About soaking cards

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Posted By: Al C.risafulli

I could see how, if one spent a big portion of his card budget on major auctions, one would think that 8s and higher are the backbone of the hobby.

I just spent about an hour going through Mastro's last auction, card by card, separating sales of PSA/SGC/and even Global (although they hardly count, I understand) 8s and higher from everything lower. I got to about $1.4 million in high grade stuff, $1.4 million in lesser grade stuff, and then I started messing up and accidentally zeroed out my calculator while I was in the middle of the hockey cards.

Damn hockey cards.

Anyway, I think that it's important to consider the venue. That Mastro auction, or some of the others Jim mentioned in an earlier post, are primary sales channels for high-grade single cards or high-ranking registry sets. If that's what you looked at to gauge the hobby, I can see how you'd get the impression that the NM-MT cards are dominating the hobby.

It's kinda like, if Carvel and Dairy Queen were the only restaurants in my town, I would probably think that the whole world ate nothing but ice cream.

The reality is that it's 12:40 PM EST and in the time it's taken me to add up all those Mastro figures, there have been hundreds and hundreds of ungraded or low-mid grade cards sold on eBay. It's a 24-hour, 7-day marketplace that's always happening, with items closing virtually every minute of every day.

Add to that the fact that many of the auction houses (like Mastro above) have midgrade sales that are roughly equal to high-grade sales, and many more have midgrade sales that eclipse high-grade sales, and it's pretty clear to me that in terms of total dollars, the low and midgrade stuff are still driving the bulk of the sales and volumes in the hobby's secondary market.

Yes, the high-grade stuff will always outpace everything else in terms of pound-for-pound sales - an SGC 88 card will always sell for a significant premium over an SGC 60 - but I look at it this way:

Is Neiman-Marcus the backbone of the retail world? No. Wal-Mart is. Target is. Neiman-Marcus may offer a higher-end product for a different type of discriminating buyer, but Wal-Mart appeals to a larger demo. What's really cool is that I can walk into a Neiman-Marcus AND a Wal-Mart, buy stuff in both stores, and then come home and soak them, stretch them, trim them and resell them on eBay to BOTH types of people.

-Al