Revenant

Looks like my new notes are arriving today from Noteshobby And my P3s arrived at my in laws yesterday - I'll see them this weekend.

It's a good tip but they need to make it to the graders first. I'm guessing there must have been some world coins hitting at highers tiers that are bumping back my moderns.

Well, I think you will be waiting a while on those. It arrived there 6/7, entered on 6/24, "Scheduled" for 6 weeks since 7/7 and all they'll say is "you're in the queue, I can't tell how far back, wait time is now 61 business days." It was like 49 when I sent mine in. I guess I'll see if I know results by Sept 1.

Sounds about right. Seems like there are some on eBay you could go for in the $750 range.

A 65 EPQ 107 year old note. I wonder how much that goes for.

You never know. Something to realize is that that video is monetized and has gotten a lot of views, a lot of ad play, and he's probably made his $200 back many times over from YouTube revenue sharing. So good on him. We'd have a hard time pulling that off. But yeah. Enjoy buying the art markers he was using. Those things ain't cheap either, yo! I say this as a former high-school art-brat.

If you watch the video through he addresses that and the answer is 100%, "No." It is no longer legal tender once you deface it. He used a $100 bill as the world's most expensive piece of art paper.

In fairness though, some people don't care how much their art supplies cost and will use a US $50 or $100 bill for paper to draw on.

Going to start getting into Bolivares now? I saw this image years ago and I've never forgotten it. But it just gets so bizarre.

I don't know. They've had all the others, up to VEN111, in pretty consistent supply I feel and they have been selling them. Not 104 though. Not if you want something nicer than 65 EPQ.

I think that's still a ways away but I could be wrong. I keep looking for the new 2021 Venezuelan notes to start popping up in PMG holders and so far it hasn't happened. I'm starting to feel confused and frustrated with that one.

Ah. Well, nuts. I'll have to continue looking for ways to make your life more difficult now.

I got my shipping confirmation this morning. You?

Ha! I guess you'll just have to sweat that out a bit. 👿 Who's the Ninja now? (Maybe both of us. )

I find people reasonably tolerant of typos in a blog type setting as it is less formal than a periodical. I see the bigger challenge if striking out on your own and not using a site like this is building an audience. You have to find and build an audience by promoting it elsewhere - places like here or reddit - or you're mostly just going to be shouting into the void.

If you snapped up a 68 EPQ from Noteshobby I think you'll be leading me by 9-15 points soon even with this, but don't get lazy. Dealing with that 69 EPQ you have on the P-83 is going to be a challenge to deal with though. Edit: Also, if I'm being completely honest, I bought this today after watching it for quite a while out of fear that you might buy it if I didn't, and I wanted this upgrade at the price I got. I doubt this will induce anyone to buy this that wasn't going to before (other than you), because, while I pay attention to prefixes on these and find them interesting, they don't get you registry points - unless it's "ZA" for a replacement note. So there's no reason for this to interest others.

PMG posted my P-3 submission as "shipped" and posted grade results today. Received on 8/3/21 and Shipped on 8/12/21. 9 calendar days, folks. That is a turnaround. A 65 and a 66 are solid, especially for 1st dollar notes and very consistent with my set overall. A 67 or 68 would have been GREAT. A 63 or 64 would have disappointed me. This is kind of a literal shrug. I looked at it and just nodded a little and was like, "Not bad." The seller I bought them from advertised them as "gem." A 65 or higher is gem Uncirc, so... as advertised. Can't complain about getting what you paid for, right? Since the cert#s are active in the system already I've already plugged them into my competitive and signature sets! I wasn't excited about getting to fill those holes at all! Competition-wise these additions are far from game changing but I'm still happy to see 100% on that set, and it is just going to be what it's going to be until and unless I decide to drop big-bucks for a P-3a, P-3b or P-3c to smackdown with the other 3 in the top 4. Of course, it would be wonderful if one day I could collect all three of those rare varieties and achieve the same thing with P-2, P-3 and P-4 that I've achieved with P-1. That would be INSANE! Such a mind-blowing achievement to me. But that's for later. For today, in other news, Mike was nice enough to point out to me that he's trying to "ninja" me in the Billions short-set. So this one is for you, Mike: A 3 point upgrade, bumping my 65 EPQ (in an old gen holder) to a new 68 EPQ. Just so you can work just a little harder, my friend. I'll have to work on bumping up my 1 Billion P-83 and my50 Billion P-87 later and even then I suspect you may one-day over take me, but you will have to bring an A game. I am REALLY curious though to see if the note that comes is really going to be an AB prefix (The seller has more than one, so I don't consider this guaranteed). But an image of a 67 EPQ they have for sale also shows an AB prefix and so I'm thinking the seller got a wad of AB prefix notes and cherry-picked and sent in several so I'm hopeful. Anything other than AA is pretty rare in the later 3rd dollar notes (purely in my subjective experience) since they were in print for such a short time. If this note IS an AB prefix it'll get added to my sig set and the AA prefix 65 EPQ will stay too. If is an AA prefix I'll drop the 65 from the sig set - like I did with my new 20T replacing the old one. I also (to save on shipping, naturally) picked up a new VEN111b for my Venezuela set, to compliment my VEN111a. Since I have the a and b for VEN110 and VEN111 now I've also added a slot for VEN109a in my signature set and I'm going to make that an official goal - a and b for all three of those.

