Stefan_W

25 book modern pre-screen submission Dropped off at Fedex - Jan 12 Arrived at CGC - Jan 19 SFG - Jan 19 G/E/I - Jan 31 Q/C - Feb 1 Based on the amount charged to my credit card just now it looks as though I did ok with this one

No idea, but maybe @CGC Mike can weigh in on that one.

This is from the front page of CGC right now, bold added: "Plus, the Associate, Premium and Elite member discounts also apply to CGC Signature Series grading fees, CGC Pressing fees and Fast Track."

Hi folks, I mentioned earlier in this thread that I track my selling on Ebay carefully and things seemed down this year, but it was too early to draw any conclusions yet. Now that we are at the end of Jan I can provide a better look at selling so far in 2024 compared to early 2023. Please note that these are all lower end slabs that fall in the 75-300 range in general. Books sold: 2020-2021-2022 were all off the charts in selling so I am not including them in this breakdown. I basically hit the 10k mark in sales (which is when I stop using Ebay for the year) by late Jan and early Feb. I was selling books as fast as I could pack them up. I felt the market drop in 2023 when I only sold 30 slabs on Ebay and 2 in local direct sales over the course of January. I did not end up hitting my selling goals until April. In Jan 2024 I only made 17 sales on Ebay but local sales picked up and I had about a dozen there. So while the number of sold books did not drop overall, the way I was selling them started to really shift back to where it was in pre-pandemic days. Prices: The books from year to year were of similar quality, but I really noticed how much I had to mark down slabs from last year to this year. A lot of moderns lost 50% or more than their value over the past 12 months. I think this is why more local buyers were willing to open up their wallets - books are cheap now, and even cheaper in direct sales. Overall, the books I sold went for 27% less on average compared to last year - but this figure does not tell the whole story. People on Ebay gravitated to books that held their value a bit better than the others, and the overall price drops in listings was about double that when you take all the books I listed for sale into account. Timing of Sales: While sales were fairly consistent across Jan 2023, Jan 2024 was very sluggish at the start and has only started to pick up in the last couple of weeks. It is possible that the impact of the scam was that people shied away from buying for a little while and then largely forgot about it a couple of weeks later (this tracks with general human behavior), but there is really no way of knowing. Summary: The market on lower end books, including mostly lower end post-1975 books, dropped a lot in Jan 2023 and continued to drop in 2024 although not as sharply. The positive side is that people are willing to open up their wallets again in local sales, which was something that did not happen as much at the height of the comic boom. The current market seems to be picking up again slightly so we will see if it catches up to 2023 levels. Thanks for reading. I hope this is all helpful to someone out there.

25 book modern pre-screen submission Dropped off at Fedex - Jan 12 Arrived at CGC - Jan 19 SFG - Jan 19 G/E/I - Jan 31 This group moved to GEI way faster than I expected. Awesome!

I just checked the grader notes on the ASM 238 that just sold on Heritage and they say "very light spine stress lines breaks color", so I think we can rule out foul play with this one.

How did you do?

I don't know one way or another whether it is a part of a scam, but my 9.6 copy is better and my 9.4 copy is roughly level with that one. If it is legit I agree the grade was a gift.

Maybe, but it is also a really nice looking 3.5 that presents a couple of points higher. This is the exact type of book that will go over GPA.

Definitely annoying. If you were billed last week, and the amount of the bill depends on the grades of the comics, they have definitely been graded. Fingers crossed that you did well and got some awesome grades

I would guess they have probably been graded by now. Sometimes there are delays with the encapsulation process. The reason I am making this guess is because when they have moved books into a higher tier in my orders is it pretty much always very shortly after G/E/I. If the premium has been assessed and you have been billed for it the grading must have been done. The books are graded at that point but not encapsulated, and we cant see the results until they are shipped.

Just did up the submission form for 3 high value books that I am sending out tomorrow AM. Definitely appreciated the price reduction.

I ended up with 5 this round - one bullseye, 3 off by 1, and I thought the first book was more like a 5 than a 6 (went back and forth about whether that as a tear on the back cover). I'll take it.

