number of marks that I see. And if there's too many marks, then it's gotta be lower. If it's less marks, then it could maybe be be a 65. It's kind of fairly, you know, fairly fairly clean cheek, but at the same time, I mean, the the lack of life in this coin, like you mentioned, so this is what keeps this thing all the down at 62. It doesn't Yeah.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Doesn't qualify for, like, even a 63.
Owen Seymour:I mean, if you told me this coin is a 63, I would believe you. Okay. But I I I definitely can't see any higher than that because of how the how the luster is dull. I want to reemphasize again. I don't think that this is a bad coin.
Owen Seymour:This is a wonderful $19.00 1 Morgan. These these dates on extremely high rate of attrition. You know, these were not saved in some massive quantity and tucked away in bank vaults like a lot of other dates and morgans. These things were workhorses of commerce. So to have one like this that is truly uncirculated with decent luster is a really great example of the date.
Owen Seymour:So with that said, there's still a lot of room to be better than this.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. So remember from our previous podcast folks that we talked about the history of the Morgan dollar and that a lot of them were minted and then immediately went into treasury vaults in the bat in in the thousands, and they sat in treasury vaults for for many years. A number of different issues had that occur. Some issues, though, went into the population, went into the economy to to circulate. And the nineteen o one Philadelphia, I believe, was one of those that went into circulation.
Tony Gryckiewicz:And because of that, it's so hard to find any mint state examples. They all got changed around and banged around in commerce, in people's pockets, and and so forth. So when you find minced examples, you know, they're they're pretty rare. So we compare that then to now this is an example of a coin that I think almost all a lot of these just sat in treasury vaults. Right?
Tony Gryckiewicz:So they Yeah. Yeah. Made almost perfectly.
Owen Seymour:Were saved in great quantity and and were in in the treasury hoards extensively.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. Now this is a MS 65.
Owen Seymour:Yep. And I I think this is a a good comparison to the previous coin because even on this coin, we do see abrasions there on the cheek. At at the high points, you you can see that there is some action going on. This is not a flawless coin.
Tony Gryckiewicz:And I
Owen Seymour:think unlike the other coin, a lot of people might be quick to undergrade this coin. They might see the abrasions on the cheek and say, oh, yeah, people think m s 60 5 is a perfect cheeks. It's gotta be a 63 or a 64. Look at everything else about this coin. To say that this oh, it's beat up.
Owen Seymour:It's a four is ridiculous. The luster is just preposterously nice. The stripe is immaculate. You know, frosty devices, smooth field. This is like everything you want in a Morgan.
Owen Seymour:Yeah. So and if we could compare it, would you mind sliding back to the prior? Sure. Look at the last year of this.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Sure.
Owen Seymour:And I wouldn't say the 82 s is all that much more abraded. You know, this coin is definitely more abraded than the 82 s, but not terribly so. Yeah. Yeah. So looking at the luster diamond, it's just two totally different coins.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. Absolutely. This
Owen Seymour:is an example where where luster makes a really meaningful contribution to the the numerical grade value of this coin.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. And and Owen just used the term frostiness to describe the devices. So a little definition thing for you guys real quick. The devices are gonna be basically Miss Liberty here. The the the the the raised portion that's in the center of the coin that is the the the focal, I don't know what you wanna call it, the the the design features of the of the coin that are raised up.
Tony Gryckiewicz:This is what's referred to as the as the devices. The elements here that are in front of the Miss Liberty's face as well as back to kind of the flat area is what's known as a as the fields. So the frosty devices are this kind of I mean, what kind of what it sounds like by zooming here, there's a certain level of, you know, like snowy ice creamy kind of frosty whatever that's on, the surface of of this face and that's, you know, it's a term you'll hear quite a bit in terms of, you know, frost. Luster is really difficult to describe using just a picture, but you can see a huge difference between this coin and the dullness. Okay.
Tony Gryckiewicz:That's that's obvious that there's a lot of dullness here compared to this coin, which, I mean, you you you can't even hide the the the the light that's being reflected, by the fact that it's only two dimensional. You know, you have light beams that you can see here that are kinda making across. This coin would twirl when you would spin it in light, and we call that a cartwheel or a luster or or a luster that's kinda twirling around the coin. I don't know. Is there a better definition of luster aside from, like, how light kinda reflects off this off the surface?
Owen Seymour:I think you described it well. Like you mentioned, it's it's hard to to exactly interpret and understand the luster from from an image. Right? It's more important to see a video or especially the coin in hand is best. Yeah.
Owen Seymour:Yeah. Looking at this coin, those, areas that are brighter, in the left obverse field and right obverse field, if you were to turn this coin in hand, those things would travel across this coin like the spokes of a wheel. Perfect. It would have a really beautiful striking appearance in hand. Yeah.
Owen Seymour:This is the kind of coin if you were walking by a dealer showcase. I don't know that that $19.00 1 would stand out on a quick walk by. Whereas No. If the 82 s was in a showcase and you walked by it, I mean, this coin's gonna stand out. You're gonna see thing from 10 feet away dazzling in a showcase.
Owen Seymour:And this is a really beautiful coin, and and a lot of that is because of how pleasant the luster is.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. Yeah. I'll just mention this, throw this out there just for the sake of completeness because, you know, we're just talking about these coins on a technical we're talking about these coins, in the through the perspective or through the lens about coin grading and a point about the the appearance of the coin and so forth. That's not to say that this coin, this nineteen o one, Philadelphia is in some way kinda not as, important or as valuable or or whatever as as this coin. The $18.82 s is an extremely common coin.
