This is a ridiculous article.
Problem #1: The person didn’t actually buy many copies
One person bought 19 copies, on a day where 26 copies sold. Even for that day alone, they are only 73% of the sales. 3-5 copies sell per day according to the article. ~120 sales per month → this one individual is responsible for ~15% of sales that month and ~3% of all (TCGplayer) sales. If you include Ebay ungraded sales, you’re probably looking at <1% of total market activity on this card. This is not a large amount.
Not to mention this 19 card purchase cost roughly $3k. Could you imagine being able to dramatically manipulate prices with three grand? Compare that to an estimate of the market cap of the card and you can see how insignificant it is.
But even if it’s a small amount of the total market, it may have an effect if concentrated in a short time period?
Problem #2: It didn’t actually move the price
Quote from this article
At release, Special Illustration Rare Greninja ex cost just $116. It’s now over $280. That’s a 140% price jump in just a few months. This in and of itself does not mean the card’s price was manipulated. Particularly after release, we see card prices change all the time. To get a better understanding, we need to look at who was buying this card, and how many copies they were buying.
This is massively misleading to the point where it’s basically malpractice of statistics. You can’t use a 4 month comparison to imply the “140% price jump” is due to a single day
They pinpoint the 19 sales to June 19th
TCGPlayer’s data says the price was $188 on the interval of Jun 10-16th and a month later, it was $220. So the the most generous effect we can say these 19 card had was a 15% increase of price.
But that 15% bump is across a month, so 85% of sales in that period have nothing to do with the 19 card purchase. And if you look at the wider trend - the so-called 140% price jump - that implies an average increase of 28% per month. Which means the period of Jun 10 - July 10 significantly under-performed.
If you look at the actual trendline, it’s basically going up since release. It actually FLATLINES FOR A MONTH AFTER THE 19 SALES. I’m not making this argument, but there’s more evidence that these sales stagnated the price rather than bumping it up.
If these 19 sales happened on July 19th, right before that uptick, there would be more evidence to suggest it moved the price. But everything about this entire analysis is correlative, you can’t say anything about causation. But on June 19, there’s not even correlative evidence of an effect.
This article may be one of the worst applications of statistics I’ve ever seen in my entire life, and the only point is to stoke outrage for people who are already preconditioned to believe that all prices are due to sinister individuals manipulating the market. It could very much be possible that there are people trying to manipulate this price and this individual was one of them. But what the data actually shows is that there is no reason to believe these 19 sales had any impact of price at all.
Terrible. 0/10
