[benjulmag]

One of the things that has guided me well as an attorney is what I call the smell test.

If,

(I) company B is the industry leader and has a publicly stated policy of objectively evaluating all submissions explicitly including submissions of slabbed company A cards;

(II) company B as a matter of internal policy has a policy against crossing over cards in company A's slabs, which policy can be proven;

(III) company B when returning the uncrossed over cards to the submitter states the reason for the refusal to cross over is that the cards are either altered or do not merit the same grade;

(IV) these occurrences occur on a regular basis;

(V) company A's profitability goes down, which decrease can be proven to correlate to company B's internal policy of refusing to objectively evaluate slabbed company A cards in crossover submittals;

Then,

company A has an actionable claim for damages against company B.

And to go further, if company B can be proven to have similar policies with similar results against all the other TPG companies in the market, such that that the end result is company B is left as the only TPG company in the industry,

Then

there are antitrust implications.


Let me worry about whether what I state to be fact can be proven. Assuming they can, I believe the conclusions I have drawn stand a very good chance of being correct if tested.