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Posted By: barrysloate

This is evolving into the same class warfare that the board always ends up in. Personalities aside, and we clearly have serious clashes in that department, this discussion still revolves around most dollars spent vs. what constitutes the typical collector. If collector A has spent $1 million on PSA-8 cards, and 50 collectors spend $10,000 each on lower grade cards, the PSA-8 collector has outspent the rest of the market by 2 to 1, yet represents only 2% of the group. So it is still unclear how we define "backbone" of the hobby- who is spending the most or who is best represented? I would define "backbone" as which group has the greatest number of collectors. For me, the PSA-8 crowd is just an elite niche of the market. Again, there is no right or wrong way to collect. We just have not satisfactorily defined which group best represents the hobby. We know an auction house like Mastro is dominated by PSA-8 cards, but their whole business model is to offer the finest cards to the best heeled group out there. They recently sold a high grade E93 set for over 300K. Would we define that as a typical hobby transaction? Hardly.