[Exhibitman]

There is no one approach. It all depends on what is offered. You can make money on just about anything as long as you get in at the right price. For that you have to know the market and get in at no higher than 50% of realistic retail value, adjusted for grade and transactional costs, of course, and further adjusted based on how fast and how little work it will take to turn out the lot. Otherwise you are just treading water.

My rule of thumb for average stuff, the usual mid-grade postwar big 4 sports collection, is to try to pay no more than a third of my anticipated gross sales. I just bought a collection of about 10,000 cards. 75% were 1988 or later. I accorded those zero value: I told the guy, truthfully, that I will basically take them to the local card store and trade them for whatever store credit I can get or toss them in a recycling bin if the LCS doesn't want it. I like modern cards but they are junk as far as resale goes. The other 25% of the collection were partial sets from the 1970s. I knew I would sell those on eBay as partial sets at a discount relative to single card prices. I geared my offer to that. Since I couldn't take the time to go through everything I had to sample the cards. If my sampling of the cards doesn't show much in the way of major stars, the price goes down further, to cover my downside risk of the collection having been picked. In this case, while it was clear that the cards hadn't been disturbed in decades, it was also clear that someone fished out the major stars back in the day. The remaining cards were nice but the real value was missing. I ended up paying a penny a card for the whole thing. I could have paid more but with stuff this common I really did not feel the need to offer more.