Tony Gryckiewicz:So while I might walk by display cases of coins and this coin might jump out at me in terms of the the luster of this of of it, from a from a coin dealing and value perspective, seeing it at $19.00 1 mint state coin is going to be, you know, my alarm bells are gonna be going off that this is an important coin from a collecting perspective to to have. So just realize that we are discussing these coins today only really in terms of, the that these kind of these these characteristics and quality that determine numerical grades and how, you know, the the the philosophy behind, you know, coin grading.
Owen Seymour:Yeah. Just to drive your point home, this $19.00 1 here is worth many multiples more than the $18.82 s and 65 despite being a lower grade.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. I think the the I can't recall
Owen Seymour:the value off the top of my head. I would think about $2,000.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Oh, this? No. Well, PCGS grading the price guide of this is 8,000.
Owen Seymour:8,000. Wow. Holy okay. Yeah. Right.
Owen Seymour:That makes sense. I mean, I'm thinking of 60. I think even in 60, they're worth that much.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. And I bet 60, they're worth about 2,000. I yeah. I I kinda recall that.
Owen Seymour:That's impressive.
Tony Gryckiewicz:So And this coin, though
Owen Seymour:less than 65 is probably a $160 coin.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. Basically. Basically. I think $200 on a good day is what you would you would expect to to pay for for one of these. There's thousands and thousands of these these ones, folks, and not many of these at all at all.
Tony Gryckiewicz:So let's jump over to this. This is there was a there was a series where I there was a video recently where every time I saw Washington quarter, kept calling him Buffalo Nichols. I don't know what was going on in my head. But I'm not if not, it's probably one of my least favorite series. That doesn't matter here, but but I just set the stage.
Tony Gryckiewicz:I think it also a part of it comes from the fact that I find these extremely difficult to grade. It's it's nickel. It's not silver. It has different qualities and striking, know, qualities. So, yeah, this one is a this is a 1934 Denver buffalo nickel in MS '62.
Owen Seymour:Mhmm. So I showed this example to emphasize that this is a coin of the very poor strike. There's a lot of missing details. Really not much detail at all. I mean, the hair is largely flat with just separation at the most significant design elements.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. Yeah.
Owen Seymour:It's not terribly abraded. I see there's some stuff on the cheek below the eye there. I think a lot of that is unstruck planchet. So so that is when a planchet is formed. The surface of a planchet is very rough.
Owen Seymour:And when they strike that coin, if the planchette fails to meet the void of the die completely, it will leave behind some of that roughness. And that's very easy to perceive that as abrasions. And unstruck planchette is not a good thing. It does affect the grade, but not severely as severely as abrasions would. Yeah.
Owen Seymour:So this is a coin that, you know, again, it's it's pretty good in the the the abrasion department, but it lacks kind of everywhere else. The luster is, like, okay. It's so so. The strike is very poor. It's kinda got these spots going on throughout it that do not help with eye appeal.
Owen Seymour:Yeah. So this isn't a terrible coin. I think it's definitely a a decent uncirculated example of this date in Midmark, but it's just not spectacular. It's not a gem quality coin.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. Yeah. I I agree. Yeah. From an I IPO perspective immediately, I I don't like it.
Tony Gryckiewicz:The the like you said, the strikes that we're talking about is when the dies struck the planchette. So the planchette is gonna be the rough, raw metal disc essentially that's put into the press, that are struck by dyes to create the coin. That is referred to as the planchette. And as Owen mentioned, they start off to have a fairly kind of rough finish or surface. They're they're they're not, you know, flat and and and shiny and so forth, at least on business strikes.
Tony Gryckiewicz:And so when the metal does not completely fill up the dye, as Owen mentioned, you still have this roughness there and, you can mistake that. This is one of the common misperceptions, I guess, for beginners or whatever, is that you can mistake this as being dings or hits or whatever, and this is instead just raw planchet that wasn't struck. But in general, I mean, like, as Owen mentioned, there's just a lot of weakness, or I guess, incompleteness of the the the strike on the coin when when it was made. So the eye appeal is, opinion, just pretty really, really, really bad. So compare this one to this guy.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Immediately, I love the eye appeal of this coin a whole lot more. This is the same this is the same coin, the same series, 1934 Denver Buffalo nickel, but this one is in Mid State 66.
Owen Seymour:Mhmm. Yeah. And this coin still doesn't have a spectacular strike. If you were to look at, like, a date, like, a 1938 d Buffalo nickel, they're usually gonna come really well struck. K.
Owen Seymour:The the best 30 the best struck 34 d nickel probably still isn't as good as a poorly struck 38 d. So you Okay. These are the kind of things you have to know as a professional grader. You have to understand how to interpret these coins. So as far as 34 d's go, this strike here is immaculate.
Owen Seymour:We can definitely see some unstruck planchet at the top of the hair there or just above the braid rather, kind of in the center of the coin. You can see this little roughness going on. That those are not abrasions. It's just unstruck planchet. Okay.
Owen Seymour:This coin has a lot of good traits. Right? It has outstanding luster, kind of some nice attractive golden kind of purple color throughout.
Tony Gryckiewicz:This is
Owen Seymour:what you wanna see on a 34 d nickel.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Would this also be on planchet
Owen Seymour:three years? Definitely. That that's that's what I was talking about earlier. Oh, okay. Planchet.