I think 7 of 12 have the printing on the back but that hardly seems like it would matter for STAMP Cancelled.

When I bought a P-15 note off a dealer a while back it just had "Exceptional Paper Quality," no "Stamp Cancelled" designation. So I was surprised when I submitted my 12 traveller's checks and all 12 got the label. The new P-17 I just got, which has a cert# indicating it was submitted after mine were submitted and graded, does not have the designation. So, I'm really not sure what this means... I'm not sure if they just forgot to include it on this one (which I think was one of 4 or 5 the seller submitted with this group) or if they aren't sure if they're going to keep using it or not, or what. But this introduces the idea that my 12 are the only ones that have this label / comment and they may stay that way. I wonder if that would make them more or less valuable? The joys of trying to build registry sets over time and with notes you bought and which were graded by others over a longer span of time. Side note, but you can really see that Zimbabwe bird watermark (or at least the outline of it) when you look on the back of these things, at least in my scans.

I would tend so say In. They make me think of the Traveller's checks - not really notes or currency, but, for some odd reason they got pick numbers assigned and now I can be a little freak about collecting them. That's cool though. Part of the demise of the old "2nd World."

So after a 66 EPQ P-3b went for about $370 last week, today, a 67 EPQ went for a whopping $761 + $10 shipping. That... is... something. My P-3d and P-3e, which where only acknowledged as received 5 days ago, are already scheduled for grading... So PMG seems to really be on it and I'm hoping to get grades on those by the end of the month maybe. Even if they grade well, they're still a d and an e, so I won't have struck it rich. But at least I'll have some P-3s in my set. Wow.

