Can we remove 2020 -2022 card prices from VCP
 

Of course the title of this post is a half joke. Pardon me while I bloviate on this topic :D

I bought a card last week. Seller is a friend so we looked up comps on VCP. We came to an agreement using recent sales, but he jokingly said “Can we use comps from 3 years ago”. Of course we didn’t, but it made me think of all the high sales during that time frame.

Do collectors take stock in those prices anymore? I guess for some high end/rare cards you can still use them, but for most others cards, they seem like a distance memory. For prewar, T206 Cobbs and 1933 Goudey Ruths come most to mind. For those that don’t have VCP, here are psa 4 sales of Ruth 144:

https://www.psacard.com/auctionprice...ues/238055#g=4

VCP has more sales, but you get the picture. Just amazing what has transpired over the last 5 years. I am not saying this is good or bad, just saying where we are at. And how I believe, for the most part, those prices are “dust in the wind” as they say.

It's nothing new. Look at the prices of Clemente rookies from October 2015 - October 2016

The buying group!!

Koufax RC and Ruth 144
 

I remember the absolutely crazy Koufax rookie prices. They really got ran up for a while.

But, to the topic, everyone needs to do their due diligence on pricing. As said before, if it's for my collection, I don't worry as much about the ROI. I paid around 20k for this one and it's probably 16k-17k today. But I am a centering nut so it hit the spot.

One card that comes to my mind was the 1953 Topps Willie Mays SGC 8 that PWCC allegedly sold in March 2023 for $186,000 an all time record sale. That card came up again less than 7 months later in September selling for $99,000 same auction same exact card. Was that $186,000 a real transaction or what ? Idk could be was the second one? Who knows?

Late Spring 2021-Fall 2023 I call the Hype Market..... a lot could maybe have been fluff driven by the hype.

It's not that hard to create a run. Do a few fake sales, the prices get published, people get FOMO, and off to the races.

That’s what happened

Another member clued me into this card (1980 Rickey Henderson psa 9)

https://www.psacard.com/auctionprice...ues/196982#g=9

Check out the graph at the bottom. Woof.

The prices on the Ruth look pretty stable. The most recent is generally lower, but it's also not a great looking card. Maybe some sort of overall stain? and with the corners is has, that might be why it's a 4.

The Henderson is just crazy. Especially the recent one.

From my perspective, selling off a few sets and near sets lately, the prices of most cards have not gone down to any significant degree since 2020-2022. The bursting bubble phenomenon is limited to a certain number of higher end cards. But almost everything I've checked lately shows a big jump in 2020-21 and no real decline since.

Tim, I am curious about your perspective. For your sets, were they raw or graded? And what era?

Wish Cracker Jack's would cool off. A constant up and to the right

Who the hell paid $4,300 for one this week??? Pretty sure Rickey charges $150 for an auto, not $2,500.

The dual grades with Auto 10s seem to have become very pricey, not specifically Rickey just in general.

It's a thing, not my thing, and is not my idea of a hobby but to each their own.

An honest question from a non-card guy: Are those vertical borders narrower than a lot of what I've seen? I'm guessing I'm completely wrong, else you wouldn't have wanted this example. I obviously spend nowhere near the amount of time staring at these cards as most around here, but have looked at my share, and this immediately jumped out at me.

Yes, narrow -- look at the card compared to the gasket -- but Goudeys vary a lot.

thoughts on prices 2020-present
 

My collection is a pretty extreme example of the type where the value comes from volume and/or scarcity, and not from a smaller number of ultrapopular and spectacular individual cards, which I have never really gone in for (sometimes to my later regret...)

As a prewar set collector whenever possible, I haven't closely followed the huge price spikes of PSA 8+ rookies and Cobbs and so on (although I'm generally aware of them).

So it's important to understand that my comments below don't apply to cards that have been seeing wild spikes up and down that amount to many thousands of dollars.

Anyway FWIW, in preparation for selling some stuff from my collection, and buying other things, in the past few months I've spent a LOT of time buried in VCP looking at sales of prewar commons and stars (as opposed to the dozen or so players that the hobby treats as superstars). Mostly in grades between 2 and 5.

This is the pattern that I've seen again and again and again:

Mostly flat prices across the whole of prewar for several years through the winter of 2020, and then an ominous dip in March and April where some stuff went for peanuts because people were too distracted to buy. Then in early summer you can trace the start of a meteoric rise in prices, again across most of the prewar world (the chunk that I've looked at, anyway). Commons, stars, low grade and high grade, it all goes up for the rest of 2020 and most of 2021.

You can trace the pattern, too - go to VCP and look for non-Ruth-level prewar cards that sell a few times a year - especially the type of cards that go for between $50 and $500 in PSA 2-4 condition. You'll see it happen through 2020 and 2021, sometimes continuing up to the present-

In the two years after the beginning of 2020, I estimate about 100 percent increase in that category of card. Obviously that's a rough average and most examples won't precisely follow that pattern, but this gives you the outline as I've traced it.

Since 2022 it seems more varied. Some prewar sets, especially CJs and M101-4/5s and tough postcards seem to continue going up. Others like T206s and T209s and Cobbs have gone flat or even come down some - probably they were ones that shot up too high too fast, and required some degree of correction relative to their rarity and demand.

But the drops are exceptional cases. Most cards in most sets still seem to be stable or still rising, now at least twice their 2019 value, sometimes more like thrice.

So I would guess that anyone who has a prewar collection like mine - with the average value in the low hundreds per card- will discover that their whole collection is worth at least twice as much as it was in early 2020. Which seems like a good thing if you're selling off - less so if you're selling to raise money to buy new stuff like me :)

+1 Absolutely not why I collect.

It's also worth noting that if you're not controlling for certain factors, the data can look rather noisy. The market has made strong adjustments for things like eye appeal & centering, old cert numbers being over-graded, newer certs being under-graded, key vintage cards holding their ground while random HOF vintage cards are losing ground, etc. Knowing which cards are moving in which direction makes more sense when you account for these factors, and it helps you to more accurately predict what the hammer prices are going to be for the next ones that come up for auction.