Price guides versus real sales
Valuing cards. . 1 min read.
Price guides are useful and they are not valuations. Knowing the difference is most of what stops a collection being mispriced in either direction.
What a guide is doing
A guide publishes a figure per card, usually blended across a period and often across conditions and marketplaces. Blending is a feature: it smooths out the outliers that make single sales misleading. It is also the limitation, because the smoothing hides exactly what you need to see.
Three things the blend hides
- Condition spread. One figure for a card that trades at very different prices raw, in a 9 and in a 10.
- Recency. A blend including sales from before a transfer describes a market that has since moved.
- Market. A figure including US sales is not what a card fetches on eBay UK, after postage and import costs.
When a guide is genuinely the better tool
When you have no comps at all. A guide figure for a card with no recent sales is a reasonable starting point, and it beats guessing. This is the case covered in valuing a card with no recent sales.
Where recent comparable sales do exist, they win, and it is not close. The whole argument is set out in how to price a sports card: a completed sale is a number two people agreed on, and a guide figure is a number derived from sales you cannot inspect.
Common questions
- Why do dealers quote guide prices?
- They are a shared reference that speeds up a conversation, and a dealer buying will usually be working from real comps regardless of which number is being quoted at you.
The full guide
How to price a sports card
The method underneath everything else on this site: find comparable sales, discard the ones that are not comparable, and read what is left.