declanwmagee

Wonderful magazine even though I haven't bought one for 25 years. My favourite was Buster Gonads and his unfeasibly large testicles. Brilliant. Terry F**kwit and Top Tips had me laughing out loud on the bus For those that it has passed by, this is the kind of 'Top Tip' (very very silly): "A mouse trap placed on top on of your alarm clock will prevent you from rolling over and going back to sleep" Shirt-ironing haters: do the backs, fronts and sleeves first, then all you have to do is the collars, and they're a piece of piss.

...and they're scans, of course, which homogenises even the most varied tones

That's because there are probably four realistic options for selling on eBay. Wanting to make money is hardly a heinous crime. 1. BIN at the market rate or BIN with best offer. Accurately and fully described, you would accept the going market rate but take anything in excess of that in the case of the latter. 2. Set a reserve at or about the market rate. Again accurately and fully described. 3. Start rubbish at 99p as seen and let punters make of it what they will. 4. Start at 99p even if way below market value, add a description, cross fingers and hope it makes a realistic price. Emphasis being on the word hope. Of the four, number three is probably the best return on capital. Best offers attracts the speculative bargain hunters. BIN without offer is probably the worst from a seller's perspective whilst number 4 leaves you in the lap of the gods. Good analysis, Rob! I tend to use No.1 with Best Offer for my better coins, with the BIN price reducing each month - kind of like a reverse auction. Eventually they reach the market level (whatever that is!) I keep records of what I have got for each coin, so I base my initial pricing on my own historical data. I do tend to bid according to book prices, adjusted heavily one way or another, but I never price coins according to book. The books aren't the Bible, and need to be taken with several pinches of salt. Only the market on that day knows the market level on that day; sellers like me certainly don't. All we know is that we've sold a coin too cheaply if it goes too quickly. I snap stuff up on Newly Listed BiN all the time, because people have put them on too cheap. If you are watching Ending Soonest, you won't see any of those coins, as they'll all have gone before they get there. I got my 1904 halfcrown, not far off VF, for £15 like that. My big secret, and don't tell anyone, is how low an offer I'll usually accept. I'm of the opinion that moving stock is better than static stock, so an offer has to be pretty stupid for me to refuse. I probably refuse less than 10% of the offers I get. Because I started the coin at a high price, the buyer's happy because he regards it as a bargain and pats himself on the back for his negotiating skills, and I'm happy because my stock is moving. Often I counter offer if an offer is borderline. Any dealer who tells you that he isn't trying to get as much as he can for a coin probably isn't telling you the truth!

Serif Photoplus Starter Edition another freebie with a circular crop...

I think it was, yes, but that coin's been scrubbed!

1926 halfcrowns suffered a similar fate with the No Colon variety, as I recall!

Oooh! Real James Bond stuff! Snap open the Calcium, drop it in water and stand well back! I think you mean Caesium. Yes. Calcium fizzes a bit, but nothing scary like the Group 1 metals

Ah, and thanks John for a new description of this: Bramah 25c, clearly!

I do love these. Here's my 8/3 and I can see how it could be the same as Robs, only muckier. Will I take a toothbrush to it? Will I heck as like.

I like the Mercury one...

These are rather fantastic... Coins made from the Elements of the Periodic Table

Wouldn't that be fun? Set up a hedge fund and buy coins with it. I think most of us would run it pretty well. I'm sure somebody proposed doing that with wines on The Apprentice once.

I take the Davies value and divide it by the common value to get a multiplication factor. For the 1923 mule it is 4.3. So that gives me £17.20, £34.40, £150.50 and £322.50. Which reminds me I must get my spare VF-GVF on ebay. That's exactly what I do, Gary. Same with the values at the back of Freeman.

I just did a quick Completed Listings query on 1836 halfcrowns to compare those results with the respected price guides, just out of interest. The coin was chosen more or less at random, and the gradings are my 5 second assessments. Sample size, 80 coins. eBay completed listings: Fair £9 F £12 F+ £20 VF- £24 VF £38 VF+ £51 EF- £90 EF £205 As you'd expect, gentle slope at the duff end (bullion value?) ski-jumping up towards EF and here's the average of the 4 books I use: Fair £14 F £29 F+ £45 VF- £61 VF £78 VF+ £148 EF- £218 EF £288 Miles higher even in mid grades. Conclusion? eBay is much more realistic. I know all the respected guides bang on about "this isn't what you'll get for yours, it's what you'd have to pay us clever people to get one", but let's face it, when most of us ask a guide "what's my coin worth?", it's the former we really want to know, not the latter.

Well, they always ignored Exchange & Mart - would you rate eBay any more highly or more respectable than that? Of course! It's not all cdesteve you know!

Hmmm. What do we all think about the respected guides ignoring the single biggest coin market in the world, I wonder?

Unfortunately that's not really a good guide - there's no way to filter "idiot buyers who have more money than sense" out of the results, nor "sellers who are less than truthful and honest", nor "buyers and sellers who don't see it's a rare variety". So how do the "respected" guides filter all that out? When sample sizes are small, how do you tell whether a result is an outlier, like the examples you give, or a genuinely changing trend?

R14 in Freeman, R6 for normal size 6. Peck doesn't distinguish.

Declan, I've seen one or two in no better than fine condition, maybe poorer, so I reckon a few must have done the rounds for a while. One was a 1934! Wow. I suppose at the time their true value wasn't universally known, so maybe people thought it was just like breaking up a '53 set!

How does a Wreath Crown get so circulated? Surely never spent? That's an awful lot of cabinet friction - maybe a pocket piece?

Criminal vandalism!

That's interesting. The coins still featured the fasces in 1945 . I'd imagine everyone knew what it was in 1945 - certainly Mussolini used it liberally, not to mention the half dozen other fascist states that were falling or had fallen, by then. But they'd switched it for a torch by 1964...

I got mine for £12 from a local camera shop. It's only about 8" high...which is plenty for coins

I like these: Coin storage boxes You can mix and match the cheapy plastic 2x2s with the better self adhesive flips like in the photo - same size, you see. 200 coins per box. I have one for each denomination and a couple for overspill, as I have slightly more than 200 examples of each denomination. I shall soon be buying another...

Not in a month of Sundays....