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I don't know about the accuracy of SMR, but if something isn't remotely accurate I don't think it can be referred to as a guide. A map of Cleveland isn't a guide to Atlanta.
In college during the cold war days, a friend of mine spent a semester at Moscow State University. He said the city maps were unreliable, as the Soviet government intentionally misdrew the street routes. To thwart Western spies I suppose.
This message has been edited by dereb12 on Feb 24, 2009 4:31 PM This message has been edited by dereb12 on Feb 24, 2009 4:29 PM This message has been edited by dereb12 on Feb 24, 2009 4:16 PM
"It is a guide. For more accurate pricing many use VCP."
VCP is a guide just like SMR. While it provides accurate prices on how much a specific example of a card sells for, the accuracy of that price is thrown out the window when the next sale occurs. Take for instance a T206 Red Cobb in PSA 3, the SMR is $700. Nobody is forced to buy or sell the card at $700. It will go higher or lower based on many factors. VCP tracks actual sales of the card and listed below is all their data on sales of the common back Red Cobb in PSA 3. So what is supposed to be the official final and accurate price of a PSA 3 Red Cobb.
I don't know if PSA has ever tried to use their SMR price guide to try to manipulate the graded baseball card market in any fashion, but I have no doubt that they wield a considerable amount of influence with it. To some degree the market follows SMR, rather than the other way around. Many people do use it as a baseline when buying and selling.
If you look at historical price figures reported by VCP, and try to use them to estimate what something is 'worth', e.g. what you should bid or ask for it, you are doing essentially the same thing statistical analysts must be doing at PSA: trying to predict the future based on observations and intrepretations of past sales, variations and trends in the historical pattern, and so on. VCP is just raw data, and you have to figure out what to do with it yourself. Price estimates listed in SMR and other guides of that type are the result of analysis performed on data, which may or may not add value, depending on the range of data upon which the derivations are based, and on the skill of the analyst. Also, the particular data, concepts and methods that are used to produce the price guides are generally not revealed to the consumer. So, take your pick -- raw data or processed data -- or just use each for whatever purposes it best serves.
Many people have said they think that prices for baseball cards have dropped significantly in recent months, especially in certain segments of the market; if so, it will be interesting to see if SMR makes some downward adjustments across the board to reflect that.
Looking at the list of VCP sales figures for T206 Red Cobb PSA 3 posted above, I would bet that many if not most of the people who won those cards had the $700 SMR figure in mind when they were bidding. That got them in the ballpark. And maybe the ones that went for over $1000 were particularly nice for the grade, so bidders were willing to go a bit higher. As Red said, there are a multitude of factors that affect the price that gets paid: variations in card quality within grade, sales venue, bidder population, player and set popularity, general market conditions, etc. Glancing at that data, there is no obvious official 'accurate' price -- that is for an individual collector, or a person whose job it is to prepare a price guide like SMR or Beckett, to figure out.
VCP does provide a current price or average based off sales going back one year. And our system takes up to the last 10 sales and we discount the high 3 and low 3 sales and average the remaining 4. This way at least in our view is a fair way to determine the value.
When I list cards on ebay I use SMR not
a map of Cleveland.
I use SMR as a 'guide' and it tells me where to start
my auctions. The cards I sell usually end up selling for
80-85% of SMR. Some sell way below that while others sell
well above it.
As for T-206's I don't deal in them so I don't know.
Some prefer Beckett, others use VCP. I'm sure other people
use nothing just common sense.
Well I've just really gotten started on my marathon to 521, and it seems that SMR just isn't valid for anything but the most common of commons. The future pinnacle of my set, the Magie, lists for $3750 in PSA 1. That price is only valid in my dreams.
Bobby -- that is a nice enhancement for VCP; I didn't realize you had implemented those methods, although I did notice that you were calculating the averages a bit differently than in the past. Excluding the high and low 'outliers' and limiting the historical time period to one year seem like good ways to 'massage' the data before taking the average.
When I use VCP as a reference I tend to look at the average, then I eyeball the whole list of prices to see the range and/or trend, then if I have time I go look at the scans for each sale to see how card quality might be correlated with the prices.
