T206 Back Scarcity, Pricing, and Other Tidbits

[53toppscollector]

Hello and welcome to my post that will contain a lot of words about T206 back collecting and pricing.

When I go through buying binges, I have to follow them up with cooldown periods to refill my hobby bankroll, and given that I did not win the recent billion dollar Mega Millions jackpot, I am in a cooldown period. During these times, I typically look into T206 research projects to keep me busy and engaged with the set when I am not actually buying cards.

Yesterday I bought a 1 day pass to VCP and grabbed a ton of price data for T206, and I am going to use this data to write a few words about a subject that is really interesting to me, and that is T206 off back collecting/pricing/scarcity. As my T206 collecting has evolved, I've taken a keen interest in the off backs, how people treat them on the market, and how pricing and demand has changed over time. I will use this first post in the thread to add thoughts as we move forward. All data will be what I collected on 09Aug

A few caveats on the data itself that will apply to all writings I end up putting in this post.

• The VCP data is not great in a lot of respects, but it is ultimately the best data source available for this kind of project, short of hand recording the result of every auction. VCP data covers not just ebay, but most of the major auction houses too, which is important for offback data.
  
• VCP lumps together all Piedmont (except Fac 42) and SweetCap sales, which is...not great! But it isn't as big an issue as
  
• All Sovereign sales are lumped together, which creates issues. We know the premium associated with the tougher Sov150s and Sov460s in general. No way to distinguish the difference for a subject with a Sov150 and Sov350
  
• American Beauty 350 and 460 with Frame are lumped together under just a listing for "American Beauty With Frame"...the 350 No Frames are their own separate listing, which is good at least.
  
• For the analyses I am going to do, I did not include data for half grades, because the numbers would just be too small to draw any kind of conclusions.
  
• I combined the sales by number grade for PSA and SGC. That is, I downloaded all the data for PSA 1s, and SGC 1s, and then I averaged those two together. I did the same for 2s, 3s, and 4s. For modern cards, we know PSA commands a big premium over SGC. But for prewar, and especially T206, the difference is not nearly as big (if any at all), and I think averaging them together increases the sample, which is important when we are talking about small samples.
  
• I am only looking at data from 2021 and 2022. If a card's last sale was 2020 or earlier, I removed them from my sample. Honestly, the 2021 data is probably not super relevant at this point, but again, small samples.
  
• VCP uses a formula for calculating their average. I took a screenshot of it and will include it as an attachment here. For some of these cards, there will literally only be 1 sale....which isn't really an average. Small samples, etc.
  
• The VCP data is obviously only factoring in graded cards, and we all know that tons of raw cards, common backs and off backs, are being bought and sold every day. So this is only going to give us a decent approximation. But its something, right?

I may add more caveats as I think of them, but I think that sums it up for now.

Entry #1, 10Aug2022

The first thing I wanted to look at was how pricing is today, compared to the back multiplier data that Scot Reader put out in 2012. If you haven't read Scot's piece, check it out here:

https://t206resource.com/Article-T20...ltipliers.html

I used Scot's updated 2012 numbers in the chart I will show below.

For this first analysis, I focused only on what I consider "Commons"....that is, I removed the 74 HoF cards, the SLers, and then two other groups that I thought would skew the data. I call these two groups "Low Pop" cards and "Tough Cards"...the Low Pop group consists of commons that are in the top 100 most scarce cards based on total population. I will provide a list here as attachment number 2. For the "Tough Cards" group, I included non-HOF cards that command a premium...think Hal Chase, the Black Sox guys, cards that were hoarded (Adkins, Titus), the 6 horizontals, and other popular cards that always command a premium over a regular non low pop common.

What I wanted to look at for the commons (325 subjects not excluded based on the above paragraph) was what kind of premium the various off backs commanded, and compare that to Scot's research from a decade ago. Here is the resulting chart:



It should be fairly easy to read, but I will outline it in detail, and then my takeaways:

* A reminder the 1, 2, 3 and 4 is the average sale of a PSA 1/SGC 1. So for a Piedmont/SweetCap, it was $59. A 2 has an average sale price of $79, and so on. After the PSA/SGC 4, the "Avg" is the average cost of all Piedmont/SweetCaps, grades 1-4. Sample applies for all the off backs.

* The AB with Frame for a PSA/SGC 1 is $259, a 2 is $314, and so on.

