Posted By:
cmokingwhy I used "way up":
1. My personal experience of what I collect - 1933 Goudey PSA 6 to PSA 8 cards - is that there is much more competition and at a higher level. It feels like prices are up about 20% in general in the past year.
2. As for other cards, I read all the comments about cards going at higher prices, and compared to prices that other people paid just a year or two ago. I don't have any direct experience in those cards since I don't collect them, so it is all just reading from others.
Are those good reasons to use "way up"? Maybe it should have just used 'up'.
As far as pops comparing to the coin market - I don't know much about the coin market, but I checked on a few coins and their pops - and it is amazing how high the population reports are. There are coins that sell for $1000 that have pops in the 1000s in that grade. Sure, these coins may be gold-based, so they do have the melted value of gold itself, but that still leaves $500 as collector value. I can't imagine a graded card, even of the most popular player, with a population of 1000, say in PSA 8, that would sell that high...even Mantle wouldn't sell that high. Yes, I know pops aren't that accurate if you compare 5 vs 8 or 11 vs 20 (PSA pops versus real pop in the world), but the compariosn of 20 to 1000 means that even if the PSA pop doubled, it's still a huge difference. So the question I posed I have answered for myself - not a definitive answer, and not saying anyone should accept my answer, but it is good enough for me. And that answer is that by looking at another hobby - the coin collecting hobby - one can't say that the vintage market is obviously overvalued based on supply. That doesn't mean it isn't overvalued, it could still be if demand doesn't exist...but the supply isn't even close to the coin market. Now if it was the other way around - say the coin pops were close to baseball cards with the prices around the same or lower for 'equivalent stuff' (I know that's hard to gauge), then the vintage card market would be in trouble based on that info. Sorry for the rambling, I'm sure many sentences are incoherent, I'm too lazy to edit.