[Exhibitman]

Sounds like the OP got crispy crittered on some buys.

I dropped pricing data from my latest book because of the shilling and the existence of real time price data. VCP is quite useful for mapping not just prices but also frequency of sales. That is often more important than price for vintage and regional cards.

Anyone who thinks postwar mainstream cards are not going to fluctuate is delusional. Too many examples exist for prices to just go up and up endlessly. I've been collecting since the 1970s. I've seen over and over how prices run up and then copies of the cards pour into the market. I know guys who had high end cards and who've dumped them and downgraded because the profit taking opportunity is too good to pass up.

The AHs have no duty to ferret out bad sales; I am not sure they could even do so without going in and specially altering their software, which ain't gonna happen.

Calling market tops is inherently guesswork: never wrong, only early. I see strong prices on a wide variety of issues that are not worth enough to be manipulated by a cabal of billionaires. That's just the byproduct of a long expansion of the general economy and the resulting cash collectors have right now.

And they're freakin baseball cards. If you have to obsess over market manipulation and cabals of billionaires you need to get a different hobby.