Owen Seymour:That's a a really good example of an unstruct planchet. Yeah. So that's definitely a great detracting feature. But I think on this coin, you know, if that didn't have that, I don't think that it would be a 67. If it had a bunch more of it, maybe it would be 65.
Owen Seymour:But on this coin, I'm kind of just neutral with that unstruck planchet. A 30 a a, you know, a nice $19.34 d nickel is just going to have some unstructured there.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Got it. Yeah. So I wonder it had something to do with, like, the the the way that this dyes were set at Denver, you know, that year with these coins.
Owen Seymour:Think a lot of it comes down to just production quality at the mints. I I think that you know, I don't know if it's a matter of making too many coins too quickly, you know, or your coining prices weren't set to an appropriate strength, and and it wasn't delivering a a strong enough blow to strike out the coin.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah.
Owen Seymour:But there there's significant variance from year to year in manufacture of US coins. And
Tony Gryckiewicz:I mean, it's
Owen Seymour:not understand all of this to be a a fluid professional grader.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Sure. Sure. It's not unlike automobiles. I mean, we all we we go to automobile sites that tell you, tell us a little bit about the history of various, you know, whatever the manufacturer is. And there's a particular year, 02/2008, don't buy one of these.
Tony Gryckiewicz:They had problems with this, had problems with that, etcetera, etcetera. And probably a lot of that had to do with the quality of the manufacturing that year and and that the standards and the staff and and the maybe some of the tools that they used or some of the equipment that they they they use or parts that they use to to build the vehicles that year. It's kind of similar. Anything that's manufactured is going to have those kind of, those kind of, you know, variances from one year to the next. And so these things are what Owen and other professional graders, they have to kind of know all this for the various years.
Tony Gryckiewicz:So, you know, the typical 1934 might be, might look like this because of the poor striking qualities or habits at that time. Better ones, you know, look like this. Now, is there a particular level where in order to achieve, let's say a 67 or a 68, it absolutely does has to not have this, let's say, this, you know, this exposed flange a planchette?
Owen Seymour:That's a great question. I I think with enough magnification, you could probably find some evidence of unstruck planchette on on any business strike buffalo nickel.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Okay.
Owen Seymour:With that said, with this quantity, I would say that that unstruck planchette and and, you know, it's it's a bit of a soft strike. You can see Liberty there is kind of bleeding into the field a bit. It's just not raised up that well. I think if this coin was perfectly struck and had less unstruck planchet, that this coin could easily qualify for a 67. So I say that for this coin that that is the main grade restricting factor is the strike and unstruck planchette.
Owen Seymour:I don't see abrasions on this coin that make me think, that could never, you know, be a 67. The luster certainly adequate phenomenal luster. So That's great. I think for a 67, it's hard to quantify this. I I I wouldn't never say it has to have half this much.
Owen Seymour:It's it's hard to quantify. Yeah. But Okay. Definitely significantly less than this coin for a 67.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Alright. I wanna jump into everybody's, one of the most favorite collected coins of of all time. We have the nineteen o nine s, VDB, wheat WheatSense, Lincoln sent. So this one is, again, our, the grade of MS 62 brown. I can say right off the bat, I do not like the eye appeal of this coin.
Tony Gryckiewicz:I've handled a number of nineteen ninety nine NASS VDBs in my inventory over over the years, and this one has really poor IPO. But I want I wanna steal your thunder. Go ahead and tell us a little bit about little bit about why this coin is what it is.
Owen Seymour:Yeah. So I selected this example. I think it's kind of a textbook example of a low end uncirculated coin. So we don't see any signs of wear. For wear on Lincoln cents to see the early signs of wear, you wanna look at the high points of the hair and beard on the obverse.
Owen Seymour:Okay. Kind of the highest point of his shoulder there in the in the center of the lower portion of the bust. And and I'm not seeing any change in color there, so that tells me that this coin is uncirculated.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Okay.
Owen Seymour:And it has some abrasions. Like, you know, we're really zoomed in. It's got a little nick on the forehead there. There's a little line coming down from the nose. But these really I mean, I I think with naked eye, you wouldn't even see those.
Owen Seymour:Yeah. I wouldn't say it's terribly abraded, but it's kind of lacking in every other department.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. Yeah.
Owen Seymour:The luster is just not amazing. It looks a little bit chalky, and it shouldn't.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. Sure.
Owen Seymour:It has a planchet issue going on above in god we trust. Like, the planchet wasn't
Tony Gryckiewicz:Right up top here.
Owen Seymour:Literally form there. Yeah. That's not severe enough that you would no grade it. Now if that was, like, loose, like, it looked like you could kinda knock pieces of metal off, that'd a bigger problem.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. Okay.
Owen Seymour:So I I wouldn't no grade the coin for that, but it's definitely not helping me arrive at a higher number.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah.
Owen Seymour:Oh, this is a coin that's that's definitely uncirculated. It has no evidence of wear, but you gotta keep it on the lower end of the grading scale because it's it's lacking in a lot of other departments.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. Sorry. Victor David Brewer, whatever name was, but this one was not made.
Owen Seymour:No. Very well. Not not not made the standard, not preserved the standards at least.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. Yeah. Alright. So we compare that one now to this guy and immediately everyone, you know, should be able to tell the difference of between those two coins. This one is graded MS 66 brown, has got phenomenal got interesting, nice color to it.
Tony Gryckiewicz:So what else? What else? What are the main main differences here between these two?
