Posted By:
Eric BrehmI agree with Matt on this. The more data on sales of a particular card that is available, the better. When I look at a historical list of sales such as VCP provides, I tend to filter out the outliers (unusually high or low prices) in my mind, and I look at the average of the listed prices, although it is indeed useful to be able to see the actual range of prices that have been realized over a particular period of time.
If there are shenanigans going on such as shill bidding in auctions, or phony sales between friends, I don't see any way to identify and exclude these in any systematic way. Again I don't think realized BIN prices are fundamentally any less valid than other types of sales. I can understand however that there might be technical problems associated with including them in the data base.
By the way I subscribe to VCP and have found it to be very helpful. I also look at the monthly Sports Market Report, which presumably bases its values on some sort of historical average of known sales. VCP and SMR are both 'guides' to what the current market for a card is, with the difference being that VCP displays the specific sales figures upon which the averages are based.