Quote:
Originally Posted by alanu
Shill bidding is wrong, unethical, illegal, etc., but my biggest problem is I'm addicted to the auctions and bidding and buying cards, the only way to stop shill bidding is if no one would overbid for cards and let the shillers get stuck for the cards.
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Definitely. And this is really the only current way that things are kept from flying apart at the seems as they currently are.
Only issue is, again for high profile cards, what is an "overbid"?
People get their concept of fair prices from previous sales. But if all of the previous sales came from the same suspicious forum, well then you have a problem. This is precisely why many high profile cards never make it to ebay, because sellers know they would take a dive ... or when they do make it to ebay, they consign the card so that they can bid on it. Now at least on ebay some detective work can be done when this happens.
You're gonna see some people lash out at me personally here, and that's because I'm challenging something that is probably near and dear to their hearts ... something they've based a lot of their collection on and now is being questioned ... and they simply can't handle it. It's just what happens ... and is fine. Thankfully this board has a nice ignore function
It's always clear to me when someone has a weak argument because they result to personal attacks, name calling and general immature behavior. This is the kind of stuff that got a lot of the same bad seeds either kicked off CU or reprimanded there. I'm glad PSA instituted their forum rules and have found posting their a lot more enjoyable since.
But yeah, as for overbidding, thankfully there are a lot of resources to use to come up with a comfortable price ... and it's easy enough to filter out the obvious balloons. A good example is the 1978 Topps #707 Rookie Shortstops PSA 10 card:
You can clearly see how this card took a dive after coming back to reality on ebay after a stint at 2 of the AHs. Now it's reasonable for the card to have a certain increase in value as unopened material has dried up a lot, but this kind of pattern of buy high at AHs and sell low on ebay isn't uncommon for premium cards ... and there's certainly a reason for this.
The unfortunate thing is some online publications will take this latest hammer price and use that as an indicator of the new "value" of the card, when in this case, it's most likely just another balloon waiting to pop.