Another shill? You tell me.

[smtjoy]

42 bids on 23 items. 100% of the activity, pretty much says it all.

I find it funny that some just gloss over stats like that or just dont care. I am guessing those are the collectors who only plan to part with their collection when they die so the price they pay makes no difference to them.

It does matter to me as someone who buys and sells various parts of my collection. I didnt really understand how much the whole shilling thing is a factor till I tried to sell some of my cards and well I got crushed. Then looking over my purchase log of who and when I purchased the cards and the ones I was losing the most money on all seemed to come from a couple of the big sellers. If it had happened on a few cards then fine its just a bad day selling but after selling over 500 cards and these trends were still going strong you realize just how much shilling is affecting prices. Also I really think shilling is used more to prop up the value of cards vs to increase value, so a comment like I though prices were normal or near VCP can also be very misleading. Like I said sell a couple cards and see how you do, it was an eye opening experience. Also when I sell cards I can hardly get any early bidding at all but somehow certain consignment houses initial bidding always seem to be run up to near 80% of VCP on every card. Again if it happened here and there fine but not nearly everything they sell.