Based on the price this book must be graded approx 1000.0

In terms of over- versus under-valued most comics are worth very little. As you point out, the market is heavily influenced now by movies (although less now today than a couple of years ago), and certain key issues have always had excellent value. I remember X-Men 94 being a wall book at the local comic shop only a couple of years after it came out. In terms of movement, run filler books say from the Silver Age will typically hold value or do a gradual rise. Movie books are highly volatile and as people spec hard on them in order to do a pump and dump before they crash and burn. More established key books will typically rise faster than run fillers but it still takes a while. Regarding ASM and X-Men, early keys especially in ASM typically do very well in the market because there are so many collectors. If you focus on a title like Sub-Mariner, for example, you can fill it out for the cost of a mid grade ASM 1. Popularity mixed with the amount of copies available determine the value at the end of the day.

I suspect the way it plays out is a lot of people want it, but the book has a huge price tag so most collector's cant afford it. At the lower end of the grade/price spectrum there are a bunch of people willing to go for it and stretch a bit to get it. As the price point increases most of those folks fall away and all that is left is a small group of collectors with deep pockets. The decreasing number of bidders at increasingly high price points can lead to some volatility in hammer prices from auction to auction.

Spawn is one of those runs where it is consistently popular, and so it does not surprise me if it climbs from time to time. There are a gazillion very high grade copies floating around so if you have flawless copies and price them well there will always be buyers. Not a particularly high value series aside from a few outliers, so it is never going to make you enough to retire on, but you can definitely have a nice return on investment with them.

If you are planning to re-slab it anyway the cost difference between that and a straight up regrade may make it worth the gamble. IMO any grade bump would be really modest but why not give it a whirl if you are going through the resub process anyway. The added factor I would toss into the mix is the book is dropping in value. It may be worth waiting until it flattens out or drops into a lower grading tier before doing a re-sub. If you wait to see if it drops into the 400s instead of 500s you may get away with the Vintage tier which is $40 instead of $85. Of course that may not happen, but since it is for your PC there is probably no big rush.

It is hard to put the brakes on the money train once it starts rolling. My own personal unsubstantiated belief is the scam changed over time. The guy who did is an opportunist, and he took advantage of the existing system to run the scam that was uncovered. I can 100% see a scenario in the past where this guy preyed on older cases that were not sealed as well as even the current ones and so on. It would have been less efficient because a decade ago he could not take advantage of reholdering using the custom label process and things like that. But, of course, this is just speculation on my part. I doubt the perp will offer up a detailed confession of every crappy thing he did in the community, and so we are likely to never know the full extent of his shenanigans let alone the stuff that others who were not caught have done.

The additional factor that comes into play when you have higher value books is the length of time of visit to the USA. I have not looked at whether things have changed, but a local guy I knew used to buy up bigger purchases on Heritage and then spend a weekend in the USA after picking them up. This changed the amount he could bring back duty free. Since I have not used this approach myself I can't speak to the details or ins and outs of doing it this way.

I did that for a while. I discovered the border security folks charged me 10% duty on a box of comics I bought while I was only charged 5% when I had them shipping directly to me. Not sure why this is, but when I added in the extra duty to the cost of gas for the drive (about an hour each way), etc, and factored in how this would take out a chunk of an evening I stopped doing it.

I ended up with 11 books in the first part of the CL auction. I was hoping to use my last shipping slot on a GA book but the ones I was looking at shot up by hundreds at the end leading to pretty high pricing. Hard to find issues of Detective Comics are still pretty strong at auction, although there seemed to be a few filler books I was not interested in that went pretty low.

People always react from their own vantage points. You are spending a great deal of time looking at a large number of books that have absolutely been tampered with, many of which are not on CGC's list, and are seeing that the scope of this is much larger than CGC claims. That is great and the work is important, but it also shapes your viewpoint. I am looking across my own collection of several hundred slabs and none of those have been tampered with, and I am 100% sure that the books I am bidding on right now at the CL auction have not been tampered with due to my price point and the books I am selecting. That shapes my viewpoint. The key here is perspective and understanding where everyone is coming from. The following is a series of true statements about the scam: - The scam is important and has impacted on many people. - The vast majority of comic collectors do not own books that have been tampered with. - The hobby has been impacted in ways we cannot begin to measure. - The hobby will continue. - People's trust in CGC has been shaken. - A lot of people will continue to send books in to CGC for grading and it will continue to be the gold standard in comic grading. If your meme shows the flip sides to all of these proverbial coins then please go ahead and share.

Sadly, I was on hiatus from collecting comics back in the days where you could mark "gift" on online purchases and be charged zero duty, and when the Canadian Dollar was above the USD. I bought tons of stuff back then, and some of it even got shipped out to me rather than the seller simply stealing the payment (which was a drawback back then), but none of it was comic books.

Sure, go ahead. Always happy to help out when I can.