Spring Cleaning Your Coin Collection: PART 4

Editor’s Note: This is the final installment of a four-part series that originally appeared in Mike Thorne’s “Basics and Beyond” column in Coins magazine in 2019.

At the end of my last column, I introduced an issue that could be summarized in the following question: If I purchase only coins certified by the major certification services, why would I need to learn how to grade coins for myself? If the grades assigned by the services are both valid (what they’re supposed to be) and reliable (the same coins receive the same grades time after time), why can’t I just depend on the certification services