The Grading Tax

A monthly published statistic: of graded sports-card sales we audited, how many realized less than the same card would have brought raw, once the grading fee is counted, and how many dollars that destroyed. The list of cards is taken from a third party's public most-graded rankings. We don't choose the sample, raw values are taken at the time of each sale, and the fee is a stated parameter with a sensitivity table.

The pattern the index measures is a cliff by grade: the top grade tends to pay, the next tends to break even, and grades below it usually sell for less than raw plus the fee. The first official month publishes once every tracked card has been measured for one complete month, first day to last.

Aggregates only: individual sale records are not redistributed. To price your own card before grading it, use the free grading calculator.