Lately I’ve been thinking about why we see certain cards, or certain groups of cards come up for sale more often than others. I think the tendency is to assume that the cards you see more often are more plentiful than the ones you don’t see as often. In most cases, that is a pretty safe assumption. However, sometimes there is more going on than meets the eye.
The perceived market price of a card often has a lot to do with whether that card is offered for sale or not. There are some obvious exceptions. Dealers (who are not also collectors), and anyone liquidating a collection, are not going to take the market for a certain card into consideration when making their decision to sell. However, when a collector feels the need to sell a card (or a few cards), they are more likely to choose a card they feel is either valued correctly by the market or overvalued rather than one they feel is undervalued. Multiplied by hundreds of collectors over time, you can imagine the impact this has on the cards we see hit the open market.
Essentially this is just a discussion about supply and demand, so I realize I’m not breaking any new ground here. I felt like it was worth a post, though, as it isn’t something I have seen discussed anywhere that I can recall. A few weeks back, a tough American Beauty 460 showed up on eBay as an auction. That listing was the impetus for this article. It occurred to me you just don’t see them for sale often at all. Obviously, they are quite scarce, but so are Piedmont Factory 42s, and there is never a shortage of those on the market. My conjecture is collectors value their American Beauty 460s more than the price they would expect them to sell for, and therefore they stay in collections.
The converse seems to hold for the “Elite Eleven” Piedmont 350s. With only around 100-150 of these known to exist, they are pretty scarce as a group. However, in the last year, I think I’ve seen around 10-15 of them for sale. The same phenomenon occurred when Ty Cobb’s Green Background Portrait began to rise in value a couple years ago. Right before the run-up, it was tough to find one for sale. Once the prices began to skyrocket, they started coming out of the woodwork. Every auction had three of four copies. Collectors clearly felt the return they expected to get would meet or exceed the value they placed on the card.
What does this mean for the market going forward? I think it means that, until the market corrects for some of the currently undervalued backs, we’ll continue to see a dearth of them available for sale. I don’t know how often other collectors use this rationale in deciding which cards to keep or sell, but it factors prominently in my decisions. Obviously each collector is going to have their own ideas of what is overvalued or undervalued. After all, if everyone agreed, the market as a whole would likely reflect this.
