Same card, same grade, a quarter apart

Why we asked

Our sister site, which records signed items, keeps finding identical labels selling far apart. Two baseballs signed by Ty Cobb, carrying the same grades, sold one lot apart for prices more than half as much again as each other. We set that out in same label, different price.

Signed items carry two grades, one for the object and one for the autograph, so there is more room for two holders to disagree with the buyer. The obvious question is what happens with one grade. If a PSA 8 is a PSA 8, how far apart can two of them be?

How this was measured

For every card on this index with enough PSA-graded copies on offer at a single grade, unqualified, we looked at the spread of asking prices within that one grade. Rather than compare the cheapest and dearest listing, which a single wild price can distort, we compared the copy a quarter of the way up the price range with the copy three quarters of the way up. That is the ordinary cheap copy against the ordinary dear one.

These are asking prices, not sales. Some of the spread is optimistic sellers, and some is the market itself, and we cannot fully separate the two. Everything below is a ratio, so it holds as individual listings come and go.

The typical answer: about a quarter

Across the classes with enough copies to measure, the ordinary dear copy is offered for about 1.25 times the ordinary cheap one.

On the most heavily traded cards it is tighter. The 1989 Upper Deck Griffey in PSA 7 and PSA 8, the 1986-87 Fleer Jordan in PSA 7 and PSA 8, and the 1988-89 Fleer Jordan in PSA 7 all sit within roughly five to fifteen per cent from the cheap end to the dear end of the middle of the market. Where a card trades constantly, sellers can see each other's prices and the copies behave almost like a commodity.

Where it widens

The spread grows in two places, and they are opposite ends of the market.

At the top grades of expensive cards. The 1986-87 Fleer Jordan in PSA 9 shows a middle spread of about 1.7 times, and once the tails are included its dearest asks run to many times its cheapest. The 1979-80 Topps Gretzky in PSA 7 shows a similar middle spread, and the 1987-88 Fleer Jordan in PSA 9 widens sharply at the tails. These are thin markets: few copies, large sums, and no settled price for any seller to follow.

At the cheap end. Several of Gretzky's 1981-82 Topps cards, which ask only a little in any grade, show some of the widest middle spreads on the index, around half as much again. When a card is cheap, a few dollars either way is a large share of the price, and sellers have less reason to price carefully.

The middle of the market, where most cards and most money sit, is where identical grades behave most like identical cards.

What that says about signed items

The identical-label gaps on signed items have run wider than this quarter. The two Cobb baseballs sold more than half as much again apart, and our sister site has recorded identical-label rookies selling at around twice each other.

We would not lean hard on the comparison. Those are auction results for a handful of copies, these are asking prices across dozens, and the measures are not the same. But the direction is consistent with what you would expect: one grade leaves less room for disagreement than two, and a signed item's second grade, along with its inscription, its ink and its story, gives two holders with identical labels many more ways to differ.

What to take from it

On a heavily traded card, the grade is most of the price. If one copy is offered well above the middle of its grade, it needs a reason: exceptional centring, a strong surface, an older holder some collectors prefer. Without one, the cheaper copy of the same grade is the same card.

On a thin market, the grade is a starting point. At the top of an expensive card's grade scale, two copies with the same label can be priced far apart, and the gap is where the negotiation is.

A grade is a band, not a point. Two cards in the same holder can differ in eye appeal, and buyers pay for that. We set out how much the step to the next grade costs in what the last grade point costs, and how much a single qualifier takes off in what a PSA qualifier costs. The spread within one grade is the smallest of the three, but on the right card it is not small.

The thing worth sitting with

A grading label promises that two cards are equivalent. For the most traded cards in the hobby, the market mostly agrees, give or take a quarter.

Where the market is thin or the card is cheap, the label stops settling the price, and the buyer is back to looking at the card.

This index tracks every grade of these cards separately, which is what makes a comparison like this possible. You can read how we work the numbers out.

Sources