[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by Snowman

I take everything from Sports Card Radio with a grain of salt. Which is to say, I don't believe a damn word he ever says without actual evidence. He has repeatedly proven himself to be full of sh!t. This "anonymous" source is probably either some random troll from Blowhard or just himself making stuff up to get a rise.

I have first-hand experience with taking "loans" from PWCC (in my case, I wasn't borrowing money against cards in my vault, but rather taking an advance on cards I had already consigned for auction, but it's the same process). This is how it works. First, they appraise your cards and assign an insurance value to them. These values are always low. In some cases, extremely low (one of my cards was insured for $10k, but sold for $18k at auction the following week). If you have cards that you want to take a loan against, you have to put in a loan request for the amount you wish to receive. You are allowed to request up to 50% of the insured value for items in your vault, and up to 75% for cards that have already sold in one of their auctions, but for which you have not yet received payment (normally, it takes about 2 1/2 weeks to receive payment, but you can escalate some of those proceeds if approved - in my case, it was free of charge. I did not have to pay any fees or interest since my cards were already submitted to auction. However, there are fees if you just want to take a loan out on cards sitting in your vault, of course). After you submit your request, it then gets reviewed by a team of underwriters. They will typically send you a counteroffer for less than you've requested (so if you requested the full 50% LTV against the conservatively appraised cards in your vault, you will probably get countered for something like 35% instead. When it's all said and done, their actual exposure is probably somewhere around 25-30% of a card's actual market value when a loan is approved. Unless that's for a card that has already sold and awaiting payment, in which case they'll approve a higher amount as mentioned.

As far as a "bank run on the vault" is concerned, all that would do is cause a shipping backlog at PWCC. Even if they went bankrupt, everyone would still get all of their cards back. Unless they've taken loans out against those cards of course, in which case, PWCC obviously reserves the right to auction those cards to recover any funds owed to them.

I had a discussion with SCR on Blowout where it was clear he did not understand the first fucking thing about the PSA guarantee, but was dismissing all my correct statements about it with LOLs and inane observations. Bad combination of ignorance and arrogrance.