Quote:
Originally Posted by glchen
Barry, I'm not an economist, but I believe that you are comparing macroeconomic effects with microeconomics. For many individual stocks, it the same thing in that it can be all smoke and mirrors for all we know. We don't know if the insiders are buying or selling; the companies put forward different metrics like # of clicks, who their social evangelizers are, when they are losing money hand over foot, that you really don't know what the company is doing. You never have all of the information.
It's the same thing here. You have a bunch of cards that were submitted by Gary Moser. You don't know if they were altered or not. There's a good chance they were altered, but maybe not. Is the entire market going to tank because of this group of cards, probably not. Probably only this group is tainted. Are these cards worth 0? No, they are still authentic, but likely altered. So the floor to the price is the price of authentic/altered. However, the card might not be altered, so it probably won't reach that floor, but will likely just sell at a discount to another card at that grade. Why just a discount rather than the floor? Because where many buyers won't stand to have a card in their collection that may be altered/tainted, there's another buyer who's optimistic/naïve, whatever you want to call it, who thinks this card is completely fine after looking at it themselves, and are happy to get the card for cheaper than they would otherwise.
I'm not saying that I agree with this mentality, but just trying to explain it.
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Hi Gary,
So here is something that still troubles me. If the hobby has reached the point where the slightly altered cards are almost impossible to distinguish from the unaltered ones, then what use does the hobby have for third party graders? We pay them a lot of money to make determinations that many of us don't feel qualified to make ourselves. But it appears that as graders and authenticators they are no more skilled than we are.
So it's starting to look like (and truth be told it's been going on for a long time), all of these machinations are reduced down to one thing: getting the number we want on the slab. The whole hobby is really about that number.
Sorry folks, but it's a sad state of affairs. And I don't like it one bit.