Thoughts on these 2 recent auctions 0

[justafan]

While Heritage has been shown to use shills in the past via their MP Gresham buyer or rebuys/buys their own books that are at risk of selling for a price below market (which they can do legally and then relist at more favorable times free of fees) an easy to imagine scenario would be if Heritage is obtaining proxy and max bid info from bidders from their auction program and selling that info or using it to shill the bids up to a favorable maximum.  For example, if that ASM 21 bid came in earlier via proxy bid and was set to $50k but current bid was only at $15k, they could sit and wait to see if anyone else bids it up and enter it in at $45k at the last minute and collect a nice profit in the buyer's premium and seller's commission (assuming it wasn't already negotiated down with the seller).  This can easily be automated.  As the buyer, I'd probably want to know who was the underbidder and probably question the bid but if I had that much money, I probably could care less and feel happy I won.

Then again, this book being part of the top registry set also brought out a lot of whales that just saw it as "Top Registry" set and translated it into best of the best and must have regardless of how it looked compared to others or what the "market" price was.

But another reason for the crazy bids could be that this book is 1 of 7 in 9.8 and white pages with the only other 2 on gpa in OW/W pages and possibly a 3rd one on comiclink also being OW pages. Meaning there may only be 1 in 4 or less in 9.8 that have white pages making this one technically the highest graded including page quality.

[rjpb]

Paying 3x 9.6 price for a 9.8 when the difference is likely more reflective of a grader's mood than any qualitative difference in the book is crazy enough, but folks do like their 9.8 labels, especially on Silver Age. Paying 9X the 9.6 price is what people who have too much money do. Congrats to the seller on extracting some.

[alexgross.com]

On 12/8/2021 at 9:43 AM, BigLeagueCHEW said:

 

What I do is last minute bids, when it comes down to the end, place low increments that are required. Not 46.6K off the bat and allow a shill to place a 46.5K bid with the "known" amount I am willing to pay. If this was how this auction went down.

this is the smart way to play but many people take advantage of the proxy bidding and bid their max up front, so they dont have to be available during the live session. and unlike trying to shill stuff on ebay, heritage has the advantage of likely access to your max proxy bid, as @justafanpointed out. i am certain that on some books, they take advantage of this info and push the bidder to their max before or during the live session. 

when shilling is permitted, it only takes ONE bidder to drive a book price skyhigh, not TWO. all heritage results should be taken with a grain of salt.