Our story
We tried to build a stock market for coins.
It didn't work as a business. But on the way, it surfaced something real — an asset class nobody had named, and a gap nobody was filling. This page is the honest record of how we got from one to the other.
The idea: make coins legible
ColCur started from a simple frustration. The coin market runs on opacity — the dealer always knows more than you do — and there has never been a single, knowable price for a graded coin, let alone a total value for the category. We thought we could fix that: take certified coins and make them tradeable and legible the way modern assets are. Hand someone a coin the way you'd hand someone a stock symbol, and have both of you see the same number.
That was the ambition behind the original site — a stock market for physical coins. Tickers, prices, a portfolio you could watch. It was a good-faith attempt to bring transparency to a market that had never had it.
As a business, it didn't work
We'll say it plainly: as a business, this was an unsuccessful attempt. The audience most drawn to “trade coins like stocks” was the audience least able to pay for it, and the thing we could honestly offer — a price, not an exchange — was never going to clear that gap. We are not an exchange, a broker, or a place to get rich. Pretending otherwise would have been the easy road and the wrong one.
So the “stock market for coins” is not the product anymore. It's a metaphor we're careful with, and a chapter we're comfortable having behind us. What it left behind, though, turned out to matter more than the thing we set out to build.
What it surfaced: an asset class nobody had named
Building the price data taught us something we didn't expect. There is a whole tier of certified coins that behaves like an asset class no one had bothered to name. When tens of thousands of the same coin exist in the same certified grade, any one of them is a near-substitute for any other — fungible enough to carry a single, knowable price. And yet they still trade above their metal: design, history, condition, and the grading brand keep a premium that never goes away. Fungible enough to price; still a collectible.
We call this tier HPG — High Population Grade — coins certified by PCGS or NGC in populations large enough that a single price, and a total market cap, finally mean something. Preserving and publishing that figure — the HPG Index — is the reason this site still exists. The methodology is open about exactly what the number is, and what it isn't.
The gap underneath: CabinetGrade
The same work that surfaced HPG also revealed the gap beneath it: the coins too cheap to bother sending off for slabbing, and the collectors who simply don't want a third-party holder around their coin in the first place. A grade you can trust, without the plastic.
That gap became the spinoff — CabinetGrade, Photographic Cabinet grading: we grade the coin from photographs, and leave the coin in your hands. It is now the primary business. ColCur quietly serves it — by being the honest reference and the record of how the whole thing came to be.
CabinetGrade is a separate brand with a different voice and a different audience. The two sites cross-refer, but they're not the same thing — pricing is colcur's concern, not theirs.
Visit cabinetgrade.comWhy we keep this site alive
Not for the revenue. The eBay affiliate links here just keep the lights on — they were never the plan and they never will be. We keep ColCur alive because the HPG market cap deserves to exist as a public number, and because the honest record of how we got here has value on its own.
The goal is small and specific: that someone, someday, can simply say “HPG is on the rise” or “HPG is now at $X billion” and have it mean something — a category with a name and a number, kept in the open. That's it. That's the whole reason this page is still here.
What ColCur is — and isn't — today
What it is
- A public reference index for the HPG asset class — the market cap, kept in the open and updated daily.
- The honest story of how a failed exchange became a useful number.
- A quiet reference that serves the grading business, CabinetGrade.
What it isn't
- An exchange — we don't custody, clear, or execute trades.
- A broker or dealer — coins stay in their owner's hands.
- Investment advice — the index is a reference, not a recommendation.
- The main business — that's CabinetGrade; revenue was never the point here.