1933 Goudey

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Posted By: Bobby Binder

This set has to be considered one of the staples of the hobby. Then why over the course of the past 2 years has this set basically dropped in value by at least 50%. You do not see the cards listed on eBay in the same quantities as in the past. Are there fewer listing because people do not want to sell them and lose money? Is there a person out there with a horde of them waiting for the market to be right. It is a great set with vibrant color and multiple Hall of Famers.

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Posted By: cmoking

Bobby, can you show some data? With the information in VCP, it would be interesting if you could have it calculate a "set break-up" price and track it annually for sets that aren't tough to complete, like Goudeys or 1952 Topps.

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Posted By: Chris Counts

It's hard for me to imagine that this set has gone down in value by 50 percent. I can't think of any pre-war cards in general that have gone down in value. The only thing I can think of that even comes close, and it's not pre-war, is the Dormand postcard of Gil Hodges. And that because a large horde was supposedly found ...

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Posted By: DR

It would be(come) beneficial and differentiated, if your service provided links to auctions AFTER they are removed from eBay and/or major auctions (since you mentioned two years in your post). You would win a customer (me) if you were willing to save this data on servers for multiple years or better yet indefinitely. This is the only way to track long term trends, pricing and owner data for rare cards / sets over an extended period of time. Striking deals is more important to me then 6 months of pricing data. Simply using Google, I am acquire at minimum 3 months and many times years worth of the same data (sometimes cached) albeit not in a concise manner. Have you considered this???

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Posted By: Frank Wakefield

I've not "studied" the matter, but just shooting from the hip I'd be inclined to agree with Bobby. I can't vouch for 50%, that seems like a significant decrease... but I agree that prices have cooled a bit. So I think the prices haven't continued to rise at the white border tobacco card pace.

Frank.

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Posted By: Bobby Binder

The data we store stays forever in our system or at least the price, date and auction house. The link to the auction dies out over time and we are working on ways around this factor. We do not have a set tabulation function yet but will be able to install something down the road. This way you can see how a set as a whole is performing over time.

I just went through basically every card in the set and with our new graph feature it was a downward arrow on practically every card in the set. Looking at the sales frequency shows it has greatly curtailed from 18 months ago. When we first started tracking data the 33 Goudey's where not far behind the T206's.

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Posted By: peter chao

Bobby,

I've been buying '33 and '34 Goudeys the last couple of years. As far as I know the prices have been going up steadily. If there has been a drop, I certainly haven't noticed it. What are you basing your pricing information on. Let us in on the stats you have accumulated. Thanks.

Peter C.

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Posted By: identify7

What has happened to Playball over the same interval?

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Posted By: Bobby Binder

Here are some quick samples of prices:

#22 Pie Traynor PSA 7

Date Auction Price
8/19/07 eBay $860.00
6/22/06 eBay $1,634.00

#22 Pie Traynor PSA 6

Date Auction Price
6/2/07 eBay $400.01
2/11/07 eBay $565.55

#39 Mark Koenig PSA 5

5/20/07 eBay $57.00
4/15/07 eBay $58.00
3/21/07 eBay $49.95
3/18/07 eBay $65.00
3/8/07 eBay $65.00
2/25/07 eBay $73.00
1/30/07 eBay $113.50

#121 Walter Stewart PSA 4

Date Auction Price
8/12/07 eBay $22.59
1/17/07 eBay $33.00
1/29/06 eBay $28.00
1/4/06 eBay $35.50

#168 Goose Goslin PSA 7

Date Auction Price
5/17/07 eBay $381.01
10/5/06 eBay $535.09
11/21/05 eBay $750.00

#168 Goose Goslin PSA 6

Date Auction Price
1/28/07 eBay $127.50
1/22/07 eBay $104.19
12/14/06 eBay $111.50
11/26/06 eBay $133.33
10/29/06 eBay $110.50
7/9/06 eBay $152.50
6/6/06 eBay $181.38
5/30/06 eBay $256.99

Here is a small sampling and of course there are exceptions to this happening.

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Posted By: peter chao

Bobby,

Thanks for the information.

