Are You Using the GFRC CAC Price Research Tool?

Originally published on Jan 10 and June 6 2018

Throughout semiconductor and numismatic careers that span over 40 years, I've always found myself building custom information systems to increase personal efficiencies. During the late 1980s, I was the architect and developer of Fairchild Semiconductor Engineering Work Bench information system for semiconductor yield management. Armed with a staff of six programmers and engineers, we developed an information system that absorbed and analyzed factory production and test data from sites in the United States and Asia. The goal was 100% cumulative production yield and the absolute minimum cost of production for our chips.

The same approach was taken for Liberty Seated dime die variety research. I needed an organized research database that would be available in my home office, at coin shows and online for eBay use while working in Asia. That database evolved into The Definitive Resource for Liberty Seated Dime Die Variety Collectors commonly known here as the "web-book". It was ground breaking back in 2004 as die variety publishing was done via hardbound books.

Now that GFRC and building a numismatic community of sophisticated collectors are my primary focus, another information system is under constructed. I've discussed the Sales Archive in the past few days. The Sales Archive will eventually be the primary GFRC numismatic pricing tool with CoinFacts auction records being a sanity check. It will take another year of effort and sales data but we will get there.

Not yet receiving much attention is the GFRC CAC Price Research tool. As incremental CAC approved coins are sold, this database and information extraction tool will become more powerful. By simply selecting three parameters (Type, Denomination and Date), one can immediately see all CAC approved coins sold for a date.

Two tables are generated for each search. The first table is an extract, from the Sales Archives, of all CAC coins sold by GFRC since inception. The coins are sorted by grade with Average, Min and Max statistics. A Records column presents the individual CAC approved coins sold and the sale dates. If a selected date has multiple mints used for production, then separate tables for each mint will be displayed. Following is the CAC prices table for Liberty Seated half dollars struck during 1849 as an example.

Please note that the CAC Pricing Research tool will not separate out individual die varieties. If that level of granularity is desired, then please go directly to the Sales Archive application. All die varieties will be captured at the Date level for the CAC Pricing Research application. So please be aware of this fact when encountering a high priced data point as these will be mostly likely a function of die variety premiums.

Following this table is a second extraction is made from the Sales Archives that lists all the lots that were captured and summarizes in the top level CAC results table. But there is more! We also include, in the CAC records tables, any current coins that are for sale on GFRC price list. As a result, customers can research CAC pricing results from the Sales Archive and compare to current offering on the GFRC Price Lists. No other dealer, small or large, provides this level of information access to facilitate a purchasing decision. Indeed, GFRC is breaking new ground in the numismatic industry!

The screen shot below presents the results for Liberty Seated dimes and the 1841 date. Please note a combination of past sales records and two coins that are current available on the GFRC price list. Those are easily noted by the shopping cart icon in the right most column.

Pricing CAC approved early type coins is quite challenging and time consuming when using auction records. CoinFacts gets us part of the way there but frankly, I don't have the time or patience to search individual auction record listings to see which were CAC approved. The GFRC CAC Price Research is fast and concise. Again, within another year's time and more sale data, this tool will become incredibly powerful and hopefully set a new standard in the numismatic industry. Efforts to construct tabular CAC price guides are traditional approaches while GFRC uses actual sales records where one can inspect the coins in the database.