* The "Multiplier" section of the grid is the multiple above a Piedmont/SweetCap that the off back command. For example, $254 for a PSA/SGC 1 AB with Frame is 4.3x the price of a Piedmont/SweetCap. ($254/59 = 4.3). The "avg" column in orange is the average multiplier for all grades, 1-4.

* The 2012 Multiplier comes from Scot's research, which is linked above. Scot's data presumably included Hall of Famers and SLers, so I don't think it should be compared 1:1 for this first exercise. I will be doing a separate analysis which includes the HoFs as well, but I am focusing here only on commons.

Now, my takeaways/comments:

* I debated not including Hindu Brown in this exercise, because it is much more rare than the other offbacks listed, but that is generally where I draw the line in terms of thinking about the offbacks in two distinct groups. You have what is listed in the table, and then you have Carolina Brights, Drum, Hindu Red, Lenox and Uzit, all of which are so rare and command such a premium, that really analyzing them here is kind of pointless. You might see one of those backs hit the market in a year for a common, and if you do, the expected price will be all over the place depending on how many people are chasing that back. Its hard to analyze that, imo.

* The first interesting thing that jumped out to me is that the multiplier for the offbacks declines as the grade increases in most cases. For example, a Tolstoi in a PSA/SGC 1 has a multiplier of 3.9, whereas a PSA/SGC 4 has a multiplier of 2.5. It is not purely linear, but you can see the decline in most of the backs as the grade increases. Polar Bear and Old Mills are not linear, and the Old Mill in a 2 looks like an outlier.

* According to this data, Tolstois still command more of a premium (3.2x on average) compared to EPDGs (2.8x), and anecdotally, I would not have expected that, as EPDGs seem to have really gone up in price recently.

* Cycle460s have a much higher multiplier in Scot's numbers from 2012, and I suspect that is because the HoFs with Cycle460 backs command a huge premium. It is still the most expensive multiplier here for commons outside of Hindu Brown, which as I noted above, you could group Hindu in with the other "ultra rare" backs like Drum, Lenox, Uzit, and CBs.

I am going to write more about the Hall of Famers in a separate post (maybe the next one?) and I want to also talk about population reports and relative scarcity in more detail, as I think it gets at a really interesting concept when thinking about back collecting and off backs in general.

Anyway, for now, I hope this starts a good discussion, maybe others will have things they want to add, and it might spark some interesting ideals to look at for future posts. I am probably going to just update the first post of this thread with future writings and bold them out so it is easier to navigate, instead of scattering new content throughout the thread.

Thanks for reading, I know back collectors are a niche within the T206 set, but I know there are a bunch of serious back collectors here, and guys with a lot more knowledge than me, so hopefully this will generate some interesting discussion.

Entry #2, 12Aug2022

I appreciate the feedback on the first entry, so I wanted to keep writing. In looking at the data, I decided to make 2 key changes which I think will help smooth out the data and make it a bit more meaningful.

• In part 1, I noted that I created two separate groups from the commons, low population and "tough"....I decided that ultimately, it makes more sense to group these 2 sets of cards together into one group, which I just renamed the Tough group. These cards are reasonably close enough in price, and as I noted, they do sell for a premium over regular commons, but they come in, for the most part, under the price for Hall of Famers. From the images I attached below, you can just combine those 2 groups now into the one condensed "Tough" group.
  
• After looking through the data for this post, I realized the easiest way to clean up the Hall of Famer data and make it presentable was to remove the outliers into their own separate group. As we all know, there is a pretty wide gap between a Green Cobb and a Jake Beckley, and looking at them together creates a pretty big skew/spread. So what I did was remove 7 cards from the main 74 card HoF subset. Those 7 cards are: the 4 Ty Cobb cards, WaJo Portrait, Mathewson Portrait, and Cy Young Portrait. Those cards all sell for $4,000+ on average in a PSA/SGC 4, and are outliers. I could have dropped the threshold slightly and included some of the cards that typically sell between $3k-$3500, but for now, I think removing these 7 cards and putting them in their own sub-group makes the most sense.

To illustrate why I think this is necessary, here is a quick chart showing the average cost of a Piedmont/Sweet Cap back for the newly aligned groups.



HoFE stands for "Hall of Fame, Exceptions"...I didn't have a better name/abbreviation for it, apologies. Those 7 exceptional cards sell for, on average, 10x more than a regular Hall of Famer.

So now that we have the HoFs better grouped, I wanted to look at the multiplier data for the 67 Hall of Famers that remain.



