[Archive]

Posted By: Eric Brehm

Assessing card value based on a single sale, even if it is the most recent sale that took place, is somewhat problematic, because of differences in card quality within grade, market movement over time (for the card, the set, and/or the hobby in general), differences in sales/auction venues and participants, and so on. I once asked Bobby Binder to modify the search capabilities at VCP so that all of the sales data for the cards in a set can be returned, not just the most recent figures, but he hasn't gotten round to it yet. At the very least, one could take averages across multiple sales, say within a particular time period, so that differences due to variations in card quality could be smoothed out.

Now when looking at the total value for an entire set, using the last sales price of each card in the set isn't so bad, since you are aggregating across a large number of cards, and thus some of the unusually high and low prices for particular cards will tend to cancel each other out, similar to the effect of using averaged prices for the individual cards themselves.

That is not to say that looking at the last sales price for each card in a set in a particular grade is a meaningless exercise -- while the above listings from VCP highlight some of the anomalies that occur, they still generally match most people's perception of what the relative values should be.