Are the Best Cards Already Graded?
Why a card’s grading cycle should change how you buy.
How long a card has been on the market, and whether grading it was profitable during that time, affects the odds you'll find a clean raw copy when you go looking. It's not something that gets discussed much, but it's a pattern I see as someone who grades a lot of cards. This post will give you a framework on how to apply this understanding to your purchase decisions.
There’s a sweet spot when buying cards to grade. It comes after a card has been on the market long enough to have both Gem Rate data and sales data for PSA 10s and PSA 9s, but before most of the clean copies have already been graded. Before that sweet spot, you don’t have enough information to make smart buying decisions. After it, there are gradually fewer and fewer raw cards available on the market.
For example, we’ve been buying lots of 2023 Prizm Victor Wembanyama rookie cards lately, and every copy we’ve bought looked clean in the listing pictures. And yet, we decided not to grade quite a few of these.
This makes a lot of sense because the Wembanyama Prizm rookie cards have been profitable to grade since it released. People have been buying and grading clean copies consistently for two-plus years now. The result is that the best cards have already been submitted, and the raw cards that are still ungraded tend to have issues.
The opposite is also true, and it’s something we’ve been taking advantage of lately. If a card has only recently become profitable to grade, there’s a much better chance that clean copies are still out there.
The 2018 Topps Chrome Shohei Ohtani #150 is the clearest example I can point to right now. A year ago, a PSA 10 of this card was worth around $200. Today it’s worth over $1,000. Because the card wasn’t a smart grading candidate until relatively recently, a lot of collectors who pulled clean copies just put them in a case and forgot about them for years. Those copies are now hitting the market as raw prices rise. We’ve been grading these well, and I think the abundance of clean raw supply is a big part of the reason why.
A similar dynamic applies to older cards from eras when PSA grading was less common. The 2011 Topps Update Mike Trout rookie is a good example. Grading wasn’t nearly as popular in 2011 and the years that followed, so a lot of high-quality copies were stored rather than submitted. We get about 60% PSA 10s on these, in spite of it being a 15-year-old paper card, and I suspect it’s for the same reason. Because grading wasn’t as profitable when these cards were pulled, more clean raw cards are available now.
The idea is that where a card lands in the grading cycle is a variable worth considering. For example, if I see a Wembanyama card that we previously would have assumed had a 60% chance of grading as a PSA 10, I might now assume it’s closer to 45%. And if a player breaks out and becomes a grading candidate (like Cal Raleigh last year), even if the card is a few years old, I’d expect clean raw copies to grade closer to the average Gem Rates.