Because we are dealing with smaller samples, there will be some outliers in the bunch. I did not find any AB350WF HoF sales in a PSA/SGC 4 in 2021/2022. It is possible VCP missed one, but nothing on my list. In this chart, I used the updated multiplier from Scot Reader that he provided in the thread. I will also eventually re-do the original chart I posted in entry #1 to include these numbers

A few things that interest me in this data for the HoF

* As Scot noted in the thread, the multiplier for HoFs is much more narrow than it is for commons/other cards in the set. From this list, the Cycle 460, Hindu Brown and AB No Frame all have basically the same multiplier.

* Tolstoi coming in at a 1.4 multiplier is a tad surprising to me. EPDG comes in at 2.2, and I can only assume that is because for a lot of the early, desirable HoF, the EPDG back is the toughest or second toughest back behind the Hindu Brown

* The AB No Frame sale driving that wild multiplier is a Lajoie Batting. An SGC 3 sold in August 2021 for $18,600 through REA. The previous sale of an SGC 3 (it was a different example of the card) sold in October 2020 for $12k. Nice little price spike there.

* To give you an idea of the small numbers we are dealing with here, this is a quick summary of the Cycle 460 sales in the 4 grades in 2021/2022. The following cards saw a sale for each of the grades:

PSA/SGC 1, (4): Bender No Trees, Chance Batting, Tinker Bat Off, Willis Batting
PSA/SGC 2, (3): Baker, Mathewson Dark Cap, Willis Throwing
PSA/SGC 3, (3): Bender No Trees, Crawford Batting, Willis Throwing
PSA/SGC 4, (2): Griffith Batting, Young Glove Shows

Not a huge sample there.

* Because they lump in all of the Sovereign data together, it isn't easy to parse out the differences between a Sovereign 150 and 350 for the fronts that have both backs. Sovereign 150s for HoFs command a premium, from what I've seen anecdotally.

* Looking at Old Mills is also interesting. I threw together this quick chart with the multipliers for a few of the early HoF portraits that had at least some data for both Old Mills and Sovereigns. The Old Mill carries a premium. People have also caught on to the fact that there are tons of commons where the Old Mill back is the most scarce, with a lot of those cards having less than 10 combined graded copies. Those prices seem to have really jumped in the last year or so.



Someone really wanted that Waddell portrait in the Old Mill 3 back.

Last chart for this entry is sort of an overview of what I have come up with so far.



This shows the multiplier for the off backs for the 4 subsets of players, and then an "All" which averages the price of off backs for all subjects, not broken down into the different groupings. As a reminder, the multiplier is calculated by dividing the average of the off back with the average of the Piedmont/SweetCap in the same grade.

For example: A HoF PSA/SGC 1 averages $266 in a Piedmont/Sweet Cap, while it averages $695 in a PSA/SGC 1 with an American Beauty No Frame back. That is a 2.6 multiplier.

For "All", as an example of the above, the average PSA/SGC 1 for Commons + Tough Cards + HoF + HoFE + SLers is $145. The average of a PSA/SGC 1 with an AB350 With Frame back is $329, which is a multiplier of 2.3. You get the idea.

* Looking at these summaries, a few things jump out to me. Across the 4 main groups (Commons, Toughies, HoF, HOFE), the higher the grade, the lower the multiplier. This seems counterintuitive to me. Higher grades = lower population counts, which you would think would drive more competition and a higher hammer price relative to the common Piedmont/Sweet Cap back, but that isn't the case, for the most part.

* Southern Leaguers in Hindu Brown and OMSL backs command higher premiums in higher grades, at least when comparing a 1 to a 4.

* EPDGs have one of the smallest spreads from a PSA/SGC 1 to a PSA/SGC 4. The average for Piedmont/SweetCaps (for all groups of fronts) from a 1 to a 4 looks like this

P/SC 1, $145
P/SC 2, $200 (1.4x a PSA/SGC 1)
P/SC 3, $295 (2.0x a PSA/SGC 1)
P/SC 4, $467 (3.2x a PSA/SGC 1)

The EPDG spread for all groups looks like this

PSA/SGC 1, $408
PSA/SGC 2, $547 (1.3x a PSA/SGC 1)
PSA/SGC 3, $626 (1.5x a PSA/SGC 1)
PSA/SGC 4, $651 (1.6x a PSA/SGC 1)

This would seem like an opportunity to pick up a nicer grade EPDG without paying as much of a premium.

