SGC vs PSA Part 4: Modern Basketball

The number of grading companies seems to go up each week as new companies pop up seemingly overnight.  Choosing to send a card to get graded is a difficult enough decision but choosing where to send it can be baffling for both new and old collectors.  Each company has its fanboys and detractors.  There are scads of posts on social media sites showing the latest snafu some company made and there are countless others comparing the prices from recent sales of cards from each company.  It is easy to cherry pick the data to fit the narrative one already has in their head about the companies, but resale value should be one of the key factors in deciding where to send a card.  Getting an accurate picture of potential resale value is one way to get ahead of the game.  This series of articles aims to move past just looking at 1 or 2 sales and instead seeks to look at a larger amount of sales data to better understand the resale values of PSA, SGC, and BGS cards.  While there are other grading companies with decent volume (HGA, CSG), it is difficult enough to get adequate data for SGC and BGS sales, much less the newer entries.  Including them would be too difficult at their present sales volume levels.  This week’s subject is Modern Basketball which should prove a difficult test for SGC and BGS as PSA receives the most vocal support from the basketball community. 

For the time frame, I am sticking with the 1981-2017 timeframe that was used for Modern Baseball.  This also makes sense for basketball as the 1980-81 Topps set is a good hallmark for the dawn of the Modern Basketball collecting world.  This week’s examination hit a snag almost as soon as it started as the number of SGC sales dwindles as we move backwards through the years making the approach used in the previous articles less tenable.  For this iteration, the project relies on sales matching and includes sales of key cards with sales of BGS 9.5, PSA 10, and SGC 10 within a week of each other.  The smaller population of BGS and SGC cards makes this a fairly manageable number of sales.  Data comes from Cardladder.com, 130point.com, and Ebay.com.  The cards included are: 2017 Jayson Tatum Prizm 16, 2017 Jayson Tatum Optic 198, 2013 Gianis Antetokounmpo Prizm 290, 2015 Kristaps Porzingis 348, 2013 Gianis Antetokounmpo Hoops 275, 2012 Anthony Davis Prizm 236, 2012 Anthony Davis Hoops 275, 2012 Damian Lillard Hoops 280, 2012 Damian Lillard Prizm 245, 2012 Kawhi Leonard Prizm 209, 2012 Kawhi Leonard Hoops 236, 2009 Stephen Curry Upper Deck 234, 2009 Stephen Curry Prestige 230, 2008 Kobe Bryant Topps and Topps Chrome 24, 2008 Lebron James Topps and Topps Chrome 23, 2007 Topps Kevin Durant 112 57-58 Variation, 2004 LeBron James Topps and Topps Chrome 23, 1996 Kobe Bryant Topps 138,  and 1992 Shaquille O’Neal 362.  Overall, this results in 90 total transactions with no individual card accounting for more than 6. Almost all account for 3. This is surely not an exhaustive list, but instead provides a good snapshot and is a large enough size to get a better grasp on the overall market. 

One thing that should be mentioned is that part of the reason that it is difficult to find enough sales of SGC 10s and BGS 9.5s to do the exact same analysis as the other articles is that the gem rates differ amongst the companies.  2017 Prizms have an overall gem rate of 47% with PSA.  This means that 47% of all 2017 Prizm cards have received an overall grade of 10.  SGC’s rate for 2017 Prizm is roughly half that of PSA’s at 24%.  In starker terms, there are 562 total SGC 10s across the entire 2017 Prizm set.  PSA weighs in with a robust 42,239 PSA 10s.  The difference in grading standards hasn’t really been explored in these articles but is worth evaluating in the future. 

It should be noted that certain BGS copies carry premiums based on sub-grades.  Black Labels with 10s in each category carry substantial premiums.  Gem cards with four 9.5s also carry a premium as do some cards with 10s for certain sub-grades.  Almost every time there is a surprisingly high BGS sale, it is due to the sub-grades.  While BGS Black Label cards are excluded here, other high sub-grade BGS copies are included where appropriate giving BGS a slight boost. 

Even with that slight boost, things do not look bright for BGS.  Table 1 shows the overall sales figures for all the transactions looked at.  PSA has a wide lead over the others.  SGC garners 55% of PSA sales to BGS’s 50%.  While that 5% might not seem like much, once you factor in BGS’s substantially higher costs and wait times and choosing between those two becomes easy.  Why would anyone choose SGC over PSA though wit these sales numbers?  Again, PSA’s costs of $150.00 to SGC’s $25.00 means that for many lower priced cards SGC makes financial sense.  One needs to expect an added value of $275.00 from grading for PSA to have a higher expected return than SGC. 

Table 2 examines sales by each month looked at.  The number of sales vary by month so comparing month to month is not a useful exercise but comparing the differences in the grading companies in each month is beneficial.  SGC beats BGS in 3 of the 4 months, but both clearly lose out to PSA.  There is a good bit of fluctuation in the percentage at which SGC sales at compared to PSA.  This ranges from a low of 47% to a high of 67%.  Being able to predict this number is critical.  It would be great if it showed a steady increase, but instead it jumps around.  This volatility has been evident in other week’s studies too.  SGC ‘s biggest constant is that it has much more uncertainty around its values.  This allows for some low sales, but it also allows for sales that get close to or even surpass PSA.  The last two months do seem to be settling close to the overall rate of 55% which is substantially better than the roughly 45% BGS has for those two months.  

Modern Basketball is the toughest test for SGC and BGS and both have their worst results so far.  Even so, the results show that there are still plenty of times where PSA is the less profitable choice.  Next week we turn to Modern Football.  After that, the next few articles will tackle the Vintage market.