Sold prices vs asking prices — and how we compute the number

Ask two collectors what a card is "worth" and you'll get two numbers, both wrong in the same direction: too high. That's because most price talk quotes what someone is asking, not what anyone actually paid. The gap between those two is where money is lost — you overpay on the buy and fall short on the flip. Getting the number right is the whole job. Here's how we do it.

Asking is a hope; sold is a fact

An asking price is a wish with a price tag. A sold price is a transaction — a buyer and a seller agreeing on a real number, in public. One is aspiration; the other is data. Price your decisions off asking prices and you're trading on other people's optimism. Price them off sold prices and you're trading on what the market has actually, repeatedly done.

Why asking prices mislead

It isn't random noise — asking prices are biased high in specific, systematic ways:

Aspirational sellers anchor to the top of the range and never adjust.
Dead listings sit for months at prices no one will pay, cluttering the "market" with fiction.
A single optimistic listing gets screenshotted and passed around as if it were the going rate.
Never-sell listings — placeholders and vanity prices — quietly lift the average.

The result is a headline number that runs systematically hot, and a spread that evaporates the second you try to sell into it.

How we build the number

We take real completed sales and turn them into one figure you can act on. Four rules do the heavy lifting.

Sold only. We use completed transactions — real buyer-paid prices — never active listings. If it didn't change hands, it doesn't count.
Recency-weighted. A sale from last week tells you more than one from six months ago. Recent clears carry more weight, so the number tracks the market as it is now, not as it was.
Median, not average. One misidentified slab or a shill outlier can drag a mean wildly off. The median ignores the extremes and reports the middle of what actually trades — robust to the junk.
Freshness, shown. Every number carries a last-updated stamp and a sense of sample depth, so you know whether you're reading a thick, current market or a thin, stale one.

A quick illustration of why the median matters: say five recent copies sold for $40, $42, $44, $45, and one mislabeled listing at $180. The average jumps to about $70 — a price no ordinary copy ever actually traded at. The median sits at $44, right where the real market is. Weight those by recency, drop the stale ones, and you land on a figure that reflects today and shrugs off the junk sale. That's the number worth quoting.

Illustrative figures, shown to make the method concrete.

The whole world in one price

Any single marketplace is a keyhole. eBay shows you the US. Mercari shows you Japan. Cardmarket shows you Europe. Look through one and you'll mistake a local price for the real one. Pool 35+ marketplaces across 7 regions and the picture stops being local — you see where a card is cheap, where it's dear, and what it truly clears for worldwide. Japan, Southeast Asia and China sold data has no clean public API, so we collect it first-party. That's precisely the view a US-only tracker structurally can't give you.

We show the dips too

It would be easy to print a flattering number that only ever ticks up. We don't. If a card's sold price softened this week, the chart shows the dip. A line that only rises is marketing, not a market — and you can't make a real buy or sell decision on a number that's been groomed. Honest data is the only data worth trading on.