Posted By:
DaveI'm still a novice, so I have really struggled with this issue. I have a partial T206 collection that I basically inherited. I've been trying to fill it out, still need about 75 cards, including a fair number of HOF'ers.
I've started slowly (my wife would disagree, I'm sure) and only bought minor league players, commons, and southern league.
I started with Krause, and found that less than satisfying. For the past three months, I have logged every graded card sold on ebay. I now have close to 2000 sales with various quality and prices.
I use this when I can to compare directly with cards I am considering, and I also use it to establish quality multipliers. For a given card, what is the price difference between a 3 and a 4, or a 4 and a 5. I really don't need to worry about higher grades than that; it would be inconsistent with both my existing collection and my wallet.
I need to stress that the major flaw of this is that it places prices on slabs, not on cards. When I buy, I really take a good look at the cards, not just the slabs. I only catalog it this way because I don't have the time to judge each card sold, particularly with the limited images on ebay. By using the slab grades, I probably have better consistency than if I attempted it myself.
For series that have much slower sales than the 206's, I don't know how you would establish value. I see the prices paid for some of the OJ's and really wonder how long it would take to understand pricing of those.
Dave