Owner Comments:
S-3971, Marsh 186
Acquired from: Great Collections
Means: Auction, Lot 1114193
Date: 6 February 2022
Critique: Bought this coin graded by PCGS before I joined NGC. What a super disappointment when I found that NGC will not accept PCGS coins for competition! Made the same mistake with a couple of other coins, and finally decided to send them in for crossover. This worked very well, which was lucky since my personal opinion is that PCGS tends to over-grade coins very often. One very disturbing fact that I noticed... I recorded the populations of the dates and conditions of the coins that I crossed, and after I got them back I noticed that the NGC pop has increased by one, however the PCGS pop stayed the same! So apparently the two rival companies don't inform each other when crossovers are done! This means there is a "ghost" PCGS coin lying in their pop report now. Of course, I knew that almost every dealer breaks out coins from holders and resubmits them to try for a better grade, which also inflates the pop reports. So, I've learned not to pay too much attention to pop totals -- they're completely meaningless for both companies at virtually every grade level. This could even be true for Top Pop grades, where some aggressive dealer tried several times to see if he could squeeze one more grade level out, or maybe get a +. So if you see that there are 10 coins available for some nice item at the grade you want, don't count on finding it soon. There may in fact only be 2 or 3 of them in existence, and the rest are ghosts!! Scary....
P.S. -- for those keeping score at home, this coin was PCGS 44372715 before the holder was destroyed in crossover.
UPDATE: Since writing these comments in summer of 2022, I've been told that you can have a "ghost" coin removed from PCGS records by sending them the original label from their holder after the coin is crossed over by NGC. Sorry I didn't know that earlier, since I discarded the few labels that I had. It's very sad in the case of one very rare variety of 1862 that I owned, since I had the sole Top Pop PCGS example! Now that the coin is safely in an NGC holder, it would be polite to remove the PCGS coin from their inventory in order that collectors competing in their sovereign categories don't keep hoping the coin will appear at auction. I did leave a note for the person who had the formerly second highest graded example explaining this, and congratulating him for now owning the Top Pop coin!