Will Beckett and SMR adjust to the economy?
lsutigers1973
Posts: 11,093 ✭
Many on this board have suggested that card prices are falling and will continue to fall due to the US economic situation. If this is true, which I personally believe it is, will Beckett and SMR adjust their prices accordingly? You rarely see down arrows in Beckett's price guide unless it is a player who is in a bad slump or involved in some sort of scandal.
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But I think that it will be a few months before adjustments occur, if at all. It's always seemed to me that book pricing lags considerably from "actual" pricing.
So my question is why should it matter if Beckett or SMR "adjust to the economy"? They haven't been accurate for years, so why would they start now? Even if they put down arrows across the board, it wouldn't matter because their prices aren't accurate to begin with.
So you think that when a $100 card sells for $50 for a sustained amount of time that Beckett should adjusts their guide to a more accurate number like $50? What happens then is that no one wants to pay full book which is now $50. Then when no one wants to pay $50 should they continue to lower their reported book values? No buyers will ever accept the book value as the number they should pay for the card, not even 75% of it.
A few times every 10 years cards from 1969 and back seem to go up slightly across the board, but it has nothing to do with them being actively sold at a higher dollar amount.
<< <i>Around 1994 when every dealer in the country started selling their cards at "50% of book", that was around the point when Beckett diverged from realistic market prices. Cards were selling at 50% yet Beckett never had down arrows across the board to reflect what was happening in the market. Ever since then their pricing has been unrealistic and their "guides" have been irrelevant. Same with SMR- the first year or two they did a decent job of reflecting accurate realized prices, but for whatever reason they never really had any kind of follow up.
So my question is why should it matter if Beckett or SMR "adjust to the economy"? They haven't been accurate for years, so why would they start now? Even if they put down arrows across the board, it wouldn't matter because their prices aren't accurate to begin with. >>
I strongly agree with this statement. Also SMR is all over the place. Some cards it is out of whack on the high side, others on the low side. For the big money cards there will always be whales out there with the coin to pay top dollar. The place the squeeze has taken place is mainly with mid tier and lower tier cards, at least this is my opinion on the subject.
Ron
Buying Vintage, all sports.
Buying Woody Hayes, Les Horvath, Vic Janowicz, and Jesse Owens autographed items
<< <i>Someone should put out an Ebay price guide listing the average sales of cards, since that's what everyone bases their card's value on anyway. >>
um, they have its called VCP...
<< <i>I hope so and I hope people panic even more than they are now. I'll be on a buying spree like you can't believe. A lot of people in this world have made a lot of money by buying for 10 cents on the dollar and selling for 17 or 18 cents on the dollar.
Ron >>
I've been making a nice run of low/mid grade vintage cards for dirt dirt cheap, I almost feel bad for paying the seller's what I did.
But....I will continue to do this for as long as opportunity presents itself.
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