Beckett Graded Card Investor Magazine vs. SMR. Surprising results.

RonBurgundy

Let me preface this by saying I am not a fan of Beckett for anything - pricing, grading, anything. I live in Dallas and I can count on one hand the number of items I have submitted to them in the last few years. I think their company is poorly run and their grading, ah well, let's not go there.

With that out of the way, I ran across a copy of their Graded Card Investor magazine today and was shocked. Shocked that it was surprisingly good at pricing vintage material accurately. Fairly reflective of Ebay prices, and unlike SMR they actually made an effort to separately list low pop and tough cards in each year and price them accurately. If I knew the market, but had never heard of each publication, I would've chosen their magazine over SMR easily. Stunning. It's not perfect and it has some holes, but at least they are trying which is more than can be said for SMR.

PSA: improve SMR. It's not that hard.




Ron

artistlost

Is the Beckett pub a month issue? and what was the price point on it? Any interesting articles? Thanks in advance.

mathew

jrinck

All it would take to improve the SMR is for PSA to hire a dedicated person to track auction house sales and Ebay sales, and the SMR would improve drastically and actually be useful. As it is now, if PSA stopped listing prices in the SMR, the magazine would be just as relevant. A change definitely needs to happen or you have to wonder why they are even wasting their time.

In the old days, price guides needed to rely on dealers honestly reporting cash sales, but that's unreliable. Ebay sales and auction house sales are electronically verifiable and represent the majority of sales. It would not be that hard to set up a database system to quickly and easily enter sale data. Add some knowledge about general rarity and availability (ding ding ding--via the pop report!) and accurate estimates can be given for cards that don't sell that often.

Hey, Joe, give me $100K per year and I'll make your SMR pricing spot on and reliable!

cwazzy

Where did you find your copy, Ron? I have heard good things about the Beckett magazine but cannot find it anywhere around here.

Mathew,
This is a quarterly magazine. It runs in my mind that it is $26 a year to subscribe.

Chris

RonBurgundy

I saw it at the Beckett offices here in Dallas. I had a card I was picking up from grading - probably the first card I have had them grade in 2 years - and it was there.



Ron

jmbkb4

SMR is an advertising venue run by Memory Lane, Mastro, among others.

Nothing else.

Even now, SMR is having 'informative' articles written by the aforementioned auction houses' executives.

ArnyVee

<< <i>Hey, Joe, give me $100K per year and I'll make your SMR pricing spot on and reliable! >>



I'll do it for $99K

fandango

if VCP can tap into ebay and auction sales (seemingly overnight) and list every sale of a specific card, why cant SMR tap into these numbers also....surely they can afford the hook up fee.....

to me this would solve all their perceived pricing problems.....

CDsNuts

I just bought my first issue of the Beckett Graded Card Investor and I agree with Ron. Not only is it reasonably accurate in terms of reporting what the tough high grade singles are, but they do it really objectively. I was expecting to see a lot of self-serving "BGS rules" crap, but they actually highlight PSA and SGC as much as BGS. In fact, there is a paid full page ad for PSA and an interview with the guy that started SGC as well as one of their graders. For the most part, the prices are about 20-30% too high, but it gives you a good gauge of what to expect to pay for a card. It really blows SMR out of the water. I'm really surprised at how much I like this magazine.

Lee

cwazzy

I agree, Lee. I got mine a couple of weeks ago and it is great. The prices seem to be quite a bit closer to reality than SMR. Still off on a few things but closer. I too was surprised to see a PSA add so prominantly displayed in the magazine. I am actually considering subscribing.

Chris

11235813

SMR is utter dross. Two or three interesting articles max and the other 95% of the magazine is taken up by ads and the price guide with its aforementioned flaws. My February issue arrived yesterday and I read it in ten minutes and tossed it on the recycling bin.

SidePocket

A radical change in the SMR report would be $5 up or down. In six months.

mtcards

I agree...Beckett Graded Price Guide is out in left field for them. The pricing is amazingly accurate and take in to account ebay sales, auction houses, etc. etc.

Now, only if they would use the same effort and put it into their monthly price guides. Unfortunately, they do not look at ebay sales or anything else other than person to person, show sales and a few bigger name company's inflated sales to a few suckers. Thats why the monthly price guides are so unrealistic in their pricing. People come into my business thinking they have the motherload of baseball cards, only to find out they have a box full of crap. But hey, Beckett says its worth $3000.................