Grading Woes

Admittedly, I’m a little confused lately.

For many, many years I’ve been selling, trading and buying trading cards, and to be honest, the core formula has been pretty simple for a pretty long time.

Buy the card raw and send it off to grading.

The money, as a rule, has always been in the margins between graded value and actual costs associated with the card. 

For example: Pay $10 for a raw card. Send it off to PSA, for instance, pay the $18.99 for the grading fee. Add the raw cost to the grading fee (plus shipping) and you have the total cost of the card.

So, to keep this stream of thought going here, let’s say I’ve got a total of $30 into a card (raw+grading), and I was fortunate enough to have the card grade a 10. 

Sell the card for $60 or so, and I have a gross profit of about $30.

Pretty basic way to explain this, but in the end, it’s not too complex at all.

Recently, however, this theory has stumbled to the finish line, with graded cards, regardless of the actual grade, really struggling to sell. 

Now, I’ve near been one to squeeze out every dime from a graded card, and quite often, I’m pricing cards below comps overall. 

Still, cards are sitting in the store for days and weeks.

And I’m not talking cards that have zero interest to most people. 

Many of these are current, trendy players, and not base cards either. 

I learned a while ago that base cards are very tough to move as a general rule anymore. 

When I decide to send some of these cards to auction — they’re closing at prices that are, in many cases, nearly half of what the most recent comp was when they were listed. 

This little quandary has left me somewhat perplexed. 

Is the emergence of live selling platforms eroded more traditional selling avenues such as Ebay and others?

Has the rush of breaking pushed out singles sales to the point where people just choose to spend their money on the gamble and not the actual card?

Or are we entering a phase of the hobby where graded cards simply don’t carry the premium they once did?

Or have I totally lost my sense of business savvy for the hobby, and simply sell the wrong things at the wrong price? 

What is it?

In all my years in this game, I’ve never had this much trouble navigating the business end of it all. 

So, I pose this question to all of you who enjoy the business side of the hobby as much as I do.

Am I the only one noticing this phenomenon? 

What are you doing about it?

What can be done about it?

And where do you all think this is headed?

Please drop some comments. I would love to read what you all think.