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Posted By: John

Since were cutting and pasting…

“The more expensive the expert will be to hire. And, since the issue is rare, there will be very few submissions, so it becomes cost prohibitive.”

At between $5-10 a card to grade and $50 a card for on site grading, I really don’t feel that its that cost prohibitive to have someone who knows what their doing. Labeling something as fake when you have no idea of what you are doing takes all creditability away. I was always taught if you don’t know the answer say you don’t know, don’t make things up. They should have returned Dan’s cards with a note that said we don’t know enough about these to authenticate them. This also raises the question if they missed this one what makes me think that they didn’t miss the trim on the NRMT Ty Cobb I’m about to buy?

“I think there is a fair balance to be drawn here. People who say that grading companies are a joke forget that they have made it safer and more pleasant for many collectors. Again, I admit that PSA and PRO have done a good job of fouling this up, too. But the SGC's and the GAI's are on to a good thing.”

Ok but another guy uses this same sentence but switches it around to say that SGC and GAI are jokes and PSA is on the ball. Another guy feels GAI is the only way to go. Well looks like were right back to subjectivity, which is what we had before grading companies, so, what have they solved? Saying one company is more trust worthy than the other is scary as hell to me! We used to do that with dealers and sellers, we would say “Blank” grades tough and “Blank” over grades etc. Which was fine with me, over time you knew who to trust and who to inspect closely. But it seems now we have replaced “Blank” with a three-letter abbreviation. The problem here is the card from “Blank” was a lot cheaper than the mistake or over graded card from “PSA” “SGC” etc.

“Grading companies brought a lot of people into the hobby, making your nice unaltered cards worth a lot more today. You can still buy nice un-altered cards. The only downside is cost, but that's high because of the competition.”

I’ll be the first to go on record that I would agree with you to a point. I’ll also say that many of my cards are worth too much in my opinion. There is just no need for some of the prices these cards are pulling, is it because of rarity? (On some cards sure) Is it because of supply & demand? (Once again on some cards) The main reason for these prices is the influx of un-educated collectors and grading company hype. Collectors who know very little about the items they are collecting who are chasing pop reports (which are pointless) or are buying into the highest ever graded hype. There are a whole new breed of collectors who are only interested in the price realized and bragging rights regarding value/grade of a card (Adam J. Morine), and this is driving the regular collectors out of the hobby, and will have a very negative effect sooner or later.