Owen Seymour:Yeah. These two coins here are night and day difference. I mean, we look at the luster of this coin, it it's, you know, way, way, way above the other coin. Just the the the brightness here is so much significantly better than the previous coin, and that's gonna really help carry the grade. It's kinda got this, like, attractive purplish, reddish, you know, original skin going on.
Owen Seymour:No mentionable abrasions. There's a few trivial spots if we zoom in enough, but but from this angle, there you can barely notice any spots. I mean, this is just a fantastic coin. This is what you wanna see for, you know, a piece of uncirculated copper. You want it to look like this.
Owen Seymour:This is just wonderful.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. Yeah. Do do you know if pretty much all of these go into circulation?
Owen Seymour:19 on an SPDBs were actually saved to some meaningful extent.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Oh, okay.
Owen Seymour:Because they were first year coins that kind of, you know, often led to coins being saved even in roll quantity. I've personally heard of dealers who have bought full uncirculated rolls of these.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Oh, wow.
Owen Seymour:Yeah. If you check the PCGS populations for uncirculated coins, it's a lot higher than you would think it would be. So these were definitely saved. A lot of them were circulated as well. So it's kind of like in between.
Owen Seymour:We were talking about the the nineteen o one Morgans earlier. Those were not saved, and the 82 s's were saved a massive quantity. Something like a nineteen o nine s v b would kind of lie in between those two things, where they did absolutely serve a role in commerce, but they were they were also saved in a meaningful quantity as well.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. So just as a little aside, why is the $19.00 9 s v d b so interesting and so popular? On the reverse of this coin, and I'll probably bring up an image to kinda just flash on the screen at this point so you guys can see more closely. But in the reverse of this coin, you'll see three letters, VDB. And this VDB stands for Victor Victor David Brenner.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Is that right?
Owen Seymour:Yep.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Okay. Victor Victor David Brenner. And he was the designer of this coin. And kind of a tradition goes back with coin designs where the the designer of the coin maybe puts a little bit of a well, I mean, the case of like Christian Goldberg with the Goldberg dollar, he wrote C. Goldberg like on the actual coin.
Tony Gryckiewicz:But other designers might put an initial or something that says this is, you know, this was something that they designed to kind of put a little signature on, like any kind of an artist. Well, his initial design had his whole name, Victor David Brenner on it. There was a huge kind of backlash about that. They or I think even at the mid, they decided, no, we're not gonna go that, you know, you need to reduce this down to just VDB. They allowed them to put that on, but then the public had a real issue with the VDB being on the coin, and they changed this out.
Tony Gryckiewicz:They swapped out the the the dyes, and they started moving forward without the VDB on them. So the Philadelphia $19.00 9 VDB is is is also I don't know. It's a bit of a scarce coin. It's a difficult coin to find super nice, but it's totally obtainable. The San Francisco version of the same coin is a lot more difficult to find and therefore there's a lot of value to them.
Tony Gryckiewicz:And everybody who has collected Lincoln cents, WeetSense knows that this is usually where the the hole in their album exists because that is the rare one to find is the $19.00 9 s. And this is also a great example of what Owen and the other guys at PCGS would do in terms of authentication because this little s right here may very well be faked in some capacity. Everything from soldering on and and asked to make it look like it's original to inserting it through the side and creating a fake kind of, like, pushing up an s from from inside the coin I've heard of. Whatever. Just in order to be able to sell it as $19.00 9 s and and make a few $100 or or or or whatever.
Tony Gryckiewicz:So or in some cases, you know, a thousand dollars or whatever. Yeah, it's just keep, keep This is one of the reasons why grading is important today and why it's been embraced by so many different collectors is it gives everybody that peace of mind about authentication, but also some authority about what exactly is the grade here so that we can kind of trade these and then be a lot more confident. So anything you want to add to that or move on to the next one?
Owen Seymour:Yeah. I mean, I just like to point out, I think that know, coin grading, I think that the numerical aspect of it, actually assessing the condition gets a lot of the spotlight when it comes to being a professional grader.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Mhmm.
Owen Seymour:But you can't do that without having a superb foundation of authenticating coins. So just to give the viewers a little insight into that, would you mind zooming in on the mint mark again for me like you did
Tony Gryckiewicz:earlier? Sure.
Owen Seymour:So just for nineteen o nine SVDBs, you know, I and every other professional grader, you know, you kinda have to know there's four different mint mark positions on SVDBs. I think this is the most this is the highest and most leftward position.
Tony Gryckiewicz:So you have to
Owen Seymour:know all these things.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Okay.
Owen Seymour:There's one single mint mark stamp for $19.00 9 SVDBs, you get these really nice parallel serifs. And one of the best dye indicators for a nineteen o nine SVDB, at the top loop of the mint mark there, you can see a little dye chip sitting on almost on the crossbar of the s of the mint mark. So in that top void in the recess area.
Tony Gryckiewicz:You mean right here?
Owen Seymour:Yes. Exactly that.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Oh, okay.
Owen Seymour:All genuine 1909 SVDBs have a die chip in the mint mark there, every single one of them. Maybe sometimes you won't be able to see it if you have a coin and good. It might be so circulated and have so much gunk in there that you can't identify. But if you have a 1999 SVDB, it should be very easy to spot that die chip. So just having little tiny pieces of information like that about every, you know, coin in in in US coins, those things add up to having a Yeah.
