Is the baseball card market a "perfect" market? The Demise of the "price guide"

[Rich Klein]

There has been movement in the vintage card world and that will eventually get into the magazine and annual guides as well.

Some cards will move up. some will move down -- but overall if you think about that, a 1960 Hank Bauer is not really going to change much in price for a long long time.

Ridh

[h2oya311]

I was just thinking about this yesterday. With VCP and ebay completed listings, there is so much more price transparency than there was in the past. I see many cards of similar grade sell for almost exactly what the previous one had on VCP (for graded cards, of course).

For this reason, I think card prices will likely stay around their current values for some time, despite or regardless of the state of the economy.

Access to markets for everyone (esp via eBay has really tightened up the disparity, although I feel that many folks simply don't know about the auction houses, so there is still a little slippage at times because some buyers don't know that there are other avenues to get cards thy want and they only buy on eBay.

Of course, this is just my opinion.

[Theo_450]

In 1982, when I became aware of my Dad's collection, we bought a price guide from the bookstore (imagine that). We will never know if those prices were close, because the thought of selling the cards did not enter our minds.

What that price guide did accomplish was to highlight the high dollar cards.
No matter if the prices were accurate, when you saw a couple extra zeros, you knew you had something good.

With all the information readily available in this day and age, that book seems pretty basic (I think we still have it somewhere). I wonder what it is worth?

[mrvster]

AGREED
I have never used a price guide.....market determines price

[JollyElm]

Price guides are a joke.

The sellers who rely on them to establish the price points for their merchandise are the same people who have the exact same cards at the exact same prices showing in their display cases year after year after year, show after show after show...

[deucetwins]

Agreed, price guides can be/are ego inflators. They don't determine actual value. The market does that. Speaking of markets, my definition of the perfect market would be seller sells an item at price point they're happy with, buyer buys an item at price point they're happy with.

[barrysloate]

Price guides are exactly what the name suggests: guides. They are often not accurate but can still be useful to help one determine which cards are valuable within a set. You may not, for example, be able to accurately price T-206 by using a price guide. But you will recognize that Demmitt and O'Hara are key cards, that they are worth more than Elberfeld, which is worth more than G. Brown, etc. So they are not entirely worthless, but by themselves not sufficient to determine market value.

I would say use everything available to you- guides, ebay and auction sales, VCP, prices, retail lists, and anything else you can find. The try to interpret these numbers as best as you can. Somewhere among all that data are accurate values.