Stefan_W

Shifted to Grading/ Quality Control 16 Mar 2022. That was fast.

16 Modern slow track: Arrived at CGC 15 Nov 2021 SFG 15 Nov 2021 G/E/I 16 Mar 2022

Thank you so much, this is very helpful!

Just to be clear there was no sarcasm in my reply.

This particular Ebay scam has been going on for weeks. The person or people behind it use the same big books as bait, same photos, new accounts with zero feedback, and usually try to direct people to sites off ebay for direct sales at a discount. You see it a lot with EoSV 2 Land Variant and books like that. I started off reporting them when they popped up, but Ebay only took some of the bad ads down and eventually I gave up since it was turning in to work for me. Besides, Ebay should find a way to be more vigilant to prevent stuff like this to begin with. Sorry you got roped in to it, and I am happy to hear you are getting your cash back. I am sure insurance companies backing paypal and credit cards are the ones losing cash on this in the long run.

It happens when you use the wrong type of backing boards when pressing. The BCW ones are fine, the other types typically have a pattern that presses into a comic book. I found that out the hard way the first time I ever tried to press comics on my own and used the mylite full backs that I had handy. It was a mistake I never repeated. The good news is that the pattern presses out really easily. I re-pressed the books after picking up some BCW boards and it completely removed the pattern.

Eeep, the extra wait for prescreens seems to be longer than what they say to expect.

My two cents added is that there is more to the equation, at least for me, than just the costs. Space can be at a huge premium especially if you are talking about graded comics. So it may make sense from an investment standpoint to get more books that are lower graded but if you are talking about potentially dozens or even hundreds of slabs you need to have lots of room to store them and a very forgiving spouse. From this perspective it may make more sense to invest in one expensive 9.8 book over several lower graded ones. I guess a second two cents (three cents?) is depending on the book you are talking about it may be difficult to resell lower graded books down the line when you want to cash in on your investment. When you send books to auction keys that are in high grade typically push the fair market value at the time while lower graded and less valuable books, especially non-keys, can sometimes get poached at a fraction of value. So if you are planning on making the books an investment for your family to cash in if something happens to you (which I do) it makes a lot of sense to distill a bit and trade a lot of lower value or lower graded books for a single higher end one. I hope this helps, and best of luck with whatever direction you choose to go in

This is true as far as it goes, but I would also add the impact of the Marvel movies has made a massive difference. For good or bad, the success and continued of the MCU has pushed the comic market from being largely flat to one where there is continual growth at least in some titles.

That was a long time ago. I have been on Ebay basically since the site started. I am in Canada, and the best days were when the Canadian Dollar was above the USD in value and you were still able to declare things as a gift to avoid any type of customs fees and taxes. Those were the days.

I believe you have to fill that in every time though. You used to be able to block sellers and none of them would appear in searches. So you could block however many bad sellers and the process was automatic that none would show up when you did searches.

Truth. Some changes were for the better. I still remember buying items on Ebay and the seller keeping the money and simply not sending, and I am glad they fixed that part of the process. The automatic return regardless of why they have now leads to abuse though so I cant say it is completely fixed. IMO, the worst change they made is no longer allowing people to block sellers. I would love to be able to block sellers who I know I will never buy from and focus on search results that I am actually interested in. I complain about this every time they do a survey and ask for feedback.

My question was literally the topic of this thread.

Did anyone have any slow track moderns ship out today? If so, when did CGC mark them as received? I know mine are getting close and I am checking more often now.

People are practical, and many are sending in a lot of books right now because it benefits them to do so. As long as the math works people will keep doing what they do, and more power to them. The two things that would make a substantial impact on the number of books being sent in are: 1) a market dip where there is an overall price correction, and 2) CGC raising grading prices to a point where it no longer makes sense to send in many comics (e.g., doubling or tripling their current pricing across the board).

I cracked myself. I did not want them to use the original grade as an sort of basis for the regrade.

9 of my last 13 CGC submissions had grades I was roughly expecting, and the other 4 were totally hosed by the grader. For one of the hosed shipments I re-subbed 6 books that were originally graded with four 9.2s and two 9.4s, and with no addition press or anything the second time through there were three 9.6s and three 9.8s. So about a quarter of the shipments were destroyed by impossibly tough grading. I figure maybe it was new graders trying to show they are tough or something like that.

Based on the experiences people are sharing, my Modern slow track books should be hitting grading anywhere from 3 weeks to 3 months from now

Thank you very much! My modern shipment was received on Nov 15th so that gives me very helpful info on approx how much longer I'll be waiting.

It could be an asset, but since they do not do a check for restoration I would not pay FMV for an older book graded in this way. Probably safe for bronze and up though.

Professionally graded items are absolutely more of an asset. The professional grading process sets a value on an item that you do not get as a raw. Of course a Superman 1 is still a Superman 1, but if a seller of that book says it is an FN+ and you are seeing a VG tops then you have two radically different value points. An objective third party evaluation of the grade locks it, and it is a major contributing factor to value as well since the value point follows the grade. It also allows tracking of grades through services such as GPAnalysis where a market value can be established for books with a sales history through the "a comic is worth what someone is willing to pay for it" process. This is very different from old school approaches that I grew up with which focused on highly speculative guide book values based on even more speculative, and often highly optimistic, grades.

Yup, although I would qualify this by pointing out that people are sending in way more books for grading because the market went nuts during COVID. Waiting times are never fun but not so much an issue prior to the pandemic.

This is what I worry about. Based on the submission numbers people were kind enough to share I should have a submission in the modern tier graded in about 5 or 6 weeks, maybe a bit longer if the bottleneck grew just before my submission got to CGC. But then there are stories of people waiting months longer who had their submissions in the queue long before mine were sent in.

I remember when the comic market crashed in the 90s, and it was pretty ugly. This is a totally different market though, and I doubt it will happen again on the same scale. Having said that, the bigger the book the safer it is when prices dip again. The first ones hit are newer and more common books.

I think it is a matter of ratios changing. Knowing that the wait time will be pushing a year people may roll more books as raw copies to try to recover the cost of investment (e.g., buying a collection). Those who love slabs will continue to send to CGC, but they may start to be more selective and send fewer books. Of course if that happens as a trend wait times will start to drop, and people will just go right back to sending tons of books in.