Owen Seymour:A really good ability to authenticate coins. And then there's a bunch of different tricks for $19.00 9 SVDBs along with the mint mark. There's different reverse dies for nineteen oh nine cents. There's type one and type two. The VDB can be formed in different ways.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Okay.
Owen Seymour:Yeah. And there's there's there's forms that are unique to $19.00 9 f cents. So there's a lot of different ways to authenticate a $19.00 9 SVDB.
Tony Gryckiewicz:That's awesome. I I I love that stuff. I didn't know that about the die chip at at all. So what we're referring to is is this, the the the die that had this s on it. There's a little chip just kind of in the metal.
Tony Gryckiewicz:So when it was struck, you can see that, as the metal flowed into that recess created by that chip, you got this tiny little thing. I'm just kinda be real more careful with here with my mouse. So just right around there, I'm kinda going I'm kinda good just going on the bottom side of it. That die chip exists in every authentic one. So if you ever find one that doesn't have that, then you're pretty much guaranteed that you're looking at it fake.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Right?
Owen Seymour:No. It's fake. Be fake.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. 100%. And and and these diagnostics are super important for other things like $18.93 s, Morgan dollars, which is, you know, super rare and valuable and so forth. There is diagnostics on that coin you can look at and you can know a 100% of the time that this is a real coin or it's a fake coin by having that diagnostic that doesn't exist in in rare I'm sorry, in fakes where they were trying to, you know, trying to mimic the the coin overall and and and fool people that are looking at it very quickly. So, awesome.
Tony Gryckiewicz:So let's get into, gold. Now I love gold. I love gold. But, this is we got $19.00 8 s San Francisco again, $19.00 $810, the MS 65. So we're talking about a pretty pretty pricey coin right here.
Tony Gryckiewicz:So go for it.
Owen Seymour:This is a really you know, this is a very nice looking coin. Yeah. It certainly looks gem. I kinda forget the grade of this. I'm thinking
Tony Gryckiewicz:This is MS 65.
Owen Seymour:Right. So it looks 65 or maybe even 66 from here. It's it's really well struck. No large marks or anything. No re marks or anything.
Owen Seymour:A a really beautiful, pleasant looking coin here. It has some light spots in the headdress. Those don't really bother me. So definitely a nice coin here. I I really like this one.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Oh, yeah. Love this coin. I mean, I would expect this to be higher graded, frank me personally. I'm not expert, but do these normally come nice?
Owen Seymour:What what was that?
Tony Gryckiewicz:Do these normally come nice? Is that part of
Owen Seymour:the $0.08 s $0.08 s tens come very nice. They usually come with a nice silky pleasant look. Not always, but they do come better than than other dates. Yeah. But kind of the example we've been talking about lower end uncirculated coins and then kind of middle end or or higher.
Owen Seymour:For these two coins, I selected one that was, you know, a nice one. And then our next example is kind of like a face melter of a coin.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. My my face is melting.
Owen Seymour:This coin in hand, actually.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Okay.
Owen Seymour:This is and this coin is, like, burnt into my memory. It's one of my favorite US coins I've ever handled.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Sure. This This coin is an MS this is an MS 68 plus. Okay. So 70 is perfect. 69 is basically perfect, almost perfect.
Tony Gryckiewicz:This is an MS sixty sixty eight plus. We haven't mentioned yet about plus grades. You just wanna mention real quickly, what is a plus grade? What MS 68 plus or MS 64 plus or or whatever?
Owen Seymour:Yeah. So a plus grade kind of just acknowledges that a coin is is very high for its its numerical grade. So I I think 68 plus in this context means that, you know, it's very close to a 69, but maybe the graders saw some some technical shortcomings. Okay. And they think it's better than an average 68, but just a little bit short of 60 nines.
Owen Seymour:This is kinda saying that this coin is not only a 68, which is amazing oven in itself, but for that grade, it's kind of cream of the crop. Yeah. But I I held this coin in hand, this coin is absolutely amazing. Just insanely nice luster, perfectly rounded apple cheek. You know, the coin almost looks like it's made of felt or satin.
Owen Seymour:Just an absolutely incredible example of a US coin. It's it's one of my favorite US gold coins that exist.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. So this one, folks, you can either buy yourself a moderately priced condominium or you can buy this coin.
Owen Seymour:I think I'd take this coin. I I think I'd I'd live under an underpass and own this coin and still be happy.
Tony Gryckiewicz:You just gotta keep your eyes you gotta be careful sleeping with, you know.
Owen Seymour:Right.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Especially if word gets out that you that you got it. But that's yeah, you can tell folks that, you know, we love coins. We get into this stuff. And, there's some collection out there that this thing sits in and it's probably helps our PCGS registry set kind of go sky high. And, you know, we can mention real briefly what that is.
Tony Gryckiewicz:I mean, I don't want to derail us too much at all, but the PCGS registry set is a I should do a video with somebody who really is into registry collecting, registry set collecting and building them. But PCGS has kind of a whole catalog of different collectors who put together sets and they call them registry sets. You basically compete against other collectors in terms of what quality and what numerical grade your collection has for various components of the collection. So somebody, you know, wanted this and probably paid a, you know, very pretty dollar for an MS 68 plus example of a nineteen oh eight S $10 Indian to put into their set and it gives them crazy number of points and just allows them to beat up next collection, you know. Yep.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Basically is what that what that's all about. So, okay. Our last example we have, this is a commemorative. So we, The United States made commemorative half dollars for, I don't know, whatever it was, years or something, maybe longer than that, forty years. But anyways, in 1925, this is a California commemorative, and we have the 40 here panning panning for gold.
