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Posted By: warshawlaw

I find that tracking price data on ebay is the best way to find the realistic national market for a card. The fact that hard core collectors from all over slug it out for rarer cards on ebay proves its utility as a means of pricing those items. In economic terms, ebay is very close to a perfect market (where all participants have equal access to information and equal opportunity to participate in the market).

I certainly think you can find bargains at shows as compared to ebay because so many non-market factors go into pricing cards for shows. I often pick up cards at shows for well under what they bring on ebay.

As far as using real prices for references, my boxing card book (shameless plug) does precisely that. I have been a long time vocal critic of publications that find it necessary to extrapolate prices for cards that do not exist simply in order to fill out their columns.