Price Per Point is Not a Thing...for Golden Age 5 5

[jhm]

12 hours ago, AJD said:

At the risk of being more of a geek than anyone here (and that's setting the bar pretty high), any curve can be approximated by a straight line if you don't go too far. The 'price per point' will sorta kinda work if the curve is straightish. Here's a curve I interpolated from the Overstreet relative values back when I was trying to work out prices for the 'in between' grades.

As others have said, up until about 6.0 a straight line fit is OK. After that not so much.

If only Overstreet was rooted in reality... I've love to pickup GA books using this curve as a cost basis!

[G.A.tor]

7 hours ago, Primetime said:

Agreed and I believe I remember you having a lengthy conversation with Bob Overstreet at SDCC one year trying to convince him to adjust the guide to reflect a “pp CGC point” at least for low to mid grade tiers. 

We discussed my grade point/value observation as well as me wanting to take ospg online (met resistance of course)

[BuscemasAvengers]

1 hour ago, G.A.tor said:

We discussed my grade point/value observation as well as me wanting to take ospg online (met resistance of course)

His resistance to an online environment for the OSPG was based on ...

[G.A.tor]

11 minutes ago, BuscemasAvengers said:

His resistance to an online environment for the OSPG was based on ...

It was his guide and he had no desire to have it be online ... he even said as long as it was his it wouldn’t be online

[Sqeggs]

13 hours ago, ThothAmon said:

Be careful though as so many books don't last but an instant.  My favorite deal with Rick was when I bought one of the books in his tagline and then five months later he bought it back from me for less than he'd sold it for.  And yet he's so nice I still feel good about the deal. 

Sell books to you at a high price and buy them back at a lower price?  Would you be interested in doing this deal for my whole collection? 

[BuscemasAvengers]

A seemingly vague response from him, with the only reason (!) evident being 'ownership' (!!??) Would an online OSPG be more reflective of market value, price points, etc., as 'living data' (sales, collections, scarcity finds) could more consistently inform the prices set in the Guide, so that the Guide becomes sort of a 'real time' document? I assume there is a significant amount of data collected in a year, allowing the Guide staff to amend the amounts ... what if this could be done during the year, and updated more often?

Edited April 10, 2018 by BuscemasAvengers

[Sqeggs]

Just now, BuscemasAvengers said:

A seemingly vague response from him, with the only reason (!) evident being 'ownership' (!!??) Would an online OSPG be more reflective of market value, price points, etc., as 'living data' (sales, collections, scarcity finds) could more consistently inform the prices set in the Guide, so that the Guide becomes sort of a 'real time' document? I assume there is a significant amount of data collected in a year, allowing the Guide staff to amend the amounts ... what if this could be done during the year?

I think for a while in the 1990s he published quarterly updates.  I assume sales of the updates weren't sufficient to keep it going.  That was more than 20 years ago, though, so maybe there would be enough demand today for some sort of online subscription plan or maybe it could be supported by ads.

[Ricksneatstuff]

15 minutes ago, BuscemasAvengers said:

A seemingly vague response from him, with the only reason (!) evident being 'ownership' (!!??) Would an online OSPG be more reflective of market value, price points, etc., as 'living data' (sales, collections, scarcity finds) could more consistently inform the prices set in the Guide, so that the Guide becomes sort of a 'real time' document? I assume there is a significant amount of data collected in a year, allowing the Guide staff to amend the amounts ... what if this could be done during the year, and updated more often?

Overstreet could be vibrant into the next generation with forward thinking subscription based "living data" documentation for sure. The current thinking creates the power vacuum that GPA has come to fill. It is sad because it could be done better than it is currently. 

[BuscemasAvengers]

17 minutes ago, Sqeggs said:

I think for a while in the 1990s he published quarterly updates.  I assume sales of the updates weren't sufficient to keep it going.  That was more than 20 years ago, though, so maybe there would be enough demand today for some sort of online subscription plan or maybe it could be supported by ads.

I remember the quarterlies ... you see them now and then pop up in LCS's and collections ... would be interesting to ask him what his intent was when he published those, and whether the original intent would be in conflict with an attempt to more regularly update values within an online environment ...

[BuscemasAvengers]

13 minutes ago, Ricksneatstuff said:

Overstreet could be vibrant into the next generation with forward thinking subscription based "living data" documentation for sure. The current thinking creates the power vacuum that GPA has come to fill. It is sad because it could be done better than it is currently. 

