CGS ceased trading

[HighlandTiger]

This may be of interest to some of you.

Just had an email from London coin company

CGS has closed and ceased trading,

The population report valuations by grade, general information, and the My Page functions are now available on a subscription basis via the London Coins website.

The annual subscription charge is £99 payable to London Coins LTD, after payment is received we will set you up on the new system. Membership will run for one year from the date we set you up.

Subscribers will be able to

View The Population Report

View The Valuations By Grade Current and Past

Input their coins in the system (or access their old CGS coin list) to get Valuation Reports, Photo Gallery, Collection lists which shows your collection in the full series, and a league table entry.

Subscribers may apply to be London Coins Grading Members, signed up members will be able to submit coins

[Clens92]

I had the same...

Personally, I think this renders their graded coins as non-saleable.  You can't check the slab's authenticity without paying £99 a year - and there is now no company to guarantee the grades etc.

They've screwed a lot of people; although hardly surprising given they're owned by London Coins.

[sovereignsteve]

18 minutes ago, Clens92 said:

 although hardly surprising given they're owned by London Coins.

yes that was always what worried me about them.

[richo]

I have never bought a coin from London coin company. Has anybody here? In my opinion there prices are incredibly expensive and I can nearly always find the same coin significantly cheaper elsewhere.

If I owned any of the CGS coins, the first thing I would do would be to break them free of their plastic prison. I can't see any point in having them if the subscription is priced as such. Luckily I have never touched CGS coins...

[morezone]

11 minutes ago, richo said:

I have never bought a coin from London coin company.

 

London Coin and London Coin Company are two different companies.

[richo]

Arrrr, ok thanks! I thought the original email here said the London Coin Company? Which company has taken on CGS? (To be clear)

[Guest]

It's no surprise and another reason to use NGC or PCGS

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[TheGoldSovereign]

There was a thread about this some weeks back, we are talking about http://www.londoncoins.co.uk/ right?

They are based a few miles from me, the company secretary is a nasty lady, this is not a surprise at all.

edit: wait a minute, @HighlandTiger you are saying CGS went under and londoncoins bought them out? Yikes, don't pay those guys any money!

[HighlandTiger]

There was a thread about this some weeks back, we are talking about http://www.londoncoins.co.uk/ right?

They are based a few miles from me, the company secretary is a nasty lady, this is not a surprise at all.

edit: wait a minute, @HighlandTiger you are saying CGS went under and londoncoins bought them out? Yikes, don't pay those guys any money!

yes it's London Coins. never bought from them nor have I bought any graded coins. (you all know my views on grading coins in slabs of plastic. )

[richo]

@HighlandTiger

very similar debates on grading in other collectibles, trading cards, Star Wars figures etc. With coins, I can't understand the point of grading proof coins, as you are already paying for custom presentation and display, so by definition the grading is rendering that packaging rather pointless. Anyway, maybe it's a debate for another thread, but in general I am with you.

[morezone]

Never bought from London Coins.  Never used CGS.  I have however bought from London Coin Company but only through eBay where I've won a couple of auctions.  Sometimes you can get decent deals bidding but BINs are well over priced.

I do have some graded coins myself and I do like slabs.  The downside is the space they take up and the additional costs for us in the UK.  If I were in the US I'd probably a larger slab collection.

£99/year just to view population reports is a bit of a con really.

[sovereignsteve]

1 hour ago, richo said:

I have never bought a coin from London coin company. Has anybody here? In my opinion there prices are incredibly expensive and I can nearly always find the same coin significantly cheaper elsewhere.

If I owned any of the CGS coins, the first thing I would do would be to break them free of their plastic prison. I can't see any point in having them if the subscription is priced as such. Luckily I have never touched CGS coins...

CGS graded coins were highly thought of by those who knew about these things but not enough people used them for them to make a significant breakthrough in this field aginst the strength of the two biggies.

I think they will continue to be worthwhile kept in the slabs as it does give a certain confidence in the grade but the checking side of it is a problem. Certainly in the short term but long term, the best option would be to re-submit to NGC or PCGS or keep raw.

[SilverTanner]

I have bought much from the London Coins auctions over the years - never any CGS slabbed coins though.

Compared to NGC and PCGS the CGS coins always seemed to have a serious premium attached with many rolling over from one auction to the next so I guess people were not prepared to pay it. Grading did appear to be very strict.

ST

 

[Murph]

I thought the grading of UK coins was more reliable than the US based grading companies.  I do have some CGS graded British coins, George III bull head, early victorian half crowns and that sort of thing.

I'm sure I've seen UK coins from even the big two US grading companies not properly identified and I think their grading can be a little generous at times but then ever since I started collecting as a kid dealers and club members said my grading tended to be on the strict side so it may have stuck.

[Guest]

I don't think there was anything wrong with CGS it's just if you are going to grade it may as well be the big two. Clearly that's what most people thought too.

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[sovereignsteve]

2 hours ago, Numistacker said:

I don't think there was anything wrong with CGS it's just if you are going to grade it may as well be the big two. Clearly that's what most people thought too.

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It was a great idea but I think their business model was flawed. They were almost a hobby company formed by a few numismatic dealers and with too much of an attachment to the LCC. If they had made a serious effort to compete with the big two in grading UK coins, perhaps on price, the advantages of being based in the UK would have taken hold. As it was, they didn't put enough effort in and have paid the price.

A serious mistake I believe was to use a different scale to the other two making direct comparison difficult. I know a scale of 1 - 100 is more logical than 1 - 70 but the Sheldon based grading scale had already become too entrenched in numismatics for people to change.

It's a shame because we have lost their undoubted expertise in Britiish coins. As has been said, the big two make a lot of mistakes with British coins.