T206 Back Scarcity, Pricing, and Other Tidbits

[53toppscollector]

new content added to the main post, pasting it in here for those who stopped reading the updated first post!

Entry #3, 18Aug2022

This will be a shorter entry here, but I felt it was interesting enough (to me) to add into the main post. As I noted in the thread, I am trying to work on a way (using my average Excel skills) to better capture raw card sales data. I still haven't worked out a way I love yet, but I have been playing around with Terapeak the last few days, and I was able to put together some generalized data. Terapeak allows you to pull data on sales up to 365 days old. You can only view the actual auctions for the past 90 days, but Terapeak keeps records of the sale price, shipping, date, etc for 365 days. For the purposes of this quick exercise, I realize I cannot drill down to the player level, but I figured that if I stripped out the exceptional HoF cards, I may be able to get data that is at least interesting to look at until I come up with a better method.

So, in the Terapeak search box, I used a string similar to what I use when creating ebay alerts for myself, adding in excluders like -reprint -rp -renata -honus etc to try and weed out all the junk that typically shows up, and I also added excluders for PSA, SGC, BGS, BVG, GMA, etc, to remove all graded cards. Once I had this list filtered, I sorted for most expensive cards and then least expensive. Terapeak shows you 50 results per page, so I was able to manually exclude a few graded cards that didn't include the grading acronym in the title, I removed a Demmitt Polar Bear because it would skew the avg price of a Polar Bear sale, and I also added in excluders for "cobb" "mathewson" and "cy" to remove those super expensive cards. I could have removed them manually, but that was too much work. I essentially wanted to compare the Commons, Tough Cards, and HoF outside of the most expensive in the set against the data from VCP for graded cards. This data is not perfect, and should taken with a grain of salt, but I think its a decent enough approximation to discuss.

I decided to do a quick search for the common backs and then the offbacks. I did not bother with any of the very rare backs since they sell so infrequently, and they are almost always graded when they do sell. Here is the chart, with an explainer below

• As you remember from an earlier post, VCP groups together all SweetCap and Piedmonts (except P42) into their data, which is why I merged the PSA 1/2 averages at the top.
• BINs and Offer Accepteds were grouped together and separated out from auctions. Terapeak's filters there aren't great, so I just combined BIN and Offer Accepted.
• The numbers here include ALL CARDS except Cobb, Matty and Cy Young + the Demmitt PB that sold raw
• There were almost 7,000 Piedmont backs sold in the last 365 days, or about 19 per day. 3,269 SweetCaps, or about 9 per day.
• For all backs in the chart, there were 11,900 total sales, or about 33 per day. If you take the above numbers, that means that 28 out of 33 cards sold every day on ebay is either a Piedmont or SweetCap.
• Polar Bears make up by far the next highest total, with 816 sold (7% of all T206 raw cards sold)
• On the other side, I could only see 5 total AB 460 backs. I don't have comparable data for the graded cards because of the weird way VCP lumps in the ABs (and the Sovereigns)
• Sovereign 350s far out pace the 150s and 460s in terms of volume (205 vs 48 vs 47) but the 150s sell for a much higher average price than the 350s.
• The spread between the price of auction and BIN/Offer Accepted does vary greatly, which I think is kind of interesting, because it skews in different directions pretty drastically, likely impacted by one or two really high or really low sales

One thing to add here that I didn't add in the main post (will edit it later) is that I think the interesting thing to remember here is that a common/less famous card is more likely to sell raw than graded, I would think. You see a few raw copies of like a Chance Red Portrait or Brown Portrait or Lundgren Chicago, but those cards are getting graded at a higher frequency than Casey, Wright and Pickering. Still, it is interesting to compare the average cost and to look at the volume of off backs that sell raw.