REA Losses

[raulus]

Originally Posted by marzoumanian

I lost out on the 1952 Mantle card in a PSA 5 (early on!) but still tracked it. What I found strange was that the last bid on August 3 ended up being the WINNING bid. Does anyone have any insights as to why active bidding stopped 10 days before the auction ended? The card ended up going for $126,000 with buyer's premium. Thanks.

With this auction format, you tend to see one of two approaches:

1) everyone gets in an initial bid just to throw their hat in the ring, but nothing really happens until the last day, with most of the action happening in extended bidding. In these cases, the price often stays crazy low. You get to the last day and you get all frisky thinking you might pick up a great deal on it. Until that last day rolls around or even until the last minute when 2 or more bidders finally max out on what they’re really willing to pay. The price might double or even jump 10x in extended bidding.

2) a few bidders go nuts early. A couple of bidders decide they really don’t want to wait, so they start their bidding war when there are still days or weeks left on the clock. The price goes to the moon, and eventually one of those bidders gives up. Over the next couple of weeks, the rest of the interested bidders decide it’s just not worth going any higher. So it never moves again, and closes at that price.

While approach #1 definitely seems the most common from what I’ve seen, approach #2 happens maybe 2% of the time? I suppose there’s also a hybrid approach, when it looks like approach #2, but then in extended bidding, some bidders get their second wind and decide they can keep the party going a bit longer until there’s only one poor fool left standing.

Reminds me of the quote from Highlander: “There can be only one!”