Jordan's 1.08% Gem Rate and Trout's 42%: What This Week's Population Data Actually Tells You

The Jordan's PSA 8 population added ten copies over the week, moving from 9,413 to 9,423. The gem rate slipped one hundredth of a point to 1.08%. The Griffey's PSA 9 population added seventeen, going from 34,748 to 34,765, with the gem rate dropping from 3.20% to 3.19%. Single-digit and low-double-digit weekly adds against populations in the thousands and tens of thousands mean supply is moving, just slowly. The market has priced this in: gems on both cards are rare, and the ungraded pool that could produce new ones is shrinking with every submission cycle. Neither number this week changes that read.

The 2003 Topps LeBron James is the card to watch as this series matures. The PSA 7 population climbed from 2,110 to 2,119 this week while the gem rate simultaneously ticked down from 11.70% to 11.68%. More copies entering the graded pool without a proportional increase at the top grade suggests the remaining raw supply skews toward lower-condition copies. If that pattern holds over future weeks, it compresses the value of mid-grade LeBrons relative to gem copies rather than lifting all grades together. One week is an observation, not a trend — but it is the right observation to track.

Two PSA 10 Trouts were added this week, bringing the population from 7,100 to 7,102. The gem rate sits at 42.10%. That figure is high by any comparison on this watchlist, but it is also a ceiling, not a floor. If you are holding a raw 2011 Topps Update Trout and considering submission, 42% is the honest probability to model against: and that number could compress further as condition-sensitive copies that have been sitting in collections enter the pipeline. Whether those two new PSA 10s represent a single submission batch or broader market activity matters for interpreting momentum, and the population data alone does not answer it.

This is the first reading in a young series. Of the 763 card series tracked in this barometer, only 47 have been read more than once, so these numbers are a baseline rather than a pattern. The value of a fixed watchlist is that the same cards are compared to themselves week over week: the Jordan is always the Jordan, the Griffey is always the Griffey. Come back in four to six weeks. That is when the week-over-week deltas on the LeBron PSA 7 population and the Trout gem rate will start to say something definitive about where those cards are heading.