I’m wondering...is there any evidence that graded card values are being manipulated

[craig.gunter.66]

Say I own 25-PSA 10 cards of a high valued rookie. What if, before selling them, I bid on a similar card owned by someone else on purpose, and I paid too high of a price for that additional 26th card - PSA 10. The sole reason for doing so is to inflate their values before selling my original 25 - PSA 10 rookie cards. Is there evidence that this is happening? I wonder if anyone thinks this is happening when I see a random rookie recently sell for hundreds more than its value should dictate? If this is happening it makes me want to wait out this artificially inflated market.


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[Benbabs]

Don’t have any idea of the current manipulation In card market But it’s been going on since I joined eBay in 1998 as a young teenager in some form or another. Think Of guy who collected all those curt flood cards. I assume the price for that card will crash when guy dies because cards would be put back on the market. Buy what you like and what you can afford is only advice.
there is no inherent difference of any psa 9 card vs psa 10, just perceived value.

 

[smapdi]

Sure, plenty if you look, and it's done in several ways. Because everyone's now trained to look at past ebay sales to gauge values, you can game that system.

In some cases the same cards get sold over and over for higher and higher prices from the same sellers, or group of sellers. How is that possible? One was is that a seller sells the card, then that buyer uses that same seller to consign it back to the market, where it sells again, and that buyer repeats the process. This seems unlikely. Or the original sale was a fake, as was the one after and the one after, creating a perception of the market being higher than it really is if you look at completed ebay sales without digging into it any further.

On some message board, I can't remember if it was this one or BO, there was a long thread about a guy who was single-handedly inflating the market for Topps Black parallel cards, the flagship variety numbered to the years of Topps production. He'd create new ID after new ID, bid up, and sometimes even pay for what he won. When people noticed this his explanation was that he thought this parallel "should" be worth more than it was actually selling for, so he was really performing a service for all these sellers. Nevermind he was blocking people who actually wanted to buy them, and if the market truly was not at the point he thought it should be, he was just wrong in his ideas.

Then there are the people who just set floors on the prices of certain cards. These are harder to spot but quite obvious when you do. Maybe the best known was the Mark Teixeira guy, who bought up at least a quarter of a particular Teixeira card's 500 print run. There was also the 2001 Bowman Chrome Ron Davenport auto RC. Someone bought every single one that came along for the first couple years, causing it to be the second most valuable card from the set. I've seen a few others. When 2006 Allen & Ginter came out, someone put a bid of $200 to $220 on every Mike Tyson auto. They didn't win many, but it was impossible to win one for less. And someone did the same thing for 2003 Exquisite Allen Iversons.

And then there is the herd/FOMO mentality that's come out very strongly in the past year. The Gary Vees of the world who can influence people to buy by innocuously stating a particular card or range of cards is undervalued and cause a self-fulfilling prophecy when his followers buy them all up. When they try to sell for more and find no buyers other than the people who were following the same suggestion, and actual collectors who didn't want that card at $X all those years wouldn't want it a 3 times $x, so it causes a slump.