CSG/CGC is awesome
 

Just auctioned a CSG 9 SP Billy Wagner RC. Ended at $18. Last PSA 9 sold for 145. Obviously a highly valued slab and flip.

Ouch! On the bright side your sellers fees are way less.:eek:

I would think this is fairly obvious. The only reason the card has any value is the PSA Set Registry for HOF RCs. There is no demand for ungraded or non PSA-graded cards of him.

Grading fees as well! Do they offer an expedited service?

Peter---you should not have given up on Billy so soon

There is a thread on Blowout about absolutely abominable prices on CSG/CGC. This is not a one off thing.

Sounds like a real kick in the shins.

Not real surprising considering they’re still relatively new, and the market doesn’t seem like it’s ready to accept their stuff just yet. That could always change in the future, but they don’t seem to be there yet.

In some ways, it’s a chicken/egg thing, because people won’t want to get their stuff graded there until the slabs are valued by the market, yet the market won’t buy in unless they’re more popular, and there’s a positive trend to get the party started.

I suspect the discount would have been smaller on mid grade stuff, particularly outside of a rookie card.

Under "irony" in the dictionary, see CGC's latest spam email subject:

"CGC Cards Makes Grading More Affordable"

It better--the cards aren't worth jack squat in their holders.

I kid my friends at CGC...

Same with SGC and now BGS. It's PSA or nothing, pretty much.

SGC has lagged for a while, but not this badly. Beckett seems to be collapsing. I just hope Star Basketball, which does not cross well to PSA due to centering for some of the major cards, retains value.

Does PSA grade Star Basketball?

As a buyer, I completely disregard anything in their holders. SGC on vintage, PSA on new stuff. I'm only commenting because I am not special, I can only imagine there are many, many like me. I have no issue with them in all reality, and am not some loyal grading company nut (in fact, necessary evil as far as I'm concerned), just literally zero interest in anything in their holders. If I was in the market for that card, I would have scrolled past it without a second look...regardless of price.

I've only got a couple of cards in their earliest type of holder. They look nice, but I didn't expect them to make me a lot of money. How can anyone hope to break the monopoly PSA has on grading cards? I think if some entity showed up with a good looking holder, established a registry, and used non-biased "machine grading" instead of human opinion, they might have a chance to become the new standard. Otherwise, I think people will continue to pay to have PSA grading and SGC will continue to be in second place.

It's also the crossover issue. Most non-PSA graded cards don't cross over to a comparable grade, imho. I recently attempted to cross over some graded cards from other companies and 2 were equivalent, with the rest an avg of 1.5-2 grades less.

Problem isn't the cross, it's the standard
 

In my experience they don't cross most of the time because they are held to a different standard. Which ultimately is why PSA and SGC cards sell for more(sometimes remarkably so) at an equivalent numeric grade. Differences between SGC and PSA are more complicated.

Howard - are you talking about crossing in the slab?

What about cracking and submitting outside of the slab?

I personally find pretty good value as a collector in buying cards slabbed by CGC. They have a proper heritage as a grading company; they seem to know what they doing from a technical standpoint when it comes to grading sports cards; and the cards that I've purchased pass the eye test (under magnification).

If I can pick up cards that are graded highly by CGC that, as far as I can tell under magnification, look just as good as a similarly graded card from PSA, but at a deep discount, I'm happy. Granted, I'm not looking to sell those PC cards any time soon, if at all.

Also may help CGC that they have very deep pocketed, institutional owners/ partners:

https://www.blackstone.com/news/pres...bles-industry/

It would be very interesting for someone to run an experiment where they take 5 CGC 8s and 5 PSA 8s of the same card (like a popular recent vintage or early modern one like the 1979 Topps Ozzie Smith or the 1992 Mariano Rivera Bowman), crack them open, and ask 10 experienced collectors (armed with loupes) to RANK them from the finest to the weakest. Do the same experiment with 10 professional graders from PSA. My strong instinct is that the rankings would be essentially random.