Tony Gryckiewicz:This example is, again, this MS the MS 62 grade. This is about a $202,100 dollar coin roughly give or give give or take. So eye appeal is horrible. So what can you tell us about this guy?
Owen Seymour:I think you start us off well. It's definitely lacking in the eye appeal department.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah.
Owen Seymour:It's kinda got these, like, rust colored spots throughout it. That's definitely an environmental issue. They're not so severe that it warrants a no grade. So I I wouldn't call this coin environmentally damaged. Yeah.
Owen Seymour:But it definitely has some light signs of that. I I don't think that that stuff's, like, necessarily burnt into the metal or eating away at the coin, so that's why I'm fine with grading it, but it's definitely not gonna help me arrive at a very high grade.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Okay.
Owen Seymour:The field is just, like, I don't know, dirty and not in a good way. No. No. No. I like when a coin has a nice attractive crust.
Owen Seymour:This is, a crust that's not good.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah.
Owen Seymour:Yeah. This is almost like a residue thing. It looks like it has some light hairlines on it. I don't think that the coin's been scrubbed or cleaned necessarily, but it's certainly been mishandled. So it's an uncirculated coin.
Owen Seymour:We don't see any evidence of wear. There's no dulling here. It it has luster throughout. Yeah. But this is a kind of a textbook example of a low end commemorative.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. When I used to work out on a ranch out in Wyoming, we should talk about some horses that were rode hard and put away wet. Like, and you know, so as it sounds, I mean, you ride kind of the heck out of the horse, get them all, you know, dirty and grimy and wet, and then you don't dry them off or clean them off and so forth. You just kind of put them back in the barn. Does not do very well for the horse long, long, long term or at all.
Tony Gryckiewicz:But anyways, that's what I would describe this guy. I mean, I don't know how it picks up. When say environmental damage, we're basically talking about interactions with the environment in a negative way. So rust and things that, you know, from being out, from being exposed, exposed to so many or being stuck in the ground. So many scents, copper scents like have environmental damage of being in dirt for years or something like that, where, you know, the coin kind of shows signs of being like, the metal's being eaten away by its interactions with the environment.
Tony Gryckiewicz:So would you think I mean, this coin maybe had some more more of this kind of rust and maybe it was kind of cleaned cleaned away at something? Yeah. I think
Owen Seymour:it was probably lightly wiped at one point again, not so much so that you would no great the coin. Okay. To call the coin clean, you want to see, like, real legitimate evidence that it was intentionally scrubbed that to make sure look a lot different.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. Yeah.
Owen Seymour:I don't think anybody ever scrubbed this coin with the intent to, like, you know, to deceive someone and make it appear much better than it ever was. I think maybe at one point, it was in a collection and someone, you know, brushed some of this residue off it with a cloth or something and imparted a few trivial hairlines.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah.
Owen Seymour:So not something that we're gonna say the coin's worthless, you know, it's ruined, but you have to compute that into your grade.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. Yeah. Alright. So we compare that guy to this one.
Owen Seymour:Huge difference. Big big step up from the prior coin. Big time. So the luster here is just spectacular. California commemoratives kinda have this really complex texture to the fields.
Owen Seymour:They're not, like, smooth like a Morgan dollar might be. They're they're they're the elevation kinda changes in the fields. And and in high grade, it really emphasizes that, and they look spectacular. So still some some trivial abrasions up above the back there between the RT of Liberty and the and the back. Mhmm.
Owen Seymour:But overall, this is a really superb coin. Tremendous luster, well struck, well made, very well preserved. So a really pretty example of a California command.
Tony Gryckiewicz:So what am I seeing in terms of I don't wanna call them them them lines. I know the answer is I'm just kinda setting you up a little bit, but so you have, like, almost appears like almost striations sort of through through here. So what is that for for folks that might look at this and initially think, oh, this coin has been maybe cleaned in some way. That that's not cleaning.
Owen Seymour:Right. Yeah. Some people I I I agree that some people might look at this coin and say, well, this hairline that's cleaned. I I can tell that those are what we call dye polish lines.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Okay.
Owen Seymour:So as Mint employees are coining these, they occasionally have to clean the dye. And they do that with, you know, some kind of abrasive material like, you know, a cloth or rag or a brush, even a metal brush, which is especially where you might see these. And as they clean the dye so, again, we're not cleaning the coin. We're cleaning the dye. Yeah.
Owen Seymour:Yep. It'll impart these lines onto the dye. Yep. And and subsequently, as as that dye, which now has lines, strikes later coins, Each coin that is struck will have these things which look like hairlines but are not. The coin was born with those.
Owen Seymour:As soon as it came out of the press, it it had those.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. Can see some patch of them right here.
Owen Seymour:Going into the e there and above the e, there's some really prominent ones.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. Yeah. Great way of recognizing these if you do, you know, you're not sure and you look at the coin is is to, you know, use utilize your loop. If the coin if the lines are raised in the surface, then that means that there was recesses in the die. And that means that the die has been polished.
Tony Gryckiewicz:If the lines are recessed into coin, then that's different. Then that means that there's been scrubbing on the surface of the coin that has taken metal away. In the case of this, it's really obvious that we have lines that are raised on the surface, which is a indicator of dye polishing. I don't know the answer to this, again dye polishing because this goes into, you know, eye appeal to some extent. And eye appeal is a factor when you get into a certainly MS 67, MS 68 kind of grades.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Is there an upper tier for where dye polish lines or heavy dye polish lines affects the numerical grade?
