Is it Easier To Get a PSA 10 When You Grade Early: A Case Study (Part 1)
We've all seen it.
A PSA10 goes up for auction and breaks some sort of record... Then, all of a sudden everyone is sending their raw card in to get graded hoping get a piece of that pie.
Some make the grade, others don't.
Actually, most don't....
I've always felt that with grading the more popular a card becomes, the less likely it is to get a 10 grade - if there's a massive influx of PSA 10s, then the whole supply/demand balance is out of whack.
In this article, we'll put that theory to the test. So put on your tin foil hats, we're going to get a bit crazy here.
Is Card Grading Really Subjective?
I was chatting to my mate PJ at the Instagram handle, 2026wcinvestor about grading and the difficult job that graders have and the potential for subjectivity in the grading world.
PJ showed me this video - a really interesting concept looking at how common key cards in a set get a 10 grade compared to a 9 at PSA.
The video really got us talking, and intrigued on the impact of card grading over time.
Mainly, we were discussing the frequency of PSA10s over time. Are cards harder to grade a 10 once they become popular?
Sure, with a set market like Baseball or Basketball it's pretty easy to know which cards will be the key cards in a set. But for soccer? Now it's a little tricky - soccer card grading has become way more popular in the last few years and cards that used to be worth the change you find at the back of your couch are worth hundreds of dollars... and the cards that were worth hundreds are now worth thousands!
With fresh in the mind, I thought a small experiment could give us some answers.
The Hypothesis
For this experiment, my 9-5 as a high school teacher can finally come in handy - here's a quick hypothesis for my using the same sentence structure I teach to my ninth graders!
If grading companies are truly objective, then there should not be any difference between the ratios of 9s and 10s over time because cards are judged on their merit.
Well.... that's what the grading companies say anyway.
So, let's see if it's true.
The Plan
The plan for this experiment is pretty simple in theory.
Choose the key sets and cards that we want to analyze
Find PSA grading data ranging from the set's release to now
Measure the amount of mint cards that are 10s compared to the amount that are 9s
Why Only Look at Mint Cards?
Similar to the video from earlier in the article, we're only going to be looking at cards graded at a mint-level, so the 9s and 10s. There are a few reasons why you'd do this:
When looking at card quality, the difference between a 9 and a 10 is pretty slim
The total number of graded cards don't impact results, just the mint cards
A lot of the major issues that cards have (corners, centering, etc) will mean that they will likely grade an 8 or under anyway
People say that key cards and sets are handled more, leading to lower grades - well we're just looking at the 9s and 10s, so overhandled cards have zero impact
Finding Old Data
In order to prove or disprove the hypotheses I need historical data on sets so I can see how the ratios of grading data changes over time.
Only problem is, that's pretty much impossible unless you've manually keeping the data for a decade hoping it'll come in handy one day.
Spoiler alert, I have not been doing that.
However, we do have the next best thing. The Wayback Machine!
Basically, it's a tool that scrapes web pages over time - and you can use it to look back at old versions of websites. It's like some internet time machine! Mostly it's used so people buying websites can make sure the site they're buying didn't have anything untoward published on it in a past life.
The Setback...
The main setback of using a tool like this is we don't get all the data we'd like in an ideal world.
Just think about how big the PSA site is... Think about every page on the PSA website.
Every sport, every season, every set, every card/sticker/ticket/whatever has it's own dedicated page.
And that's only the PSA site, this does every website that's ever existed....
That's a lot of scraping.
There's no way we can get as much data as we'd like using the Wayback.
The Solution...
Luckily, the Wayback Machine has a bunch of soccer card data from various points throughout 2016. In fact, that's the latest scrapes of the those pages.
I'm assuming this is probably because of at least one of these thigs:
PSA changed the URL structure at some point, or multiple times
The Wayback Machine, in it's rounds through the entire internet only got to the soccer pages on PSA once
Still, with data from 2016 and today, we can still do some pretty cool comparisons.
Another potential setback is that in the 2016 data you can only analyze the set as a whole. If you click to see the data for each individual card in the set it doesn't work.
That's not too bad though - because soccer grading is still pretty new compared to other sports, the majority of the time, only the key cards are graded anyway.
The Sets Chosen
Considering our limitations like only having the ability to look at data from an entire set, and that we can only see data from 2016 and now, I wanted sets that have all of the following:
Sets released prior to 2016 (sorry, Mbappe)
Sets that have a decent amount of 9s and 10s today - eliminating a lot of vintage
Sets that have increased in popularity since 2016
Sets that include a key player/rookie
With those parameters, these are the sets chosen
Panini Mega Cracks 2004 Barca Set
Panini Mega Cracks La Liga 2004
Panini Megacraques Portugal 2003
Merlin's 1996 Premier League
Panini World Cup Prizm 2014 (Base set only)
Panini World Cup 2014 Stickers
I think that's a decent list considering the options available.
This article was actually too long to fit in one email…. So in tomorrow’s newsletter, we’ll compare the data and see what we come up with.
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