LordRahl

This is one of their regular auctions, not the premier ones which they call featured. The featured one is coming up in a couple of weeks. Nothing I bid on, which is mostly keys and "cover" books in high grade, is back to '18-'19 prices yet. I'm sure you can find filler stuff that might be back to that but anything that is broadly desirable is still above. Prices are basically where they should be if you take out the the pandemic madness... about 10-25% higher now than they were in '18-'19. That's on average, as we all know books sell in a pretty wide range of prices and there is no such thing as a set FMV despite what people on the internet try to preach. Even pre-pandemic you could find high and low outlier sales and now you can find high and low outlier sales.

While I agree and enjoy his, let's say wordier posts (I know that's not a real word), he's doing a fine job of getting his point across with images and emojis so hey whatever works and doesn't get him banned. It's unfortunate that people are so thin skinned that they can't take a poster who has a very deep knowledge base on things he posts about, just because he doesn't sugar coat things. Sugar coating things isn't all it's cracked up to be but that's just my

100% it was not market manipulation. I have sold books prior to the covid madness that went for literally 5x their normal selling price. I got paid. There was no market manipulation. As someone else pointed out CL doesn't get reported to GPA or any other sales tracking site... hard to manipulate a market when only the people that bid on the book know about it (typically). I know it got called out here and now more people know about it but that couldn't have been an expected outcome for someone "manipulating the market". Sometimes this happens with auctions, 2 guys really want a book and throw in crazy bids at the end. It's an outlier and likely not repeatable but also not market manipulation.

I was going to comment on this as well but you beat me to it.

Which is of course no different than how things worked prior to CGC. A dishonest seller only needed to fool the poor sod buying his trimmed/ct'd/glued/married cover book, not "the CGC". I still have my CT'd Phantom Lady 15 that was purchased from "a reputable dealer" 25+ years ago when I didn't know what to look for whereas to someone like the guy I bought it from, it would have been obvious that it was CT'd. It's obvious to me now, but I've gained a lot of experience in 25+ years. I will never sell that book, just keep it as a reminder of the "good ol days".

Lol. OK, well all you're showing us is a very thin piece of paper slipped through... which as others have said is normal. It's one thing to slide in a single piece of paper and an entirely different thing to slide in or out a 1/4" thick book in an inner well. So, go ahead and slide the book half way out and take a pic of that if as you say the comic will slide out if picked up by the top two corners. BTW, I'm in the camp that this slab doesn't look tampered with and everything you've taken pictures of to show that it is, is normal. Like the label being on the outside... ummm... they were ALL on the outside at that point in CGC's life.

You think that's bad, check out this 8.5 masquerading as a 9.6. With that spine and all the creasing at the top right edge I just don't get it. My raw 9.0 should be an 11.5 going by this book.

Well this should help the terrible narrative be less terrible.... a Silver Surfer 1 sold for over $100K. Say that out loud a couple of times just to see for yourself how crazy the market still is even though apparently it's in the toilet. SS1 is a 6 figure book. Everyone that's been around more than a hot minute knows how utterly silly that sounds, yet that's the reality... and it's completely overlooked as if it's totally normal.

Call them and ask. Please report back on what they told you

No idea. Trying to determine if a book is a 9.9 vs a 9.8 based on a picture through 2 layers of plastic is a fools errand.

90% of the comic collecting community, because they keep comparing to pandemic pricing and not pre-pandemic, which is comparing apples to oranges but hey it's fitting everyone's narrative of the sky is falling.

A Silver Surfer 1 sold for $108K I thought the market was crashing.

I wish people would stop comparing pricing today to pandemic pricing. There were a lot of irrational decisions being made during the pandemic, pricing being only one of them. I paid $5K OVER msrp for my car during the pandemic. People locked themselves away from loved ones. People moved away from jobs and are now in a position where they either need to move again or not work. It was silly times and not remotely indicative of real life.

Of course they grade on a curve. Is this a real question? Have you ever compared a GA 9.4 and a Copper 9.4? It's night and day. Grading on a curve is 2003 news, not 2023.

You were expecting how much? For a Spidey #1? Why?

Yes, I do. 9.8's have defects, they are not perfect books. And I'm talking about legit 9.8's, not gift grade 9.8's which we all know are out there. If you are basing any analysis on data like this particular 238, and forming conclusions that books are suspect because you apparently don't know what a 9.8 could look like... well that's a problem.

You're conflating two different things here. A mislabel which wasn't caught by QC and a book missing the MVS and that not being caught by the graders. In the former (a QC mislabel issue) the graders notes will identify that the book is missing the MVS. In the latter, CGC missed that the MVS is missing. The former happens with some regularity, the latter... well I'm not going to say it's never happened but the likelihood is extremely low.

I do in fact understand that however we know for a fact that qualified books were used so it stands to reason that if the overall sample size were larger, than the qualified to blue sample size would also be larger.

This probably did happen. There are 19 of them out there. Now imagine if you are correct and the numbers are 20x, 30x or whatever factor you want to use, greater. This would be happening a lot more. Sure, one instance (even 2 or 3 instances) may just not be believed by the general public but if it happened 20 times? My point is that it WOULD have happened 20 times or more if this is as big as some of the posts here are suggesting. This is how a lot of criminals get busted. They get greedy and stop flying under the radar. If he was doing this with a few ASM 300's and New Mutants 98's in 9.8 here and there, never would have been busted. No one is cracking 9.8's for a higher grade and there are so many high grade copies of those books, that no one is paying that close of attention to any particular one of them.

He isn't going to say anything of any actual worth. "Pssst... I know something and it's HUGE" but never actually divulges what that something is so as to not be taken to task for it when it's proven incorrect.

I still don't think you get my point. My point is, in plain English... the more fraudulent books that are out there, the higher the chances of getting caught. If there were thousands of them out in the market, they would have been caught before now. The CPR part of my post is just justification for why people would crack a book, because cracking it would be necessary to figure out it's a fraudulent book. CPR has nothing to do with this guy's scam. But it does have something to do with catching said scam. I really don't think I can make it any clearer than that.

What name is that? And I guess I need to check out MCS, wasn't aware they had auctions at all.

I thought the CRP part of my post was relatively self-evident but I'll spell it out. IH 181, there are 19 on the list out of 350. That's 5.4% of the list. For those of you that believe this numbers in the thousands of fraudulent books... let's say what...5K? If the percentage holds, that would be 270 IH 181's that would be fraudulent. If there are 270 Qualified IH 181's out there sitting in Blue slabs, and this book is frequently CPR'd, you don't think someone would have stumbled on one of them by now when they cracked it and sent it in? That goes for every book on the list that isn't a 9.8, so far more than 270 total books. As for batches, yeah I think ASM 300's and 194's, he is sending in batched. There are simply too many for this to be a 1 at a time kind of thing. For the books that don't have that many examples, could very well be 1 at a time.

I bet it's more as well. You will have to define "far more" before I can tell if we're in the same ballpark. And what pray tell is a Prime auction?