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Posted By: Mike Masinick

Hi Scott,
Remember that we actually have one of your cards in our marketplace that I bought from you at the National (Vezina). Basically the way things work is that we "mark up" the price that we sell the cards for about 5-6% over what we paid to cover the insurance for 18 months and the credit card fees associated with the initial sale of the shares.
I think the biggest thing people here don't "get" is that we aren't trying to simply buy cards and sell them for more than we paid at a later date. We truly are trying to build a nice collection loosely based on the PSA Top 200 cards in the hobby and other "neat" cards that we find along the way. Occasionally a card does sell from our marketplace, but we don't actively market them for sale except the occasional eBay auction.
The most important thing that I want you guys to understand is that the prices of the cards are being set by the demand of the shares in our marketplace. If one person starts buying up the shares, the price goes up... and if one person "dumps" shares that they own, the price can and does go down. Each of our item pages has an "ownership listing" that lists the top 10 owners of each item. This is done to discourage any type of market manipulation and give people the satisfaction that all sales of every share are accounted for and available to be viewed by the general public. So all it takes is one person to drive up the share price of a card beyond what you (and I) would consider a reasonable price. Then it is up to each shareholder to decide if the shares are overvalued and sell, or if they feel the shares might continue to go up (and buy/hold) or simply be a collector and hold on to their shares. If an individual shareholder feels that a card is overvalued at any time they can sell the share. They are not "locked into" the share until the card is sold.
Our users do have a fascination with the Broadleaf 460s... I'll give you that. But look at cards like our T205 Matty and 49 Leaf Ruth which I believe are at least fairly valued if not undervalued.
I'm very happy to continue this conversation if this thread stays reasonably nice. I know you guys have questions and I'll do my best to answer them.

Mike