Episode 111 Grading Trends and Strategies PSA BGS SGC and CGC

Welcome back to Sports Cards and a Cup of Joe. This is your host, Joe Davis. And it's great to be back with you today, back in the studio and today I want to talk to you a little bit about grading. You know, it's been 30 days, it's been a month since PSA shut down their entry level services. And I want to have a conversation with you just like I have with clients here in our shop every day. Because as a company that has represented PSA since 1998 and handles a huge volume of grading submissions, I'm having to answer those questions like, what do I do now? I've got this collection and now I'm ready to grade it and I would normally send it to psa. So what do I do? Do I wait it out? Do I go somewhere else? What are my options? We have this conversation over and over here in the shop and many of you are in the same boat. So first I'm going to share some numbers I just got from jimrate.com this is through June 29th. How many cards each of the leading companies graded over the last seven days? I think you'll find this interesting. PSA graded 603.4 thousand. So 6003400 cards, CGC 2006700 cards, Beckett 38,600. SGC 13,000, tag 12,300. All of them are up dramatically. PSA is up 22% week over week. CGC 18%, Beckett 31%, SGC 61% tag 14%. So they are all cranking out the cards right now. So PSA in the last 30 days has graded just over two and a half million cards. The good news in that is that if PSA can keep that pace up, they will clean up the backlog in a few months. It remains to be seen how many months, but that's a good pace. If they're actually cranking out two and a half million cards being graded per month, then hopefully they'll be able to open back up here by the end of the year. Let's hope. At least we hope because we submit a lot with them ourselves and we have a lot of clients who want to use PSA on their entry level services, though not necessarily at the regular price of $80 a card for that service level. So I want to share with you what I've been doing. I am one of our largest submitters. I currently have right at 5,000 cards at PSA and many, many more at the other grading companies. But psa, I have the most there So I want to have a conversation with you as to what we're recommending and what we're actually seeing happen in our shop. Again, we're only one frame of reference, but we're a pretty good one because of the volume of cards that come through here each day and each week for grading. And so let's start with the biggest trend I've seen is a lot of modern cards are being dropped off for BGS specifically, we've seen the biggest jump in submissions with BGS by far. I've personally sent a lot of stuff to BGS in the last month. You know, I sent every last card I could think of sending to PSA before they shut down their valuable services. But of course, by the next day, I was going through a box actually at home, and I'm like, oh, I should have sent that card in. And then I'm going through, you know, boxes at our shop because there's so many here, there's so many collections we've bought where, you know, we bought them six months ago. We pulled out all the biggest stuff and then we get back to the next round and then we're like, oh, Jalen Brunson rookies. Yeah, we should have graded those, you know, some Shay Gilgeous Alexander rookies. Yep, we should have sent those out. And so we're always finding other stuff. Just yesterday I was down in our warehouse going through some mid-90s basketball boxes and found a 1999 Ultra Kobe Gold Medallion, huge card in high grade. I'm like, yep, should have sent that one. So we are constantly going through boxes, going through collections of our own and finding stuff that typically would go to PSA because the resale value is the best for those types of cards. But that's not an option right now. So the question we have to ask ourselves, and literally members of our team, we've had this discussion back and forth, and this is the same question many of you are asking yourselves about your cards. Do you sit and wait for many more months to send those off to psa, not knowing what that pricing could be when they come back? Because we don't know if the pricing will be the same when it comes back. And also not knowing when you'll be able to submit at value bulk with them again or what the turnaround times will be at that point? You know, our best guess right now is hopefully they reopen. This would be very aggressive, I think, if they can reopen by November or December, and let's say turnaround time is still in that six to seven month range. So you're talking about waiting to submit until the end of the year and then another six or seven months. So you're talking about not having cards back until August of 2027, so 13 months from now. So think of it that way. If you're wanting to grade with PSA at value, bulk level, whatever number that might be when it comes back, hopefully it'll be the same. We don't know. I don't think they'll make an announcement on that until they get close to reopening and I don't think those decisions have probably even been made yet. They probably have to gauge market demand and gauge what volume they can handle at that point and so forth. So if