The Lost Copies? How many GA Keys are Floating 'round Unkown!

[Silver Surfer]

You should get her to at least take an inventory of what's there and then report back to us.

[seank]

I can see why coin collecting is appealing.

 

You can't read coins. I'll take decaying four color action over a static metal disk any day.

[Big Daddy]

You should get her to at least take an inventory of what's there and then report back to us.

 

Tell me about it. I just asked again today, no progress. The ol man is still being stubborn. I even told her thousands are waiting to hear, she laughed. She's told me they used to read Superman & Batman mostly but there were some other adventure ones also. The suspense is killing me.

[thecollectron]

I don't really consider the CGC census an index of true scarcity, just an index of how many copies have been submitted for grading. I'm a little skeptical of sales ads that proclaim a comic is "Very rare!! Only 15 copies in the census!" or something like that. I know there are still copies of the "big books" out there that have not been slabbed. Still, with grail books like Action 1, 'Tec 27, Marvel Mystery 1, etc.... demand will always far outweigh supply, even if there are a few more undocumented copies out there.

I always hoped as a kid that I would find that miraculous box of golden age comics at a garage sale, but it never happened. Even so, collections continue to be unearthed.

[moloch]

Concerning the CGC census being low in relation to actual existing copies do you think it takes a higher dollar value to bring some of these books 'out of the woodwork' than it does for more modern era books? For example, if a copper or modern book is worth a buck or two the census will show almost no copies, but if it hits $20-30 in 9.0 people are slabbing copies by the shortbox. How much does a non-key GA book need to be worth before we see a more accurate count?

[thecollectron]

Concerning the CGC census being low in relation to actual existing copies do you think it takes a higher dollar value to bring some of these books 'out of the woodwork' than it does for more modern era books? For example, if a copper or modern book is worth a buck or two the census will show almost no copies, but if it hits $20-30 in 9.0 people are slabbing copies by the shortbox. How much does a non-key GA book need to be worth before we see a more accurate count?

 

Good point. A copper or modern book could appear rare in the census because it's not worth slabbing it unless it will give a 1000% return. Maybe it takes the lure of a similar % return to shake some of the hidden GA books loose.

[adamstrange]

Concerning the CGC census being low in relation to actual existing copies do you think it takes a higher dollar value to bring some of these books 'out of the woodwork' than it does for more modern era books? For example, if a copper or modern book is worth a buck or two the census will show almost no copies, but if it hits $20-30 in 9.0 people are slabbing copies by the shortbox. How much does a non-key GA book need to be worth before we see a more accurate count?

 

Good point. A copper or modern book could appear rare in the census because it's not worth slabbing it unless it will give a 1000% return. Maybe it takes the lure of a similar % return to shake some of the hidden GA books loose.

 

Centaurman doesn't attempt to predict scarcity if the book in VG is below a certain dollar amount. Can't remember what the threshold is exactly (it was a few hundred) but hopefully he'll chime in.

[CentaurMan]

I've been SWAMPED at work and busy with travel (Toronto next week, North Carolina after that), so I actually got over 1000 posts behind on the Golden Age forum (blasphemy!) and am trying to wade through them. Unfortunately, the board "resets" unread posts if you stay in a forum too long, even if you don't read the posts, so what I don't get to right now might be lost to the ages.

 

In any case, my scarcity model attempted to extrapolate the likely existence of books based on three assumptions:

 

#1) The more expensive a book, the more likely someone will bother to have it slabbed

 

#2) The less expensive a book, the less likely someone will list it on a web site for sale

 

#3) The number of copies of a book that exist in high grade can be extrapolated to estimate the approximate number that exist in lower grades

 

Using the CGC census, Heritage archives, ComicLink, Metro, and a half dozen other seller sites and cached records, I was able to cross reference historic availability with market price, producing a matrix that led to my scarcity ranking. I've got a spreadsheet that ranks more than 800 different books, and I've been pleased with the intuitive results it produces. Unfortunately, my real job has kept me from updating it very often (except as it related to books I'm considering dropping big bucks on).

 

If I get a chance to revisit it, I'll post incremental results on this forum like I used to. Sorry for the lack of contributions recently.

[PUNYHUMAN]

I agree with your statistics. & I always look forward to your posts.

Always informative & enjoyable.

(thumbs u

[seank]

How do your statistics correlate to the Gerber rankings?

[CentaurMan]

They kind of rhyme with them, in that Gerber 8's and 9's tend to be rare, and 5's and 6's tend to not be. But there are tons of exceptions. For one thing, in a lot of cases Gerber ranked books in groups of 10's, whereas in real life there can be vast differences in scarcity amongst books within those groups. Also, some Gerber designations have clearly brought books out of the woodwork (there's a subset of collectors who look for Gerber 8's and 9's, which increases their market price and in turn pulls copies out of collections).

 

Gerber did a phenomenal job with the data he had at his disposal, but we have SO MUCH MORE data available that at this point I almost never look at Gerber's scarcity ratings, as pretty much any of us can create better rankings with the web and some free time.

[adamstrange]

Now if I can just figure out how to create some of that free time.

[CentaurMan]

No kidding. It's kind of odd that money is inversely proportional to it. When I was broke, I had all the time in the world.

[adamstrange]

No kidding. It's kind of odd that money is inversely proportional to it. When I was broke, I had all the time in the world.

 

It's pretty easy to get back to that position.

[CentaurMan]

One more Heritage auction ought to do it.

[G.A.tor]

One more Heritage auction ought to do it.

[thecollectron]

my scarcity model attempted to extrapolate the likely existence of books based on three assumptions:

 

#1) The more expensive a book, the more likely someone will bother to have it slabbed

 

#2) The less expensive a book, the less likely someone will list it on a web site for sale

 

#3) The number of copies of a book that exist in high grade can be extrapolated to estimate the approximate number that exist in lower grades

 

Using the CGC census, Heritage archives, ComicLink, Metro, and a half dozen other seller sites and cached records, I was able to cross reference historic availability with market price, producing a matrix that led to my scarcity ranking. I've got a spreadsheet that ranks more than 800 different books, and I've been pleased with the intuitive results it produces. Unfortunately, my real job has kept me from updating it very often (except as it related to books I'm considering dropping big bucks on).

 

If I get a chance to revisit it, I'll post incremental results on this forum like I used to. Sorry for the lack of contributions recently.

 

After reading this and some of the other posts, I was inspired to search through past threads and I found your scarcity rankings for Action, Detective, and Sub-Mariner, along with the surrounding notes. Nice work, very thoughtful and informative. If the actual algorithm you devised for generating your scarcity numbers is posted somewhere, can you point me to it? I think you mentioned something about switching to a logarithmic curve. Do you plot data points and then fit a curve to them? Anyway, I'm really enjoying reading these threads. Very impressive!