Collectors Universe

[Tsaiko]

What I found interesting was that the article states that the stock rises and falls with the price of gold, something I haven't considered, but lately, during the pull back in gold prices, CLCT has had a nice run. I haven't checked the long term history, but short term it's certainly not the case.

They seem to be dedicated to paying their dividend, even though it exceeds earnings. Good for the investor, but risky, imo, for the company.

[WhenItWasAHobby]

Thanks for the link. In my opinion it's a totally fluff article. Both the coin and card grading divisions have serious problems and in my opinion the stock is vastly overpriced. They may be able to detect some amateur coin alterations, but it's become obvious by PGCS' own admission that they have some serious credibility problems. If you look at their annual stock reports, they disclose how much money PGCS has lost in coins they've had to buy back for not initially detecting the unethical alterations. In fact in just in three months in 2008 they paid out $822,000 as revealed in this article:

http://www.coinlink.com/News/coin-gr...ms-hit-822000/

What was even worse is that many of these doctored coins were sold by PGCS' authorized dealers and as a result CU/PGCS filed a lawsuit against these dealers and the suit was dismissed. After reading the 51 page transcript of the final hearing, I found out that the Federal court dismissed the suit with prejudice since CU didn't adequately present factual evidence that the defendants violated Federal statutes for RICO and the Lanham Act. The judge told CU to pursue the remainder of their claims for relief in state court.

The main issue is that CU requires by contract that their authorized coin dealers can not submit doctored coins. The big problem is that CU/PCGS obviously has a problem detecting these unethical coin repairs and these doctored coins seem to show up their unscrupulous alterations over time and as a result CU/PCGS has to buy these coins back. Here's the link to the when the suit was filed:

http://www.coinlink.com/News/counter...universe-pcgs/

The sad thing is that after the suit went away, collectors and investors showed no concern of this massive problem and carried on with business as usual.

[Tsaiko]

Good info Dan, I think there is a bit of irrational exuberance going on there.