Fortunately (for me) both of the coins I was looking at were in the United States, as am I, so that wasn't a concern for me. If it had been it could have been very influential in the decision. I like to avoid such issues, even when the coin is just up in Canada. I've been oddly successful in collecting this European gold series from American dealers.

The US, rather than their country of origin, does seem to be the source for a lot of quality examples of world coins including European gold - in my experience the coins of the Netherlands/Belgium are almost an exception in this regard with Schulman b.v. being the main source by far - it is great that you have been able to find them at home. As a result I do tend to buy many coins from the US and end up 'importing' them back!

A few years ago the US was almost the only source of graded examples however there has been a noticeable change recently where sales at French (and Monaco), Swiss and Japanese and even some UK and German auction houses now have significant numbers of slabbed coins which certainly improves things however the populations for many issues are usually very low and I expect self-submitted coins will still form a large part of collections of graded world coins for a while yet.

Here in South Africa we do not receive our coins purchased overseas ,I am lucky if I receive a coin 4-6 months later ,lost lots of $ ,so sad !!!

On ‎12‎/‎20‎/‎2018 at 3:32 AM, ColonialCoinsUK said:

A few years ago the US was almost the only source of graded examples however there has been a noticeable change recently where sales at French (and Monaco), Swiss and Japanese and even some UK and German auction houses now have significant numbers of slabbed coins which certainly improves things however the populations for many issues are usually very low and I expect self-submitted coins will still form a large part of collections of graded world coins for a while yet.

I'd certainly be tempted to start some self-submitting myself, but the nature of this Netherlands set I'm trying to build has somewhat prevented it. The coins I still need at this point have mintages of 50,000-70,000, and they were made about 130 years ago. Even ungraded, they just don't show up very often. The joys of trying to build a set of somewhat rare coins. It still amazes me some days that I got to get my hands on an 1887 (40,754 minted, 59 graded by NGC), and an 1888 (35,585 minted, only 22 graded by NGC across all grades). I originally thought I'd probably only be able to get the 5 common dates and have to stop there.