PSA/SGC Waiting Lines At 2019 National

[BobC]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

I suspect, Bob, that PSA will aggressively downplay it with their auditors, and claim nothing is new here just an intensification of the chatter that's always in the background. I think they could probably afford a significant increase to the reserve, as they seem to have (you would know better than I would, interested in your opinion) a decent amount of cash for a company their size, but at the same time that could affect perception of their confidence in their own abilities to grade and I doubt they want to send that message. But we'll see.

That is exactly what I'm thinking also, that they will downplay any current issues as nothing new and assert that as always they will vigorously defend themselves against any and all false or misleading allegations. And quite frankly, that is really all everything is right now, allegations. Despite all the scans and evidence that the Blowout guys have unearthed, and what looks to be fairly damning evidence across the board, nothing has yet been definitively proven as factual in any applicable court or by any other organization or party deemed/felt by the hobby community to represent it in determining such things. The sad truth is that up to now, the hobby has been looking to the likes of TPGs like PSA to be considered and treated as the be-all-end-all arbiters of what is or isn't authentic or altered. So with the recent, sudden revelations of all the suspect graded cards that are showing up, do we really expect any of the TPGs to suddenly realize they may not know as much as they profess to in regards to cards and what they are doing in grading them, and to openly start to admit that they have mistakenly been grading altered/doctored cards for years? It financially could be ruinous to them to now start doing so, and upend the hobby itself by putting things like the entire Registry in question. So as I've said before, it seems that even if the TPGs were not knowingly involved and collusive with card doctors, dealers and any other parties possibly involved in these fraudulent schemes, because of the financial and business effects these revelations could have on them, it behooves them to shut up and say nothing about this. They are in a virtual Catch-22 where if they admit to their prior grading errors and mistakes, it can end up costing them financially and reputation/business-wise. And if they say and do nothing and stick by their earlier grading opinions, the evidence found about their alleged mistakes will still find them guilty in the court of public opinion, which these myriad of threads about the issue already seem to prove true, at least among people on the BO and Net54 forums. In all the threads and posts I've seen, I don't seem to remember many, if any, posters taking the side of the TPGs and defending them as being correct.

And think about this, despite all the before and after scans the Blowout guys have been able to find and share with everyone, does anyone truly think the card doctors would have limited themselves solely to only picking up cards from other recent auctions to then perform their magic on and have re-graded and sold right away? What about all the cards the card doctors may have picked up at shows, from private sales, that were originally raw, etc., etc., where there were no convenient, recent, high-res scans the Blowout guys could go back to and show the similarities and then highlight the alterations made to such cards? My guess is that given the years over which these card doctors have been known to be operating and the multiple sources and areas they could have been getting their subjects to work on and alter, the number of supposedly altered/doctored cards that the Blowout guys have been able to find before and after scans of and show us are probably only an unbelievably small fraction of the doctored/altered cards that actually could be out there in the hobby, all sitting in otherwise legitimate, TPG graded holders.

And here is the scariest thing of all to me. If these card doctors are that good and can make these alterations so that they cannot be readily detected by the so called expert TPG companies when looking at them, without the availability of these before and after scans that the Blowout guys have been able to find and share with us, there is no way to tell beyond a doubt that any other graded cards with a numerical grade, regardless of what that grade is, have not also been altered or doctored. Unless it was found that these cards doctors over the years had been keeping records of all the cards they had worked on and then got re-graded and what they got as a bump in the grades, the new cert numbers, and so on, it will be impossible to tell. And I sincerely doubt the card doctors or anyone else possibly involved would be that stupid to keep such detailed records around that could possibly incriminate them. And even if they did keep such records, how would you be able to coerce them into making them public unless legal authorities started going after them criminally and somehow getting such data from them before they had a chance to destroy it.

And because of all this uncertainty and the ultimate inability to be able to possibly prove definitively what graded cards are or aren't altered/doctored, I can see a large part of the hobby community turning a blind eye and deaf ear to the whole thing and waiting till it blows over. Too many people have too much money tied up in their collections or inventory, or associated with their Registry holdings to want to see the entire hobby trashed to the point that they end up suffering financially as a result. Because of the unknown numbers of already altered/doctored cards that may be sitting in graded holders, and the inability for anyone to now go back and prove otherwise, the hobby in general may just end up accepting the fact that there are probably a lot of altered/graded cards in TPG company holders out there, but that if the TPGs couldn't detect any issues, then the'll leave them as is and basically the hobby will have started accepting these as restored/conserved cards and leave them as graded.

Otherwise, how can you feel comfortable buying any graded card then? Will one/some of the TPGs admit they may have had shortcomings and revise their grading procedures and testing so as to be able to detect these alterations in the future? if so, could it possibly mean that any future sales of graded cards will now require the seller to have a card re-graded to see if it were possibly altered before someone purchased it? I just can't see that happening due to the sheer number of graded cards out there and the costs to go through doing all that. And even so, who would trust any of the existing TPGs to get it right anyway. Quite honestly, you know who would probably be the best party/group to set up a new TPG to do the grading and detect these alterations, the card doctors themselves! Who else would be better able to detect the alterations than those who knew how to do them in the first place, right? But hopefully, that isn't ever happening either.

Getting back to the issues with regard to the CU financials and Annual Report, we don't know what their year-end numbers as of 6/30/19 will look like right now, but the measure of what is considered material to the financial statements will be determined based on those year-end numbers. And I already mentioned that based on the prior year-end numbers as of 6/30/18, the measure of materiality on those financial statements would probably have been around $500K, not really that much. So depending on what PSA graded cards were showing up on those Blowout lists as questionably graded, and the potential differences in their cumulative value should they actually only have been graded as "A" (authentic) instead of receiving numerical grades, that is what should be considered and factored into the Warranty Reserve that will show up on CU's financials. What actually ends up on their will thus be very telling.