Best Measure of Rarity in grade?
PaulMaul
Posts: 4,888 ✭✭✭✭✭
Suppose I’m trying to assess what are the toughest star cards in the 1971 baseball set in high grade. What’s the best way to measure this?
The most obvious way is to measure the number of cards in 9 and better (or 8 and better, whatever you want to consider high grade) relative to total number of submissions.
The more I think about it, though, that may make cards with relatively low submission numbers seem more common than they actually are. Let’s say most folks won’t submit the card unless they think it has a shot at a 7, for example. The fact that a smaller number of cards is submitted in the first place is itself a measure of toughness.
Of course, absolute numbers are not fair either, as major star cards will obviously be submitted more than commons or lesser stars.
Comments
To me absolute numbers. If I want to buy a card in grade x or higher the likelihood one will be available is most tied to how many there are.
Price will be significantly higher on star cards due to demand. However more are available if you are willing to pay.
I think it has to depend on why you want the information.
I want to know: if every copy of each card from a given set in the world were PSA graded, what would the relative populations be?
Ah, if it's pure research, or "truth" you're after then I have no idea of the methodology. I had hoped you were asking something easy, like best potential price increase.
I do not think there is any way to know this except for stars. Submissions curtail to only the best examples once the cost of grading exceeds an 8. You would need to know submissions before and after that tipping point to extrapolate.
I would think the closest thing you could do is take the percentages for Mantle and the key rookie for the set and extrapolate to the whole set. That gives you the largest sample size. Then you can move up or down a couple of standard deviations from Mantle’s distribution based on where the distributions fall among each common.
My issue with using “percentages” (if by that you mean percentage of total submissions that are above a certain grade) is:
If card A is generally well centered it might have 100 9s and 10s out of 1000 submissions.
If card B is tough to find centered it might have 50 9s and 10s out of 500 submissions. There are another 500 cards that were too awful to submit, but the percentages are still the same even though card B is tougher.
I think the problem is there are too many unknowns here to really do anything scientific. I have thought about this before. I wanted to get some sort of priority list for my purchases of 71T. I decided the answers I came up with would just be guesses with the number of unknowns so I gave up and decided to just use the pop report. Maybe I'm just lazy
Kris
My 1971 Topps adventure - Davis Men in Black
Expecting rationality in an irrational market leads to disappointment.
I think this would require a ton of assumptions in addition to including items like these in the analysis: