Scoring Pokémon card lots against eBay sold comps
TL;DR Active eBay listings are asking prices, not realized prices—they lie. Use SOLD comps (~90-day history) to anchor your math. Card identity is everything: name + set + edition + variant + grade. “Charizard” is not a price; “Base Set Unlimited Charizard, PSA 9” is. Sell-through velocity (sales per week) predicts how long your capital sits locked up and is the variable most buyers ignore. Expected value = (median sold price × (1 − fee rate)) − shipping − grading. Apply a 30% margin of safety before you bid. Confidence gates protect you: skip lots where you can’t find ≥3 grade-matched comps or where the price spread exceeds ~6× the median. Buying Cards Rewards Discipline I’ve overpaid for Pokémon lots I “knew” were steals. The problem was never the cards—it was that I was bidding on nostalgia and gut feeling, not math. ...