The market and hobby run on the lower end and ungraded cards. It's not detected by PWCC numbers or SMR, but rather a pulse and common sense. High sales of low pop high grade or trending players does not indicate a strong trading card market for several reasons, but one of the main ones is that the sample size is too small and open to fraudulent sales data.
It's true that one of these "monster" grades (PSA 9 or 10 Gretzky OPC RC, for example) can help bump lower PSA grade values - even if the data is fraudulent.
There are almost 6,200 PSA grades for this card and only 90 are PSA 9 or 10.
That's about 1.5% of all the other grades and can easily be controlled and manipulated by auction houses as we've seen in texts like "bid xxx amount I promise you will not win" - the data simply cannot be trusted. The lower graded cards reflect a more accurate picture because it is much more difficult to manipulate the other 6,000+ cards within the market.
I bought a PSA 4 Gretzky OPC RC the other night for $600 USD ($520 after eBay Bucks offer and a $50 coupon code). I would NOT have bought this card if it were not for the offers and I feel like it was a fair deal.
Other Gretzky cards are sitting and not performing well at the moment. Too many BIN with high prices. Market is flooding. People are selling, and prices will go down to more realistic "fair" prices.
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