Peter C.

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Posted By: JimB

From my casual observation, Goudey's have not moved much in value in at least seven or eight years. Goudey Ruths have been constant.
JimB

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Posted By: Anthony

Bobby- Have enough SGC graded '33's changed hands to see the same trend, especially on the same cards and grades as the ones you cited above? I'm wondering if it's more PSA graded '33 Goudey's that have gone soft in the market, or '33's in general.

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Posted By: Bobby Binder

Going through it is the same with SGC graded cards.

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Posted By: bruce Dorskind

The market for nearly all ultra high grade pre War
cards remains very strong. In support of this theory,
we carefully reviewed Vintage Card Prices.com listings for
the 1933 Goudey Set in PSA 8.

Whilst some cards are below their sales price from 18 or 24 months ago, other
cards have recently experienced a 300% gain above their late 2005 or 2006 price.

A standard regression analysis will disprove the theory that there has been
a 50% drop in the market for PSA 8 1933 Goudeys. Said analysis would
show that the demand and the concomitant prices are random.

At a moment in time a certain collector may need a particular card in particular
high grade. Furthermore, prices fluctuate wildly because the entrance or departure
of one or two collectors can significantly influence the price of a particular high
grade card at a particular point in time.

We also note that when certain firms auction certain cards, said cards appear to
achieve a price well above the average price achieved by E Bay and/or other auction houses.

Clearly there are certain "buyers" who will not participate in E Bay auctions and/or
auctions of certain dealers. At least several of these significant buyers appear to
focus their resources in Mile High and Memory Lane auctions thus driving up the
prices of "common" Goudeys when they appear in one of these auctions.

Take a look at the example below. It is typical of the performance of a number of
common 1933 Goudeys in PSA 8. One can see the large variance in price,
but the only logical conclusion a trained statistics professional could draw is
that the market is random not trending down.

Player-- Jack Burns


DateAuctionAuction Link Price
8/18/07eBayView Auction $795.00
1/30/07eBayView Auction $330.00
12/7/06Mastro $428.40
10/5/06eBayView Auction $480.00
2/7/06eBay $597.79
11/10/05Goodwin $1,784.75
10/20/05Mastro $987.00

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Posted By: barrysloate

But Bobby's observation wasn't exclusive to PSA 8's. He was also looking at 5,6, and 7's, which are more collector oriented. The PSA 8's are more for the set registry crowd. I think those are two distinct markets.

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Posted By: Bobby Binder

Thank you Barry...you beat me to the post, I was still sleeping here on the left while you are on the right coast.

I really did not bother looking at the high grader results because I knew they would be all over the place due to the registry competition. But there are countless times a high grade card sells for the first time for insane money. Then shortly after another comes along and sells for a fraction of the prices.

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Posted By: T206Collector

I would offer a simple analysis that could support a downward trend for 1933 Goudey cards.

a) Cards from the 1940's and later still bring in money from the crowd of people who saw the players featured on those cards play;

b) Cards from the 1930's and earlier rely primarily on, what I call, hearsay fans -- you heard about Ruth and Gehrig, but you never saw them play;

c) When collectors enter the market as hearsay fans, there are a number of factors that determine which cards they will target -- since they didn't see Ruth as often as they didn't see Cobb or Anson;

d) These fans are more likely to go back further than 1933, since tobacco cards are readily available;

e) Unless they have a desire to chase Ruth and Gehrig, more hearsay collectors are likely to turn to T206 cards because of their relative availability and affordability, and because they are nearly 25 years older than Goudeys; and

f) They don't keep going earlier than T206 since the availability and affordability of pre-T206 cards is a barrier to entering that market.

My conclusion: with the advent of internet/ebay and the aging/passing of the 1930's contemporaneous collectors, T206 will take market share from 1933 Goudey.

That's from my own personal experience as well -- my first great vintage card was a 1933 Goudey Grove I still have, bought in 1989. But when T206 became readily available to me on the internet, I all but lost interest in the 1933 Goudey cards. As collectors age and die out, I think this will happen more frequently into the 1950's and 1960's, etc.

