Traditional Price Guides in Times of obscure Trading Card Sales — Value and Utility of the Beckett

When I started collecting Basketball trading cards more than 25 years ago, here in Germany, it was a very new Hobby. Up to that point we only knew collecting Panini (Soccer) stickers which was rather fool-proof in the sense that you glued the stickers into your album and kept doubles in a pile as trade goods. Usually, you traded a player straight up for another player and a sparkly logo for another logo. With Basketball cards, there were simply too many different products to complete each set and nobody wanted to restrict themselves to collecting only one series at a time. Thus, most focused on their favorite players or certain inserts. But how could you fairly trade a Topps Finest card against Fleer cards of which the pack only was a tenth of the price? And how to treat inserts which not only came from differently priced packs but also featured widely differing odds?

Unlike anything we had collected before, the large variety of Basketball cards would have made schoolyard trading very hard if it hadn’t been for the Beckett magazines which served as an universally recognized price guide. So, long before the internet had emerged, the Beckett was mainly responsible for bringing some liquidity to an otherwise very illiquid trading card market in Germany. In addition to its function as a price guide and checklist, the monthly issue was also a great source of information about the Hobby in general. It contained articles about players and remarkable Hobby stories, lists of the hottest cards, presentations of new releases, as well as a very informative readers write section.

By the time the internet had emerged and a large number of transactions were processed online, the Beckett was more and more superseded by eBay comps as the main source for determining trading card values. During the past several years, the majority opinion even completely dismissed the Beckett price guides as an useful orientation due to its lagged response to a steeply rising sports card market. In this manner the Beckett was degraded from the leading source information on which virtually each card seller based their inventory’s prices on, to a magazine that merely holds historic or even ideologic value.

As the trading card market is anything but liquid, especially for ultra-high end cards, few sales on eBay have a potentially huge impact on a large group of cards. Such a scenario is particularly prone to fraud and market manipulation. For one thing, even with more advanced search engines that show what the actual best offer price of any auction was, you cannot be sure whether or not the item was eventually paid for or if somebody — or a group of people — just wanted to drive the price up to influence “the comps”. And even if the item was properly paid for, there is also the possibility that somebody deliberately pushes the prices in given auctions to inflate their own stock. This seems to be the only rational explanation for why the price for a 25-year old Kobe from his rookie year recently increased by the factor of ten within a week. But even in the unlikely event that some new investor has confused the card with a much rarer parallel version and in consequence grossly overpaid it, the sale will nevertheless strongly influence the comp-driven trading card market. Additionally, there is the potential impact of social-media influencers who have the power to immensely hype the prices of given trading cards. Whether or not, they follow a strategy of pumping and dumping, where they promote certain kinds of cards just to sell them shortly afterwards. What happens if the influencer, or in that regard his followers, eventually lose interest in the subject, the cards’ values will dive-bomb to where they belonged in the first place.

Without a doubt, constantly monitoring the development of the comps is paramount for short-term investors, i.e. flippers, to be able to react in a timely manner and to anticipate trends. Then again, in the case of a long-term collector, for whom jumping on a trend is of no particular importance, wouldn’t it be more adequate to base his price cap on a source that not only factors in the most recent sales but also backdata, odds and print runs? The Beckett has a 40-year old track record of determining trading card prices and was considered the most reliable source over most of that timeframe for a reason.

In the ’90s when I started collecting, nobody cared about the Beckett LO value as almost every sale was based on the HI column. In the 21st century the tide began to turn and most transactions were based on the LO value. Considering the ups and downs over the years I believe that the Beckett price guides always supplied a good estimate of what a card was worth. Even if price adjustments might be delayed, Beckett values have eventually converged to the actual market price.

I like to give you two examples from my own experience which coincidentally involve a dealer who doesn’t place any value in the Beckett:

• In 2016 he sold me a Shaq 96–97 Topps Chrome Refractors at comps which then was less than $25 when the Beckett HI value was still at $60. Four years later, the Beckett HI value has increased to $100 and the comps are a multiple thereof. From our present view it wasn’t the right decision to sell the card for below $25 and I predict that watching from a couple of years back it would not have been a wise decision to have bought the card for $300–400 as today’s comps suggest. I believe that the card has been undervalued but Beckett’s price adjustment by 66% is much more realistic and sustainable over the long run than an increase by more than 1,000%.
• About 2 years later I wanted to buy a Shaq 96–97 Fleer Thrill Seekers from him. His asking price was about $110 and way above Beckett HI value which at the time was in fact significantly undervaluing the card. The expected scenario occurred as the Beckett value slowly climbed and about one year and a half later I bought the card from another dealer for almost the exact same price as was originally offered to me.

In both scenarios I didn’t suffer any disadvantages by orienting my purchase on the Beckett values and I expect that to be true more often than not, especially when you are able to demonstrate a little patience. That being that, I am not advocating against comps as a significant pricing indicator but, given its clear shortcomings, I am emphasizing that you should consult all available sources to determine your price cap. And completely neglecting the historically most relied on price guide might not be the best strategy.