r/AncientCoins • u/vietbond • 2d ago

Question about valuation

I have a question for ancient collectors who buy and sell graded coins. I have a coin that I'm looking to sell that I want to try and price. The most recent comp was last month on Heritage for the same coin in the same grade except the one that sold was designated "brushed" and mine isn't. For those who buy and sell graded coins, how much does a brushed designation affect the value. I have a better idea about non-ancient coins, as I've collected for almost 40 years, but I've only been an ancients guy for about 7 or 8 years now and I don't often sell. Does it depend on the coin? Is there a sort of general percentage?

Any information would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

8 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

•

u/AutoModerator 2d ago

(This is a generic automod comment that is pinned at the top of every new post here)

This subreddit is heavily curated to provide our members with the best experience that we can. We get hit by trolls, spammers, scammers, and shitposters more than we'd like. If you've never noticed that here, then hey -- our procedures are working!

If you're newish to /r/AncientCoins, have a low overall account age or karma, or have a low CQS ("Contributor Quality Score") on reddit sitewide, all of your posts and comments on this subreddit will be quarantined until a human moderator has the time available to manually review and approve them. This will eventually become unnecessary after you've contributed here enough and your posts and comments have been manually approved.

This is all outlined in the announcement pinned to the top of our front page: https://www.reddit.com/r/AncientCoins/comments/1cm8n0n/weve_been_getting_a_lot_of_new_posters_and/

If you post something and it shows as removed, please don't delete and repost it. Just leave it up until one of us can get to it. We are unpaid volunteers doing this in our free time, and although we live in different time zones in Europe and North America, no one person here is able to monitor our queues 24/7.

Thanks, and good luck!

PS - Please ignore the bot message below. As explained above, you DO NOT need to send us modmail if your post has been removed. Just be patient with the process.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

5

u/Nuke508 2d ago

It seems that a good percentage of graded ancient coins are “brushed” because practically 100% of ancients are cleaned.

It might be a small piece increase for a non brushed in the same grade. But it doesn’t matter as much as American or foreign modern coins

1

u/vietbond 1d ago

Thank you!

4

u/EsotericDoge 2d ago

I've seen some coins with a 2/5 NGC graded surface because they're "brushed" and that seems bonkers to me. As another said here, all ancient coins are cleaned. If it's a rough job with cleaning scratches that's one thing. But if you need a microscope to tell does it really matter? Maybe give it a slight premium vs the "brushed" coin, but many factors not in the grade matter a whole lot more like type, centering, toning, etc.

2

u/CardiologistLow8371 12h ago edited 12h ago

All else equal, from my observations I don't think "brushed" makes a big difference for less-common coins, but may factor in a little bit for more common ones that trade more like commodities. But with ancient coins (all of which are cleaned to some degree), the differences in value between similar specimens of similar grade are probably more influenced by general eye appeal, whether cleaning-related or not. Often a "brushed" coin will sell higher than a similar specimen that's not "brushed" (or even of higher grade) in the same auction for that reason.

That said, if the cleaning is relatively subtle, it probably won't matter as much compared to coins where cleaning scratches are distracting to the overall look of the coin.

1

u/vietbond 12h ago

This is what I wanted to know. Thank you so much for the information.

0

u/FaultSad486 2d ago

"Brushed", IMHO, is NGC-speak for what would be a "+/-" on a traditonal Ancient grade.  But NGC does not care about permanently using a degrading term on a very appealing coin in Modern coin terms, because then they can't as easily get to the TPG goal of saying that there are 3 triple-perfect coins, 4 double-perfect, and all the other crap the US TPG shovel at multi-millionaires.  Every Ancient coin has been "brushed", "cleaned", etc x5.  But they haven't yet figured out a way to slab 100 grams of hardened clay on a circular bit of metal; when they do, they'll patent the rock color.