Back to grading school — two weeks at ANA Summer Seminar

I just got back from the ANA Summer Seminar in Colorado Springs, and I had an absolute blast.

If you've never heard of it, Summer Seminar is the ANA's big education event — a couple of weeks every summer where collectors and dealers from all over the country take over the Colorado College campus and do nothing but coins. I signed up for the grading track this year: Grading I from June 21st to the 24th, then Grading II from June 28th through July 1st.

The classes

Grading I was taught by Don Bonser, Jim Stoutjesdyk, and Wade Spencer. Grading II was Tom Hallenbeck and Jerry Bobbe. Between the five of them we're talking about guys who've graded for PCGS and ANACS, run major auction houses, and handled more coins than I'll see in my lifetime. They threw a ton of great knowledge our way, and they didn't sugarcoat it either — you grade a coin, you commit to your grade out loud, and then you find out what it actually is. Over and over, all day. That's the whole method, and it works.

What stuck with me

A few things I keep thinking about now that I'm home:

• Luster first. I used to look at wear. Now I rotate the coin under the light and watch the cartwheel before anything else. Luster tells you the truth about whether a coin ever circulated.
• Go to the high points. The cheek, the breast feathers, the knuckles — wear shows up there first. Check those spots before the rest of the coin talks you into something.
• The AU/UNC line is where the money is. Grading II lived in that About Uncirculated to Mint State range, and for good reason — that's where one point changes the price the most, and where my eye needed the most work.
• Copper, silver, and gold all lie to you differently. Toning hides different things on each metal. You have to learn each one on its own terms.

Am I a professional grader now? Not even close. But my eye is a lot sharper than it was a month ago, and I know exactly what to practice.

Why I did it

Every coin I sell is certified by PCGS, NGC, or CAC, and that's never changing. But I don't want to just trust the label — I want to see what the graders saw. When I pick a coin for the shop, I want to know it's a nice example for the grade because I can tell, not just because the slab says so.

We built NumiGrade during all this

Here's the part I'm most excited about. The whole method of those classes is reps — grade the coin, commit out loud, find out what it really is, repeat until your eye changes. Somewhere in the middle of week one I realized I didn't want the reps to stop when class ended. So between sessions (and probably later into the nights than I should admit), we built that exact loop into an app: NumiGrade.

Pick a series, swipe through real graded examples from Poor-1 on up until one matches the coin in your hand, flip obverse and reverse, commit to your grade, and see how you did. There are daily streaks, head-to-head grading duels with friends, and an Eye Rating that moves as your accuracy does. It's the Summer Seminar method, in your pocket, and building it while taking the classes meant every lesson those five instructors taught went straight into how it works. It's in invite-only early access right now, and I'd love for other collectors to sharpen their eye with it the way I've been sharpening mine.

An open love letter to Heritage and Stack's Bowers

Speaking of grading by example — a tool like this is only as good as its photography, and let's be honest about who has the best coin photography on earth: Heritage Auctions and Stack's Bowers Galleries. Decades of archives, millions of coins, every one shot beautifully and tied to a real certified grade. I've spent more hours in both of your archives than I'll ever admit, and half of what I know about what a nice coin looks like, I learned from your catalog photos.

So here it is, in public: if anyone at Heritage or Stack's Bowers is reading this, I would love to talk about licensing your photography for NumiGrade's grade reference — full attribution, links back to your listings, whatever makes it work on your end. Your images teaching the next generation of collectors to grade would be a genuinely great use of the best photo archives in the hobby. Yes, this is me buttering you up. It's also every word true. My inbox is open: mike@snowpackcoins.com.

What's next

I'm already looking forward to next year's Summer Seminar. And I don't even have to wait that long — I'm taking another grading class at the ANA World's Fair of Money in Pittsburgh at the end of August. If you're going to be in Pittsburgh, come find me. I'd love to talk coins.

— Mike