Owen Seymour:Yes. But the frequency at which you encounter a coin where the dye polish actually, you know, influences the grade is exceptionally rare. Okay. What comes to mind is, like, some dates of s mint piece dollars can have really, really prominent dye polish that some people think it looks cool. I think it makes the coin look awful, and and that can certainly be grade restricting.
Owen Seymour:I can't imagine something like this. There's I I don't think there's any California commemoratives out there that have dye polish so severe that it it actually influences the numerical grade of the coin.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Gotcha. So
Owen Seymour:is it possible? Yes. Is anyone likely to ever actually encounter it? No. I don't I don't think so.
Tony Gryckiewicz:I see. K. I'm gonna stop the the sharing. I got three quick questions for you before we wrap up. Mhmm.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Alright. So three quick questions. What is your best advice to collectors who wanna get better at grading for themselves?
Owen Seymour:Well, I I think I kinda demonstrated this with our our five examples there, is to understand what goes into grading a coin. A a lot of people make the assumption that, oh, it's just, you know, how many marks does or or doesn't have. And and they kinda just roll with that. We can get you in a really bad habit of of grading a coin and kinda just counting marks, which is just not how it works. That's part of it.
Owen Seymour:And abrasions are a foundational aspect of grading, but it's not at all the entire thing. Yeah. You know, so understanding what goes into coin grading is essential. And second to that, I think it's important to just look at a ton of coins. If you have a friendly local coin shop and they don't mind you browsing frequently, look go to the coin shop and look at coins as often as you can.
Owen Seymour:Yeah. If if you know, one way that I learned a lot was just going on eBay and Heritage and great collections and websites like that and just looking at tons and tons of graded coins. Not necessarily looking to buy them or or or looking at it for some angle with profit, but just to study coins. You can just go on on eBay and look up PCGS MS 64 piece dollar and look at a 100 examples of that. And then plug in PCGS MS 65 piece dollar and look at a 100 examples of that.
Owen Seymour:And just in the back of your head, kind of think about what differences are you observing from grade to grade? You know, how does the luster look from a grade to grade? Does the strike differ? Yeah. You know, at what point do you stop seeing so much unattractive toning?
Owen Seymour:And and those are all key components into different attributes of different grades.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Is there any common common mistakes with relying too much on on photos, grading from from photos? Any pitfalls that you think people can run into if you rely too much just on trying to grade a coin from from a photo?
Owen Seymour:Yeah. I mean, definitely. For example, we haven't talked about any proof coins today. So proof coins are coins that are struck with the intention of being sold to collectors. Mhmm.
Owen Seymour:And and they have very reflective surfaces, and they're typically not gonna be abraded. The most common grade restricting feature of a proof coin is going to be hairlines, and those are imparted from someone gently cleaning the coin with a cloth.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah.
Owen Seymour:And and those can be graded. It's not like business strike coins where where a hairline equates oftentimes to a no grade. Proofs are kinda the opposite where you're kinda grade them almost on the presence or lack of hairlines. Yeah. So with that said, grading proofs and pictures is just not possible.
Owen Seymour:You you might be able to get some idea or suspicion. If it looks really nice, you know, then it's probably a gem coin, a 65 or a 66 or a 67. But if you show me a bad photo of, like, a proof Franklin half dollar, you know, $19.57 Franklin half dollar in proof, You cannot wager a guess out of me because it's just not possible to assess a proof coin, which are graded, you know, on an even more nuanced basis than mint state coins. Yeah. So I I think grading through pictures I don't know.
Owen Seymour:I'm kind of torn on this because sometimes I'll get really confident in my ability to grade a coin through pictures, you know, and I'll be buying coins off off great collections or something. I'll get 10 coins in the mail, and I'm like, alright. Perfect. They all look exactly like the photos. They look like I thought I would.
Owen Seymour:And then I'll get another batch of coins where I buy five coins, and four of the five look nothing like what I thought they did. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's important to I think you can definitely get a good feel for a coin from a photo. Yeah.
Owen Seymour:But you're not gonna get the whole story. To see to understand a coin and to give it a well thought out grade, you have to see it in hand. There's no alternative to it.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. Yeah. That's one point I I wanted to mention because we we haven't we didn't talk a whole well, you mentioned a little bit about the approach with lighting and bringing the coin up to the light and and so forth. But a little tidbit that I picked up at the grading courses was the importance of looking at a coin from multiple angles. So holding a coin, you know, up front, upright in front of you, but then also looking at it know, from a side, but also looking at, let's say, with the light coming in kind of a 90 degree angle, or versus, I'm sorry, coming in more of a slight angle so I can kinda see just kinda like what's on the surface of the coin.
Tony Gryckiewicz:All of these things you can't do with a photo. Yeah. Impossible to do with a photo.
Owen Seymour:Yeah. Definitely.
Tony Gryckiewicz:So, super important stuff to being able to, you know, assess assess grade and find things and find potential, maybe potential problems, which, you know, could be a big determinant in terms of of ultimately of of final grades. If somebody dreams of becoming a professional grader, it's like yourself, what would you tell them to focus on if you, you had a mentor? If you were Steve Feltner to the next Owen Seymour, what would you say?
Owen Seymour:It's a great question. I think I mentioned it earlier in that I think the numerical evaluation aspect of coin grading kinda gets all the limelight. But authentication is almost becoming a bit of a lost science.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Okay.
