Quote:
Originally Posted by Brent G.
If someone wants to ignore extensive sales data over the past 12, 6, 3 months, or even the past week, and price an item at way above those numbers, that's certainly their right. A used car salesman can ignore Kelley Blue Book and price an '86 Ford Escort at $20,000 if they want. And they can sit on that thing when no one buys it.
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Who made Kelley blue book the authority on price? It is a "guide" - a starting point. If that 86 Escort had never been driven or only had a couple hundred miles on it, is it not worth more than 1 with 100,000 miles on it? Garaged/not garaged? maintained "by the book"/not maintained. Lots of degrees in between of any of the aforementioned factors.
Example to illustrate the points that:
1) The historical pricing you are looking at is only a portion of the sales that have taken place. There are a multitude of private sales that are not public information that will vary from the public sales we all have access to.
2) The inconsistency of the grading process has been discussed ad nauseum in multiple places - even looking at the public sales data - you will see discrepancies - often huge for cards of the same "grade". It has become relevant to "grade the graders" - making determining fair market value much more elusive
In conclusion, while many would like to think of determining fair market value as scientific an simple as looking at past sales as the determiner of current fair market value, it is far from that simple.
That all said, I would say that the greater the number of recent (for retired players - 1-2 months) data points that exist for a particular card in question - the closer together those data points are "should" be a good starting point of a predictor of current price. The bigger the skew in time or variance of price - the less reliable those data points are. If we are talking about true rarities - the last sale is almost meaningless.
While I have certainly seen a fair share of what I would call "overpriced cards" at shows, there are plenty there that are either priced fairly or within what should be negotiating distance of fair.