What is the relationship like between GPA and the Overstreet people?

[skypinkblu]

49 minutes ago, Sqeggs said:

I think for a while in the 1990s he published quarterly updates.  I assume sales of the updates weren't sufficient to keep it going.  That was more than 20 years ago, though, so maybe there would be enough demand today for some sort of online subscription plan or maybe it could be supported by ads.

After the 1990's, early 2000's, maybe 2003? They weren't very useful or easy to use, they were leaflets. I thought they were going to be monthly, but that never happened.

[skypinkblu]

When Heritage was selling PDF versions of Overstreet, I thought it meant they would go online, but they didn't, and the PDF versions were slower to use than a book.

[adampasz]

Have any of OSPG's historical data sources been documented or publicly released?

[Ricksneatstuff]

1 hour ago, BuscemasAvengers said:

What is the relationship like between GPA and the Overstreet people?

I honestly don't know but I would not think it is all that friendly. 

[G.A.tor]

The reason bob didn’t want his price guide on line is he is the only one that adjusts and enters prices on the printed version. He manually adjusts every line (if needed) and then a staffer enters. Bob told me he won’t relinquish that to anyone else and therefore would not have any desire to have it online (presumably because logistically he couldn’t update). This conversation is 10+ years old, but that’s what I recollect 

[ThothAmon]

I certainly like the price per point analysis up to a certain grade (6.0 seems reasonable).  Helps remove some of the emotion from the process. Still now that I’ve had a couple hundred books from all eras graded I feel very strongly that you should buy the book not the grade. 

[lou_fine]

23 hours ago, G.A.tor said:

23 hours ago, Junkdrawer said:

I’m almost positive that anyone who has ever priced a 7.0 has taken the prices of the 8.0 and 6.0 and came up somewhere in the middle. No rocket science or anyone taking credit for that formula 

That’s old school. I don’t think (admittedly haven’t analyzed ) that formula works these days in general, does it?

Well, if you take a look at all of the CC auction listing descriptions which are good enough to warrant an Overstreet guide valuation, that's exactly how they determine the guide values for all of the intermediate grades. 

[lou_fine]

8 hours ago, G.A.tor said:

The reason bob didn’t want his price guide on line is he is the only one that adjusts and enters prices on the printed version. He manually adjusts every line (if needed) and then a staffer enters. Bob told me he won’t relinquish that to anyone else and therefore would not have any desire to have it online (presumably because logistically he couldn’t update). This conversation is 10+ years old, but that’s what I recollect 

Out of all of the price guides that he does, I am 100% sure that Bob cares for the comic book price guide the most and is very meticulous about it.

Seriously though, this must take up an almost insurmountable amount of his time.  Especially when he also has his price guide on the Indian Arrowheads which he has been doing for a long time.  Now, he has also added ones for original art, movie posters, concert posters, video games, tabletop games, and what have you.  He must have other people doing the bulk of the work on these other guides. 

[rjpb]

On 4/10/2018 at 5:49 PM, lou_fine said:

Well, if you take a look at all of the CC auction listing descriptions which are good enough to warrant an Overstreet guide valuation, that's exactly how they determine the guide values for all of the intermediate grades. 

Not that guide values are all that important in most of those listings, but I always had an issue with assigning an OSPG value for 7.0 books at exactly half-way between 6.0 and 8.0. To my mind a 7.0 book is generally closer to a 6.0 than an 8.0 in desirability, and valuation should reflect that (eye-appeal aside). Of course, depending on the genre, publisher and over all scarcity, 7.0 books can sell for significantly higher prices than 6.0 copies, but for books where sales more closely track OSPG prices up through 8.0, I'm not sure they realize prices at quite the midpoint between 6.0 and 8.0 copies. 

[Sqeggs]

On 4/10/2018 at 12:43 PM, Ricksneatstuff said:

On 4/10/2018 at 11:24 AM, BuscemasAvengers said:

What is the relationship like between GPA and the Overstreet people?

I honestly don't know but I would not think it is all that friendly. 

I don't know either, but I think they're really doing different things.  GPA attempts to record every public sale for CGC-graded books (of course, he doesn't have data on CLink sales, sales by many dealers, or private sales), while Overstreet is a price guide that attempts to reflect market conditions but doesn't adjust prices to every sale.  Overstreet clearly (intentionally) lags behind books that suddenly take off (and sometimes also books that have entered a prolonged decline).

Room for both approaches, I guess.