I didn’t get a chance to dig into this as much as I wanted to during the move, so this post has been somewhat “on hold.” In late July I noticed a seller had a P-17 note for sale - a 64 EPQ - starting at $12 + shipping and it popped up in my saved search email. This doesn’t sound like something that would get my attention normally since the two I graded myself got 64 EPQ and 66 EPQ and so I don’t really “need” this, and it doesn’t upgrade my set. HOWEVER! This P-17 was stamped 18 Oct 2004. That’s the same date stamp that was on a 65 EPQ P-17 I lost out on when Bonezdogg sniped me with 2 seconds to go with a bid about 55 cents higher than my max. He won that one for $47 + shipping + tax - maybe tax. I was seriously so mad when I lost out on that by such a narrow margin. I was salty about that for days when what showed up in their set and I knew who'd beat me. While I already have one in that grade and one in a higher grade, I wanted and still wanted that note for the date stamp. So, I decided to watch it… but then I noticed the seller had a 65 EPQ P-17 starting at $20. So, I watched both. I decided I’d try for one or both depending on how things were looking. The notes were ending at about 3 AM Monday so when the 64 EPQ had picked up a bid and the 65 EPQ hadn’t I put in a bid at like 11 PM Sunday night and went to bed. I woke up to see that I’d won the 65 EPQ unopposed for $20 ($27 after s&t) and someone else walked off with the 64 EPQ unopposed for $12 + s&t. I was pretty stoked about this! At the time I lost out on the other one I was frustrated to have lost out on such a desirable date stamp (to me) but I knew I was barely willing to pay want I’d bid and I knew at the time I was better off just sending mine in and seeing what grades I got and I got that confirmed when I got my 66 EPQ. But I still wanted that date stamp! And now I’ve won this one in the same grade for half the price. Sometimes patience does pay off. The note has made it to the US from the international dealer and should be in-hand in a few more days - the first note the be delivered to the new house. The nice thing here is one of the notes I graded myself was also stamped on that 18 OCT 2003, that one a P-19: I also have a P-16, a P-17 (or 2), a P-18 (or 2), and a P-19, all stamped as PAID Inward Clearing by the RBZ on 08 Dec 2003. That’s 4 of 6 notes for a set of Traveller’s checks stamped on that date. This is probably not surprising given that I got all of those from the same seller who probably got a bunch of them from the same person / place, and they just got a bunch from that day / batch. But it still raises interesting possibilities - date sets / sets that have all the dates the same, branch / location / stamp sets where all 6 notes come from the same branch / location with the stamps or sets of the same note from different branches. You could really go nuts digging into this just playing with the stamps and dates. Also, incidentally, the stamps on for 08 Dec 2003 in the checks below are all upside down. The same seller had a P-15 in 65 EPQ but I didn’t go for it even though it got no bids, and I could have snapped it up easy - it is the same grade and has the same stamps with the same dates as another P-15 I bought from the same seller. So I feel it adds no value to my collection of these. I have been checking and watching the pop reports for these and I did see a small uptick in the populations for P-15 and P-17, but just for those 2, not for the others. So, I’m guessing this is the result of this dealer submitting these for resale. This also has me thinking there’s no value in buying raw checks from this dealer because they’re already submitting what they have that seems promising and this also makes me think this dealer doesn’t have any good / promising notes for P-16, P-18, P-19, and P-20. Maybe I’m wrong and they’re just taking their time. However, very interestingly… they got a new 66 EPQ P-17. Mine isn’t the sole finest anymore. But I haven’t seen that one offered for sale… yet. It's a little funny to me that I'm doing such a deep dive on these but I'm largely ignoring what I thought would be my "next thing" for the Zimbabwe set after my pick-set was done, that being getting more Replacement notes or more non-Replacement notes to compliment my existing Replacement notes. But I just find these / these stamp and date variants oddly interesting and I'm going a bit nuts but I'm enjoying it so much.

Ouch! I'm hoping I'm only 2-3 weeks from grades on the z coins now. I also probably won't do anything again until January or February now, but I have already picked up 2 more z coins for grading.

They were 65s and 66s I think I already have several replacement notes and I list prefixes in my sig set for a reason. 🤣 More on this later but I could also do a deep dive on branch stamps and dates on Traveller's checks. 🤣 My wife will be thrilled. My NGC submission arrived on 6/7 or 6/8. They entered it 6/24. Went to "scheduled for grading" on 7/7 and has been there for 4 weeks. It just is what it is. 🤷

Today I got the email from PMG that they got my submission of a Zimbabwean P-3d and P-3e that I'd bought raw to finally fill that gap in my first dollar set. The d and e aren't as desirable as the a or b but they're still quite nice. However, the day I was getting ready to mail those off to PMG a dealer listed a high grade P-3a and a high grade P-3b for sale starting at a low price on eBay with a 10 day timer / run. I knew I probably wouldn't win because I expected them to go for about $125 and I just wasn't willing to spend that for them right now but I wanted to know what they'd go for. I was surprised! The 3a went for about $230 and the 3b went for about $370. Lots of bidders. A few of them wanted these things BAD I guess. lol. Once again, glad I knew going in I had no chance. I mostly don't see much inflation / price increases going on with these but it does seem to be happening with the rarer / highly desirable varieties and notes. PMG seems to be moving fast. I'm hoping to find out how the P-3d and P-3e did at grading sometime in September and have them back home for imaging well before December. I'm going to love having a 100% complete 1st dollar registry set at last.