you're waiting, keep that in mind. By our best guesstimates right now, you'll probably be waiting over a year from today to get those cards back in hand if you wait. And for many of you that's exactly what you're going to do. We have clients who have sent us cards for us to screen them and when we're through screening they're like, okay, I'm going to wait now and sit on these until PSA reopens. Valu Bulk services, that's an option that many clients are choosing. However, we also have many who have also said, hey, I don't want to wait that long. I want to get my cards graded, I want to get them back in my hands this calendar year, not the second half of 2027. And so we've had many choose BGS and CGC and sgc. So I'm going to give you the recommendations I'm personally making right now. And let's start with vintage sports cards. I literally just finished assisting a client in our retail store before starting this videotaping. And he had a 1954 Bowman Mickey Mantle, he had a 1955 Topps Killebrew rookie, he had a 1962 Tops. Hank Aaron, he had a Yazz rookie, he had Henderson rookie, he had a wide variety of 1948 through about 1980 hall of Famers, varying conditions. Most of them honestly were lower to mid grade. And so I explained to him like here's your options right now. And in my opinion for that collection, SGC was the best option. SGC is very respected in the vintage market and they've always been for a long time they've been our number two option for grading vintage and specifically vintage baseball, which is all he had. But other vintage sports, same thing. So he chose SGC, sending off 30 cards to SGC recently, I've personally pulled a lot of modern basketball inserts as I was sharing with you. A lot of Kobe's, a lot of Jordans, some Tim Duncan, some Shaq, some cool, you know, Fairly low print, 1990s inserts. Those I'm sending to BGS right now. And normally that would go to psa. But the thing is, I know what I can send to bg. I know what price I can send to BGS at right now. I don't know exactly what I'll be paying for PSA when they reopen. I also know my turnaround time right now with BGS will probably be five to six months on their bulk service, whereas I'll be waiting probably 12 to 13 months from now to see new submissions come back from psa. So for me on a lot of the stuff I'm sending, $20 cards, $50 cards, stuff like that, I'm like, BGS is a really good price point for their bulk service. I'll have it back in five or six months. I know the resale is not going to be as strong unless I happen to get a black label, which would be sweet, but I know the resale won't. In all likelihood, unless the market shifts dramatically over the next six months, the resale won't be as strong as it would be with psa. But I'll have the cards back in hand by the end of the calendar year. I, I can get them sold rather than waiting an additional six or seven months to get them back and probably paying 10, $15 more for grading, depending on what PSA comes out at. So a lot of unknowns there on the PSA side right now, what the pricing will be, what the turnaround will be, when you'll actually get cards back in hand. So we use a phrase here a lot of times, at least I use it where we say get off the sidelines. And what I mean by that is we have a lot of collectors who are sitting and waiting and there's a lot of uncertainty right there. You don't know when you're going to get them back, you don't know what you're going to be paying. And you can know within reason, but you're definitely going to be waiting a very long time before PSA reopens again. Now you can go to the national if you're going to be at the national, PSA will be grading on site starting at $229 a card. $229 a card. BGS will be grading on site starting at $150 a card. And I believe, I know the BGS, that's I believe for end of show service. So it's not like one day service. There are higher levels. Also PSA has multiple price points, it's out there on their website. So that's not an option for most of you. You know, a lot of you are sitting on cards that are $50, $100 and you're not wanting to spend $229 to get those graded. I get it. So even BGS is offering their raw card review service. They just announced at $65 a card, very similar to our card got pre grade service, which I can tell you will be cheaper than that at the National. We will be offering that at the national. Both you can drop them off for two week service for as low as $15 a card. And then we will also be offering an expedited service at the National. We'll be making announcements on that as we get closer, but we will have those options for pre grading with us. But if you want hard slabs and you want to take them to the national, you're going to be spending hundreds of dollars to get that done. So there's a lot of math that plays in and there's a lot of formulas you can look at. I got off track here. Let me get back on track. As I was saying, with BGs. For me, with Modern sports cards, that's where I'm going right now with the great majority of stuff. Vintage, I'm mainly sending to SGC. Modern, I'm mainly sending to BGS. Now for those of you who are heavily into TCG, Pokemon, One Piece etc. I think BGS and CGC are great options there because the resale on their