Hello all. I hope everyone has a fantastic holiday week coming up here with it being Thanksgiving tomorrow for those of you in the states. Happy Thanksgiving! I hope for the long weekend to generate some thought and discussion on something that has been bothering me for a while now. This has been on my mind for about a year now, and I have been delaying putting in the work to further explore it for too long but the time is now.
Being that I recently posted in my buy thread about regrading I decided that I should further explain my stance here and explain why in my eyes it has validity in certain circumstances ESPECIALLY in the case of the dreaded PSA 8.5. This post has a lot more to do with the 8.5 actually than regrading. I really want to avoid anyone thinking I adorn tin foil hats as well because I tossed out the crazy theory that PSA had a short stint where PSA 8.5’s were handed out unreasonably, unfairly and in astronomical proportions never before seen. Nobody searches for them, nobody collects them or wants to buy them, they often times go for sub PSA 8 prices, the grade is too long to properly title and still fit all the other relevant bits in an eBay listing, the label looks ugly and messy with all those extra characters. I could go on and on.
So please see all my data below from my personal submissions. A quick word on my methodology. I only looked at cards graded PSA 8, 8.5, 9 or 10 in both my subs and in pop reports. All cards below grade 8 were excluded from the samples. You can see that my sample sizes are reasonably large and that I compare them against entire populations of large sets further below.
As you can see above I have graded in my tenure 2,990 total cards PSA 8-10. Of those, 34 have achieved a PSA 8.5. I had a two month stretch consisting of only ~10% of my total submissions where I received a whopping ~76% of my 8.5’s overall. Not only that, but regrading some of these cards led to the below results.
Do note that I have graded 34 PSA 8.5’s yet I only show results of 17 regrades. There are multiples reasons for this. Certain cards were not regraded due to the low value they would yield in PSA 8 or 9 (e.g. base II). They were cracked and added to binder sets. Certain cards I have graded in such high quantities that I couldn’t reliably say whether it went to an 8/9/10. What I can certainly say is that exactly ZERO regraded a PSA 8.5. I know this because of the 34 8.5’s I have received them all on unique card variants except two. Those two cases resulted when both 8.5’s for the given card were received in the same submission.
To put it into greater context here is the PSA 8.5 rates for a few select sets. Choosing Jungle Fossil and Chinese as they are ones that affected me the most. Choosing Base and Burning shadows for old and new large pools of data. What would be perfect is to have these data sets for my given timelines. Unfortunately I do not have that data, all I have is my own and my visual anecdotal evidence whereby a lot of the 8.5’s I see on eBay were submitted in the same time frame having the same cert # range.
Further things to add and some of my own interesting observations.
- I had 17 submissions before the anomaly window, 6 during and 37 since.
- My ship dates during the window were from 12-2-16 to 1-19-17.
- I speculate the anomaly started after 11-16-16 and ended before 2-2-17 as I have large unaffected submission bookmarking my affected submissions.
- My affected cert #'s are 26,3XX,XXX through 26,8XX,XXX but I feel the anomaly includes all residing in the 26 million bracket.
- Interesting uptick this year in my personal PSA 10 rate while PSA 8 held steady. I always submit cards that are PSA 9+ worthy in my eyes. Many are pack fresh, but many are also mint+ looking ones that I buy raw as singles or in large collections. I see 9’s as breakeven, 8’s as losses, 10 as my profit and 8.5’s as a PITA that needs to be regraded.
I decided to post this in the article section as I feel it best suits it, but mods please feel free to move if necessary.
