The primary goal of most numismatists is to collect the highest grade coins at the lowest possible price. I consider myself an armchair collector, as I have a strong desire to amass a very nice collection of coins, but like 90% of the population, I have limited funds - I also do not devote much time to my collection on a regular basis. I might easily go a year without acquiring a single specimen. As a result, when I found that EBay was a great source from which I could acquire much higher grade coins than I ever expected to own, at much less than I thought they would cost, I was in awe once again, by the power of the Internet.
There is a wide and varied band of reasons to collect things ranging from pure nostalgia to the satisfaction of completing a series of something, or maybe you are just interested in trying to make some money. Since, to quote the fictional Gordon Gecko, "What is worth doing is worth doing for money."
For years both my sources of coins and the population of choices to me were very limited. I understood this rarity incorrectly. What I thought were rare coins were not. What I thought were great prices were not.
There are plenty of resources available, some for a price, that offer coin values by grade and by year, but in my experience, they are very inaccurate, as I routinely find coins for considerably more, or less, than the published values. More troublesome, some of the higher grades are not even listed in many price guides!
So, I have decided to put my computer skills against the task. I have written an Alpha version of a program that scours the Internet and gathers the prices of actual sales of coins and stores them in a database. I will offer the results of these searches real-time on the enclosed pages when I feel that it is ready. For now, I do have a program that allows you to ENTER your coin collection into a database. It will show you the total number of coins, their face value, your total cost and even their melt value! (More popular of late due to skyrocketing metal prices!)
If you are interested in being able to review the following type of information, I invite you to bookmark this site, contact me via e-mail, or just check back frequently. If you drop me a note, I will be happy to get you information that you are interested in:
| Coin | Low | Average | High | # Sales |
| 1997-S Washington Quarter - Clad PCGS PR69DC | $10.60 | $13.91 | $17.50 | 8 |
| 1997-S Washington Quarter - Silver PCGS PR69DC | $23.50 | $26.60 | $30.98 | 9 |
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* Sales occurred over roughly a 2 consecutive month period. |
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By having timely & accurate data present in the table above, you would know that paying $20 for a Clad quarter of this grade would be too much, while finding one for $8 could certainly be bought and resold for a small profit, depending on the trend of the price, which can also be graphed for a more precise determination of the fair current value of the coin. Notice that the Silver coin routinely sells for much more than the Clad. Also notice that the range of prices paid are vast. I like to be on the lower end of the spectrum, myself!
I decided long ago to only buy PCGS coins, as they seem to be the most consistent and stringent grading company. The values of the same grade coin among all the companies shows this in hard dollars. PCGS commands more money on the front end and the back.
So please contact me at Mark@MVick.ORG for more information, or to be notified when this site goes live. Unfortunately, my time is limited, and I have been spending most of my time working on a stock analysis program.