I am a relative novice to this world compared to you all. A few things with respect to economic theory that could be going on here. First, you have supply and demand curves, and relatively speaking, you have a fixed supply curve at best, or an inward shifting one at worse. Prices could go up due to contrived scarcity, or due to rising demand. It seems based on discussions, nobody is certain.
Second, you could have cartel pricing going on here. A few people/organizations are working together to control supply. In order to do that, one must first corner the market supply, and then trickle it out at an agreed upon speed. Or they could be divvying up players: you got Aaron, I got Mays etc. by company. OPEC has done this for close to 50 years to varying levels of short term and long term success. The DoJ is not going to go after collusion in the baseball card secondary market.
Third, you could have somebody buying 10 or 15 of a sort of specific card or player, then purposely bidding up the last one purchased to set the market so they can unload 1 or 2 at 10x value to an ill informed buyer to break even, and then unload 13 remaining in the OPEC manner. Would this require auction manipulation? Perhaps, but that's apparently not stopped many people before in this industry. In addition, if you owned a company that charged based on final pricing for your services, this could almost be a lost leader in your business.
Fourth, I see a ton of posts about "1000% year-over-year growth in price. That's a bubble." Well, not necessarily. It depends on if we started with an undervalued asset or an overvalued, mega-liquid, mature product. If you bought Sirius XM Satelitte stock at the trough of the 2009 financial crisis, you would have a similiar return over 3 years. Same wih gold from 2004 to 2011, but from 1980s to 2004 you would have been flat on gold notional terms. My point is that assets don't appreciate linearly, and when they move, they move. Sometimes they have a blowoff top (bubble) and sometimes they don't. But 1000% on a $0.25 asset is a heckuva lot different than 1000% on a $5 million asset. Elasticity of demand is much more inelastic on cheaper prices than higher prices. So I would be careful about getting wrapped up in percentage increase numbers, in my opinion. As crazy as it may sound, $1500 is not a lot of money to professionals in large cities where the cost of living may be 5x middle and southern America.
Finally, the industry is well known for lack of good institutionalization of risk and controls. Think about the worst firms you can find in finance, and that's sort of where this industry stands in my mind as a collective. Sad, but unfortunately true. So there could be some dodgy things going on. Again, you all know so much more than I do about that. When you have prices charged based on appraised value rather than a flat rate, it's in that comapny's best interest to have higher appraisal values. It's in long-term market players best interests to see their assets appreciate quicker.
To hear people bit h about how expensive things are, though, is a welcome change to the past 25 years in this hobby. You have all dealt in depreciating assets for so long, that any inventory you actually hold that's appreciating could be unloaded at these "absurd" prices and you get all the joys and experiences the past few decades free of charge or with a small profit. Not bad, I would say.
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