slabs is not the same as psa, but it's a decent percentage of psa. And again, you'll actually have them back roughly by the end of the year. And you're paying a cheaper price than you would be paying at PSA even if PSA were open for those submissions. So gaming, I think BGS and CGC are great options. Vintage, I recommend SGC right now. Modern Sports, I recommend BGS right now. And it's not just what I'm recommending, it's what I'm actually doing. We haven't stopped buying collections and submitters haven't stopped needing cards graded. And so no matter how long PSA is shut down for their valuable services, collectors will be wanting to get cards graded and wanting to get them back. So those are the Things you've got to keep in mind. I think a lot of collectors have sit on the sidelines for the first month because they're like, well, let's just see what happens. And all that has happened is you've lost a month of them sitting at one of the other companies to get them back. So I totally get it. I have many collectors who are PSA and nothing else and they'll be sitting on the sidelines waiting on psa. I get it. Many of you who might have sets in the set registry, I get it. You're not going to mix your set with different grading companies. You're working on finishing a PSA graded set for the registry, so you're going to wait. I get it. But understand, you know, PSA is making great progress. Two and a half million cards graded in the last month, but as they announced, their backlog hit about 14 million. So at 2.5 million per month and their goal is to get down to around 5 million, you're still looking at roughly five months of waiting for them to reopen. So we've been through June, we got to go through July, August, September, October. That's why I said at the very best, the very best, my best estimate is that they would start offering value bulk again in November. I think it's far more likely to be December or January. So a lot of, lot of my peers in the industry are saying there's no way we'll see grading with them until January at the soonest. And I hope they're all wrong. I wish we could be offering it again tomorrow, but that's just not going to happen. So the demand is not slowing down. Slabs are selling so well, we are actively buying, we need inventory for upcoming shows. I've told one of our team members, I'm kind of worried that we're going to have. Our selection is going to be lacking at some of the upcoming shows if we can't buy some more collections between now and then, because so much of what we have bought lately has already been sold, it's going right back out the door, either in our retail retail store or on ebay. And so we are actively buying slabs. As submitters are getting cards back with us, we're offering to buy them. And so if you're a submitter with us and you've got cards coming back in the next few weeks, you'll get an email from me saying, hey, would you like to sell? We'd love to talk. Let's make a deal. Because we need inventory, because there is so much demand for slabs and specifically there is incredible demand for PSA slabs right now. There's many repackers who put PSA slabs in their product. They need those. But again, I do expect probably we will see some improvement in the resale value in these other companies, being that many more will start submitting with them over the next few months. And my belief is when you start using a product, you are more likely to become a fan of that product and that brand. You know, I have seen a lot of submitters say, well, you know, I've always liked BGS so it doesn't bother me to send there. And I had someone today drop off cards this morning. He said, hey, I'd love those SGC holders. I know I can't go to psa so I'm fine, just send all these into sgc. So there are plenty out there who love these other iconic, respected legacy brands in the hobby. And what I mean by that, they've been around a long time. They've been around for decades, both SGC and BGS have. So don't shy away from trying something new. When it comes to grading, I recommend all of you know we work with psa, sgc, CGC and bgs. TAG has come on very strong lately in the industry as well. I've been impressed with the volume that they have been able to build up to. They're still, you know, light years behind PSA and cgc, but they have almost caught up with SGC in terms of monthly output. So kudos to them. They've been doing a good job in building up their infrastructure to improve their grading capacity. So I will give you another update a month from now. It's going to be interesting to see, but I personally expect to see more submissions in the next 30 days than I have in the past 30 because once the news broke, many didn't know what to do. Many are like, I'm just going to wait, see what happens. Let me sit out for a little while, watch the market, see what happens, see what my options are. But to all of you with that mindset, the other thing I want you to consider is there's no guarantee all of these other companies continue with their bulk services. What could very easily happen is the same thing that has happened at PSA is that now that PSA is not taking stuff in and everyone is, not everyone, but large quantities of submitters are going