Owen Seymour:I I think that the industry takes it so much for granted that, you know, you can pay 20 some dollars, send a coin to PCGS and and get in a, you know, consistently, extremely accurate answer on the coin's authenticity. Yeah. And people have become so almost, like, lazy to the fact of authentication that nobody really thinks about. You know, it would be really sad if someone dedicated years of their life to understanding how to grading, maybe even got good at it, went to apply a PCGS. If you can't authenticate, you're not getting a job.
Owen Seymour:Yeah. You cannot become a professional grader without having, you know, a really excellent foundation of authentication ability.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. Yeah.
Owen Seymour:So I think that would be be kind of one of my first points is, you know, pay attention to authentication, become fluent at it, study it, you know, buy a lot of different resources, try to memorize die diagnostics, what to look for and what you shouldn't see on some coins. Yeah. Two, you just have to expose yourself to a ton of coins. Yeah. But I think, you know, go to a coin show and and if there's a dealer who you know, you shouldn't bother a dealer who's busy and and in the middle of something.
Owen Seymour:But if there's someone who has a spare time or maybe you know them and they're friendly, if if they don't mind letting you look at five coins for five minutes, just look at five coins and just spin them around under the lamp and and think about what you're seeing. How braided is it? What's the luster like? Is it is it pretty to you? And and do it at the next table and the next.
Owen Seymour:Yeah. Look at raw coins. Look at coins on eBay. Just expose yourself to as many different grades as possible. Becoming fluent in grading is is, you know, a matter of understanding authentication, which is a very scientific process.
Owen Seymour:And then you have to become good at grading, right, which is kind of an artistic process. There's a lot of nuance to it and subjectivity. Yeah. And the way that anybody you can't become good at that without looking at a ton of coins. And you had to kinda have to become ability able to to, you know, kind of recognize the composite of each each each grade.
Owen Seymour:You know, what does an average 65 look like? What does an average look like? You can't grade until you understand those things. And to understand those things, you have to look at millions of coins, and I mean million. So it's not a matter of looking at a 100 to 200 coins to become top tier professional.
Owen Seymour:You have look at millions of coins.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. One thing I just really wanna add to that would be the attending of the ANA seminar. I've been to the ANA seminar three times beginning grading.
Tony Gryckiewicz:I had it with, Kyle and Kyle. Yeah, Kyle Knapp and then also a guy named Mike.
Owen Seymour:Farone.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Farone. And was amazing, amazing experience for me. You get to expose yourself to the ANA grading set, which has been used for probably, you know, many years, maybe decades, has been used to teach and inform students about how to grade all different series of US coins and all different levels of the numerical grading scale. But then the relationships you build through it, you spend all four days with these people in the same, in the classroom together, you have lunch together and dinners together, and you end up building these bonds that you use for the rest of your, you know, that are helpful for the rest of your time in numismatics. And then I did intermediate grading with Steve Feltner and with David McCarthy.
Tony Gryckiewicz:And the last guy is I'm drawing a blank on. He works for Stax Bowers now.
Owen Seymour:Not sure.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yeah. Yeah. It'll I can actually see his Devin Devin Hip.
Owen Seymour:Oh, Devin Hip. Yep.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Yep. Devin, Steve, and and David. Incredible experience. Saw all of these really kind of more high end coins, interesting coins. Coins I'd never got a chance to even handle before up to that point in in terms of my my time in in numismatics.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Got to be we spent a lot more time in the mint state grades, the nuances between various grades at mint state level. And then the most recent one that I did with Don Kettling, Ken Park, and then Jeff Jeff Garrett. And that was advanced grading and problem and problem coins. And I I just I think if you're serious about this at all, if you're serious about this hobby, if you're certainly in this business, but if you're serious about the hobby, either way, making your way out to Colorado Springs, taking a course, being instructed from a guy like Owen here, for four or five days, whatever the total number is, it's really, I think it's completely worth it, you know, from a from an investment perspective and a time perspective if you can do it. So I would I would say that.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Okay. So people are interested in reaching out, asking some questions or doing business with you or whatever. How can people reach you, Owen?
Owen Seymour:Yeah. So I think I'm I'm best available by email. And so that's Owen@SeymourRareCoins.com. If you're on social media, I'm pretty active on Instagram. My Instagram handle is p a underscore coins.
Owen Seymour:So you can reach out to me there, send me a message. So, yeah, if anybody, you know, if anybody's looking for information or advice on anything, I'd be happy to help.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Awesome. Cool. Well, hey, man. Thank you so much for doing this. It really means a ton.
Tony Gryckiewicz:I'm trying to grow this channel. If, folks are are out there, you know, watching up to this point, please like, comment, subscribe, share share the the video, all of those things and so forth. It makes you know, it's a huge, huge help. You can also listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts as well as Spotify. So in case you enjoy, you know, listening to this while you're driving in the car, you may not see all of the great visuals we had, but, you get a chance to to listen to us, talking about the philosophy here of grading.
Tony Gryckiewicz:But, again, Owen, anyways, you so much for doing this. And I know that everyone out there is going to really enjoy this video quite a bit. So yeah, hope to see you. Hope to see you at the ANA show and get a chance to to catch up some. So thank you so much.
Owen Seymour:Sounds good. I'll see you there. I really appreciate you having me on, Tony. Thank you.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Awesome. Cool. Have a good one. See you. You too, man.
Tony Gryckiewicz:Bye.
