A Cards Worth

[Blitzu]

Originally Posted by Bosox Blair

I respectfully disagree with the breadth of the premise.

For items of true rarity (even unique), I accept that it is difficult to ascertain a firm value. Therefore sales results can be quite surprising. At the extreme of this are one-of-a-kind items, like original oil paintings. To me, the seller of such an item has equal power to a buyer (or buyers) in setting the price.

But in terms of cards, the number that would fall into this categary are quite few.

Most cards are readily and frequently traded to the point where we can pretty easily determine value. And since many are sold by no-reserve auctions, in these cases the buyers set the market price.

Personally I think there is no card in T206 that is rare enough to apply the "each one is different" art-like approach. The Wagner may be looked at this way, but not because of rarity...rather because of the extreme high value.

For pretty much all other T206s, you can be assured there will be plenty of transactions of graded examples, and if you examine these transactions you'll see a trend. A result outside that trend is an outlier, and if the trend is a strong one, I can fully understand why someone might be surprised by an outlier.

The examples of people who are rich and don't care about money etc., if true, only create outlier transactions. Personally I disregard these things in my evaluation of true "worth". (Classic example is BINs from eBay.) I am a long term collector with patience and knowledge...I don't care what other types of people do on a whim.

Where the item in question is frequently traded, IMO the seller has little part in determining "worth".

It doesn't matter if I think my T206 Piedmont Bill Carrigan in a 4 is the best one ever and "worth" $500 to me...that has no bearing on the real "worth". It just means I'll keep it forever.

And if I think my Apple stock is "worth" $1000, that has no effect on its real "worth", since there is enough of it out there to trade daily for a lot less than that. It just means I'll be keeping it.

I suppose my real problem with the OP is that taken to its limit, the idea is that there is no way to determine the value of cards, other than to accept what a seller is asking for. While this is what dealers want people to think, it isn't true.

Cheers,
BLair

Thanks for the comments Blair. As I understand your point, I am basing my entire thought process on what I have observed over the years. BTW, I am not a dealer and not looking to change anyone's belief on that dealers prices are the value. I am a collector and regardless of any number someone throws at me, the cards I treasure are not for sale. I once saw a dealer every weekend at a show back in the late eighties that had a handful of T206's that he was asking hundreds to thousands of dollars for each of them. Some thought he was crazy, I now wish I would have bought them for their value is far more now then they were then.

Anyways point is those cards are each unique since each owner, irregardless if they're a dealer or just another collector. Since either will not let the card they own go for less than the price they want to sell it for. Doesn't mean their price is set in stone, but once the buyer and seller agre on the price that becomes it's worth. There is also the buyer vs buyer worth where two people or more in an auction setting compete until a sell price is set. That too makes that individual card worth that sell price. These are my observations over the years.