Thoughts on Card Market Manipulation - a VR to DPZ

[@DoubleDvintagebaseballcards]

Dude i missed this one and I am absolutely loving hearing your thoughts on this !!! Ok let me get back to it 👊

[@HighPopProfessor]

Glad you’re loving it, Dylan! Thanks for listening to my ramblings! 😂😂😂

[@mookiechillson]

It’s so tempting to guess the motivation of a buyer you’re competing against, but in the end it impossible to know and so you can’t dwell on it. I agree with so much of what you said here - great response Brian

[@HighPopProfessor]

Thanks, Mookie! Glad you enjoyed the thought-dump! 😂

[@iconic_baseball]

Thought-provoking response here Brian. Whenever this topic comes up, there seems to be someone (DPZ in this case) that represents the ‘victims’ of manipulation. And although I hear the arguments, i’m usually thinking to myself: No buyer is being forced to bid.. ever. Any buyer who gets ‘manipulated’ is willfully allowing it by continuing to bid. The main point: don’t bid or pay more than any object is worth to YOU.

[@HighPopProfessor]

Something else that’s been bouncing around inside my head too… the way that blanket bids work functions to keep comps lower than they actually are. If a card is sitting at $98 and someone bids $200 at the last second, and they end up winning it for $100, the sale was made at $100 and assuming the card gets paid for, this establishes the $100 comp for the card. But the fact is that someone was willing to pay $200 for the card! Heck, if the card had only been listed as a buy it now for $150, would that not have been snapped up sooner? In other words, how much different would card prices look if the bidding immediately jumped to your max bid, like in a live auction? I think many would be a little more restrained with their “mega” bids, but there would also never be this huge gap between the highest blanket bid and the actual winning amount: this “comp purgatory”.

[@vintagesanctuary]

Great thoughts, Brian! I have done a few "protection bids" in my lifetime, of course always paying if I won the duplicate copy. Indeed, I do believe your questions and thoughts help to expose that market ethics are a lot more complicated and nuanced, in general. Nonetheless, certain practices such as shill bidding, are clearly unethical. Since we need some sort of standard, I say we agree to pi as the value multiplier. Anyone who lists their card for more than pi times its market value is a bad egg! 🤣👊

[@HighPopProfessor]

Thanks for your thoughts, Adam! I found myself in an unusual spot with a card earlier this year, and placed my first ever protection bid. Although I didn’t end up winning, I intended to pay had I won. It was a PSA 10 I got back from a PSA order that was a Pop 1, so there was no comp available on it. After a month or two, another one shows up at auction (making mine a Pop 2 now), so I figured it would establish a good comp for my own card. I had a pretty good idea of what I thought it was worth, so I protected my perceived value of my card by bidding on the other one. It probably ended higher than it would have had I not “meddled”, but again, if someone else’s blanket bid was higher than mine, why should a comp be set by the second-highest max blanket bid? Had it been a buy-it-now, the other bidder was still willing to pay more for the card than I was, and that higher price / comp would have been established had the sale been in that format vs an auction. Sorry for the novel, and thanks for watching! 😂

[@vintagesanctuary]

@@HighPopProfessor Brian, your novel was a great read, plus the time flew by! 😂

[@TheSportsCardDad]

Great vid!

[@HighPopProfessor]

Hey, thanks for watching!

[@CollectingMaddux1987]

I definitely see how it is difficult to put in a response. I'm on the cheaper end of collecting but do have sympathy for the high-end collectors. I've seen some weird Maddux prices lately, so I'm in a holding pattern at the moment. I'm not sure if it is price manipulation or someone with too much money. It happens every once in a while

[@HighPopProfessor]

Yeah, aside from my two recent big pickups, I tend to stay in the shallower end of the pool… and stuff like this makes me glad of that. Maddux occupies an interesting and sort of unique status in the hobby where he’s not a “Pareto” guy, but also not a low end HOFer either. As for player “value” of a given set, I put him below Frank Thomas but above Bagwell and Piazza. Pretty close to Pedro, too. His market has some weird fluctuations for sure! I too have noticed some weird things going on with his market, but I wouldn’t let that stop me from pursuing the cards on my list! Thanks for the comment, Allen!