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Posted By: cmoking

Bobby, I love your site, and I use it almost every day. Congrats on your good work.

However, your perceptive powers are incredibly weak. You mentioned you thought the cards were down 50%. I just went over your site and picked out 20 cards at random. I would have picked out more, but the numbers were so obviously different than 50% that I stopped bothering.

Here's what I did. I looked mostly for PSA 5s and PSA 6s. I clicked on 4 cards in the first 5 pages on VCP. I only took information if the same card in the same grade had sales both after May 2007 and between January 2006 and September 2006. In other words, I wanted to compare the market in the last three months to the market from Jan 2006 - Sep 2006, about a year's difference. There were many cards where data did not exist for both time periods, so I moved on to another card.

Over all, I picked out 2 PSA 7s, 12 PSA 6s and 6 PSA 5s.

The average card went down. But only 5%, a far cry from 50%. With a sampling size of only 20 cards, there's a fairly wide margin of error to the 5% number. But I'd guess the margin of error is not wider than 10% points either way. So a fairer ranger is probably to say the decline is somewhere from up 5% to down 15%.

Here are the individual cards I looked at. I took the average of the % increase/decline (rather than compare the average in prices of cards) because I did not want the high dollar cards (like the 92 PSA 6 Gehrig) to influence the price differential much more so than a common (like the 96 PSA 5).

I rounded decimals for individual auctions. For multiple auctions in the same time period, I averaged them. The first number is the card number, next is the PSA grade, next is the post-May 2007 sale, next is the Jan2006 to Sep2006 sale.


2 PSA 6 414/515
11 PSA 6 104/169
19 PSA 5 283/277
24 PSA 6 128/134
28 PSA 6 156.5/168
29 PSA 7 1108/1076
45 PSA 6 174/192
49 PSA 6 338/257
55 PSA 6 229/148
60 PSA 6 191/166
61 PSA 6 85/97
74 PSA 7 464/371
78 PSA 6 87/89
85 PSA 5 56/52
92 PSA 6 2343/2398
96 PSA 5 43/54
107 PSA 5 138/138
117 PSA 5 153/142
124 PSA 6 78/98
136 PSA 5 54/58



Conclusion: The Goudey mid-grade prices seem to be very close to what they were a year ago. 50% is not in the same universe in describing the market activity in 1933 Goudeys. +5% to -15% is probably a good range for the set as a whole.

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Posted By: JK

I agree in some respects with t206. When I first entered the vintage market, I bought quite a few 33 and 34 goudeys. Then I discovered tobacco and caramel cards and lost almost all interest in cards produced in the 30s.

Also, as to Bruce's example, to me that looks like a downward trend on the PSA 8 with the most recent purchase being an anomaly.

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Posted By: peter chao

T206,

I partially agree with you, if you are a historic collector you will start with T206. However, there are many who are attracted to baseball solely because of the Yankees or because of Ruth and Gehrig. If that is the case, they might start off with the '33 Goudeys. This could simply be the lull before the storm.

Peter C.

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Posted By: Mark L

I find it hard to believe that Goudey's have become less popular because a significant number of collectors no longer remember seeing the players who are depicted on the cards. 10-15 years ago, I saw lots of them being sold at shows but the buyers weren't primarily octogenarians. More likely, collectors have discovered via ebay and population reports that Goudey's are a lot more plentiful than they had believed, so they are not snapping them up at a high rate. Moreover, the set has fewer subsets, rarities, and quirks than t206, thus making it much less challenging and intriguing.

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Posted By: Jeff Mohler

I have been looking for something a little bit cheaper to collect than tobacco and caramel. I started the Exhibits, but even they are starting to shoot up in price. Now the Goudey wide pens are starting to attract some interest.

I think the "Art Deco"-like portraits in the 1933 set are pretty neat. From what I can see EX commons are in the $40.00 range, so it isn't too expensive to get pretty decent cards.

Jeff

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Posted By: peter chao

Jeff,

Buy Goudey commons and stars in the first series, because of the heavy cardboard it is difficult to find these in nice condition.

Peter C.