Mega Charizard X EX #125: The most profitable card to buy right now
We're buying lots of these.
I’ll start with the part you’re looking for: the card we’re buying is the Mega Charizard X EX from the Phantasmal Flames set.
Methodology & Market Adjustments
Let me briefly explain our methodology for evaluating the profitability of a card for grading. We start by finding the value of the card as a PSA 10 and a PSA 9. As of December 27 (the time of writing), the values are:
PSA 10: ~$1700
PSA 9: ~$700
However, because these cards first hit eBay as PSA 10s around the third week of November, we like to adjust these market prices. Since the card is so new, more supply will likely hit the market before we get our graded copy back, driving the market down. To account for this, we apply a 25% value adjustment. Here are the adjusted values:
PSA 10: $1700 x 75% = $1275
PSA 9: $700 x 75% = $525
Gem Rate & Expected Value
Next we’ll look at the gem rate of these cards. So far these are grading quite well, with 1,493 of 2,089 submissions grading as PSA 10s. To keep things simple, we will assume:
Gem Rate = 1,493 / 2,089 ≈ 70%.
Of course, if you’d like to be more conservative, you can apply a larger value adjustment or a lower gem rate. Now, let’s calculate the Expected Value (EV).
EV = $1275 x 70% + $525 x 30% = $1050
Note: For Ultra Modern cards, we assume that the card will grade as either a 9 or a 10, which makes the math much simpler.
Moving along, let’s look at grading costs and selling fees. For our business, because we mainly consign with PSA the selling fee for our business would be 10% if the card sells for over $1000, and 12% if the card sells for between $500 and $1000. To keep things simple and to be conservative, let’s just use the higher number (12%).
Applying the selling fees to our EV we get:
Selling Fees = $1050 x 12% = $126
Finally, let’s look at the cost of grading with PSA. Note that PSA is generally fairly lenient with their upcharges in our experience. With that in mind, you most likely could get away with submitting this as a Value Max (with a maximum value of $1,000), but there is a chance you could be upcharged to the Regular service level if the card grades as a 10 (maximum value of $1,500). An upcharge to any service level higher than Regular is unlikely.
Below are the current grading costs from PSA’s website.
So we will assume a base grading fee of $60, a 50% chance of a $15 upcharge, and $30 total for outbound and inbound shipping. That will put our total grading cost at:
Grading Cost = $60 + $15 x 50% + $30 = $97.50
To add this all up:
Value After Fees and Grading = EV - Selling Fees - Grading Costs
$1050 - $126 - $97.50 = $826.50
In summary, if you buy a well-centered and clean copy of this Charizard card, the value of grading the card is roughly $826.50 after all fees and costs. Looking at the market today, these regularly sell for between $450 and $600 (I bought a nice one for $450 this morning). For a copy bought for even the upper end of the market, the expected profitability would be:
Expected Profitability: $826.50 - $600 = $226.50
Basically, this is the process that we apply to all cards that we look to buy, grade, and sell, and this card in particular has stood out as one to target right now.
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