PSA SMR question
 

good afternoon

I am just starting to contemplate buying and selling graded cards as a deviation from my raw roots...

I am not, yet, a PSA Collectors Club "member"...but was wondering about the SMR price guide that is available to the public on their website VS the SMR price guide that I assume is available monthly to members (?). Is the "public" one updated far less frequently, not as "real time"?

PSA seems to do a very good job of tracking and updating auction sales data, but it doesn't seem to efficiently translate into the SMR data.

I am just looking for a good, quick ballpark/benchmark for the INITIAL review on cards. I know that the monthly Beckett isn't a good "guide" like in the old days and it seems that market prices for a PSA 7 are running somewhere in the range of 1.5-2.5X the "NM" price in a beckett...and the SMRs I can see seem to mirror Beckett which doesn't seem to be "market".

I know not an exact science...just curious if I am missing a good research tool...

thanks..sorry for the ramble

It's been a long while since I looked at their SMR, but I found it inconsistent and didn't really reflect the market.
Free alternatives are past eBay sales and cardtarget.com.

Pricing
 

Card Target is free, but it is a PITA to use and loads slowly. I would pay for a subscription to VCP.

Just look at completed sales on PSA's website.

^This. SMR is usually very low and way behind.

SMR is completely useless in my opinion. Put it this way, I will buy your whole collection based on SMR prices.

Just another way PSA ensures that we “never get cheated”

Rick Card Target works best with google chrome if you have it.

SMR Price Guide is a useless tool
1914 CJ #82 Cravath PSA 3 is listed at $200 but ALL 9 cards have sold since 2015 and ranged from $478 to $2,304
The best way to get accurate numbers are the actual auction prices realized on PSA Website
Cardtarget is useful to locate past sales of PSA, SGC, BVG and BCG cards
Looking through past auctions (REA, HA, LOTG, Goldin etc...) on the individual sites will also be a good guide to give you a better idea of price ranges

Thanks to everyone who has taken time to respond...

for some reason I was thinking SMR was more tied to current transactions but It seems clear that is has fallen into "hard copy monthly Beckett" territory.

I will check out all the mentioned resources, but probably stick closer to the "realized auction" prices on PSA site and each of the databases of the individual auction houses

thanks again

Mike

Mike,

Vintagecardprices.com is a great resource. It’s a for-pay site, but it has great data and pictures to go with sales comps

I got a 6 card membership, backpack, and SMR in June. Have not found SMR to be very valuable, the grading vouchers are fine, and the backpack rocks. My 2 cents

My grandson likes the backpack and the monthly magazine is great if I ever have any Pokemon questions.😀

Plus you can get a membership for 24 hours, if need be. It's a useful site.

And FWIW talking about price research, COMC's SRP (Suggested Retail Price) is also not worth it.

VCP has its limitations.

Relying on VCP, you'd think Red Cobbs (G-VG, common backs) sell for low to mid $2000s. Multiple copies just sold for over $3500 in REA.

there are so few sales on many of these cards, that I do not think the historical data is very useful.

A caveat about PSA Auction Prices Realized: they don't seem to determine Best Offers correctly. So you may be looking at the original BIN price when a much lower Best Offer was accepted on eBay. Or a sale that didn't actually complete the process, or was returned.
One of the ones that PSA was not catching was when a seller makes a counteroffer to a message in the eBay message system. Those were still showing as the original BIN price.

Basically proceed with caution on every site. There are always ways to cheat the system, and display a much higher sale price from someone who wants to establish a new high water mark for a card.

I’ll echo the recommendations for VCP. Just a really great resource to quickly find realized prices on graded cards from auction houses and eBay. I use it for research (or just for fun) all the time.

Hi
 

Hi Pat, I use Chrome for everything. I appreciate the thought.

Thanks, Rick

No problem Rick I thought that might be the issue, it used to take a long time
to load for me but since I switched to chrome everything loads in seconds.

If you're buying frequently, the price of an annual VCP subscription more than pays for itself in time saved hacking your way through other methods.

Great product, and the Auction House data seems to make its way in there eventually
|

I'd echo the VCP sentiments. While no method is perfect, there's enough data to get a ballpark price on cards which may not have any sales for a long time. I'm on their site several times a day doing research. Some people don't like to pay the $17.99/month but if you're buying or selling a bunch of cards or even fewer higher valued ones, it's completely worth it.

Good luck!

I pay for a VCP subscription. As others have mentioned it's well worth the price. When I first got back into the hobby I remembered those Beckett price guides, and figured SMR was the modern equivalent. But the data there is completely unreliable. I haven't looked a card up there in years.

Here's a question, if anyone has some insight...

How truly accurate are any of these sites, including SMR? Over the past year or so, quite a few cards I bought have curiously never appeared in the PSA 'Auction Prices Realized' site (the only one I consult aside from the sold results on ebay). These buys were either when I negotiated a price with a seller and he sent me an official offer (so nothing nefarious was involved), including a 1964 'Koufax Strikes Out 15' card, and a few others where the title of the auction had the wrong year listed. For instance, I recently bought a 1962 card in an ebay auction that was listed as a 1959, and a 1972 Wilt Chamberlain that was listed as a 1974. These cards are nowhere to be found in either the right or wrong years on the PSA site, so my assumption is they just receive the official data from ebay and if the year/player/card number doesn't correspond to reality, they are just excluded (garbage in, garbage out). Is that most likely the case? Do any of these sites do deeper dives into the data to make it more accurate overall?

Auction Prices Realized records are all based on what the computer system thinks the Cert # is. So if they mistype the cert number, or read it wrong using OCR of either the number or the bar code, it gets entered under the wrong card information.
It's possible since I reported so many issues with BIN/BO or seller offers that they're hidden in the system so an not to skew the pricing data. I know some 1990 Topps partial blackless were in the APR system as having sold for $4700 each, when they were actually sold by BO for between $600-800. None of those partial blackless have any APR sales currently.

www.sortsof.com

for most items you can see what they actually sold for

For items still in ebay sold listings, you can also open up the page in your browser by selecting View Source, and then Ctrl-F search for the "taxexclusiveprice".

Thought this was interesting, as the auction prices realized on the PSA site seems to update quickly. My recent REA win was reflected on the PSA site within a few days. REA has not even gotten my check yet (sending from Canada), yet the final price (including BP) is on the PSA site.

This can be both good and bad. Good in that the prices are reflected quickly, but the bad is obviously, deadbeat bidders are still reflected.