Adding a few other stray thoughts now that I have some time.

* Perhaps the most interesting thing to me is that the biggest multipliers are all for common backs. On one level this does make sense, as commons in a Piedmont/Sweet Cap will have the lowest price, but it is interesting that buyers will pay a big premium to get an off back of a common, but won't pay a premium to get an off back of a Hall of Famer. Would you rather have a Cycle 460 back of Bradley Batting (pop 12) or WaJo pitching (pop 11)....the data indicates you are likely to pay a bigger multiplier for the Bradley card than the WaJo.

* Polar Bear backs for the HoFs buck the trend slightly, as those command a very slight premium compared to commons with a PB reverse. Perhaps this is due to the more abundant populations across all of the cards in the Polar Bear set.

* A common with a Hindu Brown back in a PSA/SGC 3 commands more than 3x that of a HoF in the same grade. That is pretty wild to me. Hindu Browns for SLers command between a 4-6x multiple over the OMSL back. At a glance, I'd have thought that number would be higher given the smaller subset of SLers that have a Hindu Brown back, and the big spread in population numbers between OMSL and Hindu Brown

Last update for Entry #2, just something to look at for fun. I pulled out all of the subjects from my data that had at least 10 different sale points, ie, at least 10 different front/back/grade combos. I wanted to fit this all in one graph, so you may want to open in a new tab and zoom if it is too small to read



Nothing much to add here, just thought it was interesting.

Entry #3, 18Aug2022 - Raw Card Prices v1.0

Check out this post for more info/data: https://www.net54baseball.com/showth...98#post2254398

• As you remember from an earlier post, VCP groups together all SweetCap and Piedmonts (except P42) into their data, which is why I merged the PSA 1/2 averages at the top.
• BINs and Offer Accepteds were grouped together and separated out from auctions. Terapeak's filters there aren't great, so I just combined BIN and Offer Accepted.
• The numbers here include ALL CARDS except Cobb, Matty and Cy Young + the Demmitt PB that sold raw
• There were almost 7,000 Piedmont backs sold in the last 365 days, or about 19 per day. 3,269 SweetCaps, or about 9 per day.
• For all backs in the chart, there were 11,900 total sales, or about 33 per day. If you take the above numbers, that means that 28 out of 33 cards sold every day on ebay is either a Piedmont or SweetCap.
• Polar Bears make up by far the next highest total, with 816 sold (7% of all T206 raw cards sold)
• On the other side, I could only see 5 total AB 460 backs. I don't have comparable data for the graded cards because of the weird way VCP lumps in the ABs (and the Sovereigns)
• Sovereign 350s far out pace the 150s and 460s in terms of volume (205 vs 48 vs 47) but the 150s sell for a much higher average price than the 350s.
• The spread between the price of auction and BIN/Offer Accepted does vary greatly, which I think is kind of interesting, because it skews in different directions pretty drastically, likely impacted by one or two really high or really low sales

Anyone, discuss amongst yourselves, I gave you a topic. I'm going to keep tinkering with my methods for collecting raw card data and hope to have something more detailed and granular to dig into. Until next time..

Entry #4, 21Aug2022

What is the toughest possible off back set (No Piedmont/SweetCap) that you could put together?

See post #49/50 for the answer https://www.net54baseball.com/showth...47#post2255347

[MR RAREBACK]

thanks for the info

[Rhotchkiss]

James, great post! I look forward to reading more. A couple quick thoughts/replies:

1. I totally agree with your discussion about Hindus being the line, and feel you put them on the right side of the line. They do not compare to Carolina Brights, Broadleafs, and the other rare backs. But they are certainly more rare than the mid-tier backs. I guess they kind of fall in their own place, or maybe get grouped with American Beauty, who is a step above EPDG, Cycle and Tolstoi. Regarding Hindus, I especially love all the portraits and southern leaguers.

2. Great point about the scarce cycle 460 HOFers perhaps throwing off Scot’s 2012 weight. The same scarcity tends to exist for American Beauty, and also with some (not all) Sovereigns. Series 460 can be tough indeed.

3. I like that you point out that not all Sweet Caps are the same. Specifically, series 350 factory 25s can be downright impossible sometimes. I have found 150, 25s can be tougher too (compared to 150, 30)

4. Personally I strongly prefer series 150, when a combo can be found in 150 vs 350 (see Cobb bat on, Wajo portrait, etc). Series 150 is 1909. They are the “OG” t206s. They are the first and the oldest, and I think that is cool.

