People often ask, "Where do you get all your values?" Our answer is, "Many sources."

The majority of values listed in Coin World's Coin Values and at www.coinvaluesonline.com are derived from prices realized at major public auctions. Private transactions are another useful source of pricing data, although we are not privy to many of these transactions. If a private transaction (especially for record prices) is made known to us and is properly documented through a copy of the bill of sale, we will use the information in formulating values.While many other price guides get their values from contributing specialist dealers, Coin Values remains independent and unbiased. The Coin Values market analysts do not professionally buy and sell the coins for which we establish values.

While some of our values, especially for the less-expensive coins, are derived from dealer price lists, buy lists and wholesale bids from dealer trading networks, we do not rely solely on dealer sources. We look at the market as a whole.

For many scarce coins one challenge is in finding sales data. Much of what we find is not current. Sometimes, transactions are lacking in particular grades. But, just because we can't find sales data for certain coins or grades doesn't mean we should ignore the listings.

We have to keep those values in line with the market and we do this by "interpolating" values using those grades for which we've found current values as benchmarks.

Reviewing transactions we've monitored during the past decade or so for the 1804 Draped Bust quarter dollar provides insight into the pricing information, or lack thereof, available in the marketplace. We found two auction appearances of the coin in Mint State 65 from 2008 and 2006, no sales in MS-64, one 2005 sale in MS-63 and two from 1999. In MS-62 there was one sale from each of the following years: 2005, 2004 and 1998. No sales appear in MS-60 or AU-55 and sales of lower grade examples are scattered.

Besides a lack of information for certain coins, we often encounter large differences in prices between coins graded by different grading services and sometimes even between coins graded by the same firm, complicating the process.