over to BGS, CGC, SGC, etc. They start getting inundated with more volume than they can possibly handle and then we hear, oh, XYZ company has said, hey, sorry, we're halting our bulk submissions and it's a domino effect and PSA is the biggest domino. It's already fallen. So what I would hate for some of you to do is sit on the sidelines saying I'm going to wait and see what happens. And then the next breaking news is that one of these other leading companies has had to pause their bulk services because we've seen this happen in the past. So don't get caught holding all those cards, waiting and waiting and then wishing you had taken advantage of one of the alternate companies while you still had that opportunity. I know I'm not waiting. Don't get me wrong, if I buy a large collection with quantities of something, I'll probably submit some now, maybe put some of them back to send a PSA later if I get a large quantity of a card. But when it's just one offs, I bought one of this, two of these, whatever. The great majority of that's just going right back out the door to BGS if it's modern, to SGC if it's vintage. If we happen to get we don't buy a lot of big TCG collections, but we do grade a lot of those with CGC and bgs. When we do get them, of course we're heavier into the sports. Now when you talk about our pre grade service, we've been very pleased, we've been very thankful to so many of you who have tried us out on that. We had one submitter give us right at 350 cards. We've had many others give us 20 here, 60 there and many just give us a handful to try it out. And so far we've been able to keep our turnaround times. We've been meeting or exceeding expectations. A lot of the two week submissions we've been able to get turned around in a week or less. And so as the summer ramps up and many of our team members are gone to shows, we're going to do our best to still hang on and keep those turn times. So hopefully if some of you need another option, that's one you can take advantage of. Visit gotpregrade.com where we will examine your card. We will give you a raw card pre grade estimate but we don't just give you a pre grade number, we give you the reasons for that number. You can go on gotpregrade.com Enter the serial number of that card. You'll see what the issues are. Is it corners, is it edges, is it centering? Is it a surface flaw? You know, is there a wax stain? Whatever it is, we give you a breakdown of the condition issues that helped us reach that pre grade estimate. We will be taking submissions in, as I said at the national, we'll be taking them in at Fanatics Fest. And of course you can always mail them to us. And again, that service we're currently offering at $15 a card. And we're actually running a special through July 6th. It's the USA Fourth of July special in honor of our nation's 250th anniversary. You can send in 20 cards for $250 as long as you postmark them by July 6th, which is the Monday after the holiday. So take advantage of that. If you've got a handful you want to try us out, get those pre grades done. It might help you determine what you want to send on to grading. Maybe you want to figure out what you want to spend $229 on at the National. So that's your choice, but we're here to help you either way with it. So check us out@gotpregrade.com if you want to grade with any of the other grading companies. You can do all that through our portal@gotbaseballcards.com Again, we are still offering PSA at the $80 regular service and all the higher, quicker options as well. We're offering BGS entry level, CGC entry level, SGC entry level, and so forth. So we'll help you with any of these great companies. But I hope this is at least given you a little bit of insight as to decisions we're making about our own cards because we send in hundreds and hundreds of cards every month to various grading companies and we make recommendations to clients on thousands of cards every month. So hopefully this advice has been helpful to you, even if you say thanks for the kind advice, Joe, but I'm going to wait it out and I'll get my cards back end of or middle to end of next year. So we're here to help you whichever way you want to go. We even offer, we've joked about coming out with an option called Screen Now, Grade later, and we do offer that. We don't have a marketing hook for it, but basically you can send your cards in, get them screened, and then you can decide what do you want to do. Do you want to send them to any of the companies that are currently taking stuff or do you want to wait it out? We can help you with that as well, but at least you're ready. You know what you've got. You know whether you might want to grade those or not. Those options are available as low as $4 a card for the pass fail service. So if you any of the options we offer other than PSA bulk, they're still available to you for now. Remember, it could change, so take advantage of it while you can. And thanks for joining us today. Remember, most importantly, my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. He loves you. Remember that. I think you are awesome too. I'm thankful for each and every one of you. Hope you have a blessed day. It over. I am your child in me but I need you.