I look forward to more posts

Here is a mid-tier combo

[Golfcollector]

Cool article! Nice dive into the recent market on these.

Look forword to your next installment

[sreader3]

Hi All,

The back multipliers at the below link are more current than those in my 2012 piece:

http://www.t206insider.com/store/c1/insider#checklists/

David Hall and I also collaborated on a couple of back scarcity articles which are published on the PSA website.

Scot

[MuncieNolePAZ]

Great info here!

Chad

[53toppscollector]

Originally Posted by sreader3

Hi All,

The back multipliers at the below link are more current than those in my 2012 piece:

http://www.t206insider.com/store/c1/insider#checklists/

David Hall and I also collaborated on a couple of back scarcity articles which are published on the PSA website.

Scot

Thanks for this Scot, I must have missed it. I will update my chart accordingly and use those updated numbers in future updates.

Ryan, I agree with your comment about the SC 350/25s....some of them are just impossible. The real shame is that factory numbers were not tracked from the beginning by PSA (and not at all by SGC), so we don't know the true counts, but I think it is clear that the SC 350/30s far out number the 25s in most all cases.

[RCFire82]

* Looking at these summaries, a few things jump out to me. Across the 4 main groups (Commons, Toughies, HoF, HOFE), the higher the grade, the lower the multiplier. This seems counterintuitive to me. Higher grades = lower population counts, which you would think would drive more competition and a higher hammer price relative to the common Piedmont/Sweet Cap back, but that isn't the case, for the most part.

Super interesting info here, great work James!

A quick thought that jumped out to me about the diminishing multiplier with higher grades, is the fact there may be less competition (in terms of # of bidders) as people start getting priced out..thus bringing that curve down.

Myself, trying to build a raw set, I'm curios what raw card sold history would look like? (Or if this data is even something you could gather)

-Ryan

[53toppscollector]

Originally Posted by RCFire82

* Looking at these summaries, a few things jump out to me. Across the 4 main groups (Commons, Toughies, HoF, HOFE), the higher the grade, the lower the multiplier. This seems counterintuitive to me. Higher grades = lower population counts, which you would think would drive more competition and a higher hammer price relative to the common Piedmont/Sweet Cap back, but that isn't the case, for the most part.

Super interesting info here, great work James!

A quick thought that jumped out to me about the diminishing multiplier with higher grades, is the fact there may be less competition (in terms of # of bidders) as people start getting priced out..thus bringing that curve down.

Myself, trying to build a raw set, I'm curios what raw card sold history would look like? (Or if this data is even something you could gather)

-Ryan

Raw card data would be amazing, but unfortunately, I don't know of any way to really do it. ebay only shows you the last 90 days of sales under completed listings, and that would be limited to just ebay. Most of the big auction houses don't sell raw singles, everything is graded, but they do sell lots/collections of raw cards, but parsing out that info would be really tedious.

If there is a better way to get automated or semi-automated raw card sales data, I would be all ears. I too am focused on a raw set, and when I look at the raw values, I just have to estimate and assume a small discount from an equivalent grade down to a raw card. So if a PSA 3 sells for $100, I would expect to pay like $80-90 for a similarish condition raw card. Its very inexact in that way, of course.

[53toppscollector]

Added this graphic to the end of Entry #2 in the first post, this is the last thing I have for right now. I pulled out all of the subjects that had at least 10 data points to look at, that is, sales of 10 different front/off back/grade combos. These are the multipliers. None of these had a Hindu Brown sale, so I just omitted that from the chart to make it fit into the post without having to scroll a ton. Enjoy

[jggames]

Originally Posted by 53toppscollector

Added this graphic to the end of Entry #2 in the first post, this is the last thing I have for right now. I pulled out all of the subjects that had at least 10 data points to look at, that is, sales of 10 different front/off back/grade combos. These are the multipliers. None of these had a Hindu Brown sale, so I just omitted that from the chart to make it fit into the post without having to scroll a ton. Enjoy

This is all awesome info, well done. Am I reading this chart correctly when I see a yellow Chance CYC350 PSA1 for $208 (1.0 mult.)? If so, that’s an amazing deal, that Chance is one of those cases when the 350 is tougher than the 460.

[53toppscollector]

Correct, it actually sold back in June on BIN, and my guess is it got snapped up quickly

https://www.ebay.com/itm/195144890408