I see this talked about a lot but my view is the numbers on PSA are not actual gem rates for a cards population. They are the gem rate on what has already been filtered as a potential 10. No one submits (or a very tiny percentage) submit cards that are not potential 10s on ultra modern.
So if a card has a gem rate of 50% on PSA pop report I would venture to say the actual gem rate for the entire population of cards is probably at least half that if not more like 10-15% Gem rate. (1/4 of whatever the PSA pop report shows)
One assumption in the above is that 50% of cards are off center and will never be sent into grading then a percentage of the well centered cards have corner ding or miss cut further reducing the population
Probably over thinking it. The first owner of a raw card will likely make the determination to grade it as a 10 or dump as raw NM. But the next owner(s) won’t be as picky. The culture of grade anything is too strong to have everyone doing accurate pre grading.
And on the other side of “grade everything”, there are a lot of gem mint cards that will sit in binders forever. Not every perfect card gets graded. For example my Moonbreon is likely a 10, but it will never show up in your gem rate %
I can also second eeveeteam. A LARGE portion of my binders are 9s and 10s, and while I’d love to replace them, with say, 7s, and grade them, I can’t… So they’ll just sit there till I cash-out.
can you help me understand why the assumption is that all the cards are in worse condition for grading? My thinking is because there are probably more non-grading collectors than grading collectors, which means that even if the card was perfect, they wouldn’t send it in because they don’t care/don’t know about grading.
I’m pulling the more non-graders than graders out of my rump though, so who knows. I guess you’re assuming that there are more graders and not, which is coming out of your rump also, so I guess we’re at an impasse.
If I had to guess there is a TON of confirmation bias these days when it comes to graders/non graders. I’ve noticed that a lot of people jumping into the grading scene in the past year or two see a few videos, and do bulk submissions, and think they have everything figured out after they get it back. Meanwhile someone that submits maybe once or twice every year, but has been in the hobby for a while is more knowledgeable about grading overall due to seeing the change in grading over time, and actually caring about the card instead of the number it receives.
There may be a correlation as well between the money they’ve sunk in to the hobby, and them normally spending lavishly. If you’re spending a lot on grading, and chasing 10’s then you likely have money in this economy which leads me to believe that they will more than likely be chasing 10’s and seek that sense of perfectionism. On the other side of things we have people that buy the card, and not the grade, chasing the cards that they deem a 10 in their own mind. I joke sometimes that “Ive got some raw PSA 10’s, and raw black labels” because of the subjectiveness of grading.
We have too many different types of collectors now than we did a decade ago, and the standards aren’t quite as uniform as they once were. This leads many people to believe that their way of thinking is how it should be, and it gets even worse with influencers, and the hype behind it all because then you have even more people thinking that grading is a set standard because John Doe said it was. I will piggyback off the idea that too many people suck at pre-grading. They 100% are not good at it when its not that difficult to determine what will get a 10, and what wont.
The past 2 years I have been grading mostly modern IR’s.
Anecdotal, but the approach was mostly done through mass buying on TCG, filter graded copies, re-sell most of the raws. Ebay has been competitive with sourcing gradable stuff the past couple of years.
One card I really wanted to grade was Obsidian Flame Scizor. Bought about 50 copies, filtered down to ~7 copies “worth” grading and out of those only 2 came back at 10s. Context, PSA pop has gem rate at 15%.
As much as I’m a vintage guy at heart, the effort it’s taken to get IR 10’s does give me confidence there will always be some level of premium on modern 10’s with lower than 50% gem rate, specially when you’re more aware of how many raw copies you have to sift through to get there.
That being said, I think this is even the case with non-modern. The viewpoint you should take with PSA pops, is “this is the ratio of condition based on what people think is worth grading”.
I think the only time we’d see a card closer to in the wild condition ratio is when a card is worth more in a slab regardless of the condition + passage of time. Things like gold Ray come to mind and will be curious to see what pop reports look like 20 years from now.
I think the intuition that there’s a bias for PSA 10-able cards it true but you can’t infer much more that that. Trying to put a number on it is just inventing a fact. Every card will be different too. If the PSA 9/8/7 also carries value this doesn’t hold as much.
Yes this is obvious imo and there is plenty of strong evidence that i think proves it. Heres one example of many
Take a look at N’s Zekrom promo from ascended heroes
Gem rate: 13%
Now compare to the pokemon center stamped version
Gem rate: 5%
So whats the difference? Well there is no difference they have the same terrible QC and they are the same card.. but the huge price of the PC stamp makes it worth it for people to grade 9s with the off-chance it can get a 10. With the regular version? Thats just a pure money loss so you better not bother unless you think it actually has a shot
IDK if there are more graders proportionally, now. What I DO know is that I see a lot of new certs that should be junk slabs, and are only not because of the recent rise in prices.
I’m seeing PSA 7s go for the same rate as NM raw… which makes no sense. PSA 6 barely below them… It’s a 6. Not even NM, but because it’s graded?! If you NEED the graded copy now, I guess it makes sense, but who wants a graded 6? If someone is aching for a mid0tier grade, I’m genuinely bewildered. Even a 9 is a no-brainer when the raw cost is the same. So, something has to break, and those people grading 7s are either hoping to get in before the wave crashes, or they can’t tell they’re looking at a non-mint card.
How many people actually think “pack fresh” means Mint? Ebay describes it this way…
I get your point, and I agree that most people submitting ultra-modern cards are doing so because they believe the card has a legitimate shot at a PSA 10.
That said, I don’t think that means the published gem rate should be interpreted as being lower than it is. The gem rate is simply the percentage of submitted cards that receive a PSA 10. Trying to infer an “actual” gem rate for the entire print population goes beyond what the data is measuring and defeats the purpose of the statistic. It’s meaningful because it reflects the success rate of submitted cards, not every card that was ever printed.
If you NEED the graded copy now, I guess it makes sense, but who wants a graded 6? If someone is aching for a mid0tier grade, I’m genuinely bewildered. Even a 9 is a no-brainer when the raw cost is the same. So, something has to break, and those people grading 7s are either hoping to get in before the wave crashes, or they can’t tell they’re looking at a non-mint card.