How to Grade with PSA Shut Down (New Strategy)

The biggest news in the sports card hobby over the last month was PSA shutting down submissions for all of their value service levels. But what does this mean now? You probably still want to grade some cards. There's opportunity to grade and flip for profits. But how, how do you approach this? Do you go to the other grading companies or do you employ a different strategy altogether for. For how to handle grading? Well, we're going to get those questions answered for you right now because we're bringing in our resident grading expert, Joe Davis from Got BaseballCards.com to discuss how to approach grading. Now with PSA shutdown, The Jeff Wilson show is brought to you by Arena Club, the official home of Slab packs. Now available every day, Slab Packs offer an exciting way to collect graded cards with confidence. Plus, every pack comes with an instant offer to buy your slab. Don't miss out. Explore the latest Slab packs and more by downloading the Arena Club app. Just search Arena Club in the App Store and use promo code sci for 20% off your first purchase. Joe, welcome back to the show. Great to be back, Jeff. It's good to have you back. It's very timely to have you back. It seems like, you know, we've done probably, I don't know, 20 shows about grading over the last six or seven years, and it seems like a lot of times when we do one of these shows, it's because something big happened and changed in the grading world. Yes, it has happened again. This is. The grading world has been full of dramatic events occurring over the last six or seven years. Yes. And here we are again. Were you surprised by the PSA shutdown of all levels below their regular service level? No, I. Sadly, I saw it coming with the announcement about the slowdown in the turnaround times that preceded that announcement. I literally told a lot of our clients, I'm like, hey, in the past, when they've announced slower turnaround times, one of two things happens. Either prices go up again or historically, one time there was the big shutdown back in 2021. So sadly, we're in the middle of another one right now. And I try to put a positive spin on it by saying, isn't it great to be a part of a hobby where the leading service provider for grading and authentication has to shut down services because there is so much demand for it. Yeah, I mean, there's obviously two ways of looking at it, right? I mean, on one hand, it's unfortunate for collectors and it's unfortunate for a lot of business people in the hobby as well. I mean, You. Including you. And we're going to talk about that. You do a ton of business through got baseball cards. Helping your customers with grading submissions is a huge. A huge part of your business mix. And now a large segment of that business mix has been completely disrupted. Right. So there's. There's definite bad to it. But then if you look at it holistically, if you take a step back, it's happening because the demand for cards has never been higher, the hobby has never been hotter, and so that part of it's good. But I think we all agree that we wish PSA and all the grading companies could get their capacity issues solved and figured out so that we didn't have to go through this and they could handle whatever capacity was thrown at them. Right. But it's. It's a challenging problem, I think. I think, you know, having run a business like both of us, you know, do I think we both maybe. Or at least I do. I shouldn't speak for you, but I sympathize with PSA a little bit because I know how hard it is to hire, to train. It's not just to snap your fingers. And we've gone out and added 300 new people to our grading room. Right. It's a. It's a tedious process to. To go through a hiring process, recruit the right people, screen, you know, screen them, make the right hiring decisions, and then go through a training program and really vet them to ensure that they can have quality output and they're ready to go. That's not an easy task. Right? Yeah. There's no college courses out there to be no greater, you know, so it's. Yeah, it's a very unique skill set, and it's very tough to hire for. I'm sure it's tough to hire for. And I'm. And. And you don't want to skip steps, because if you skip steps, then you get every person in the hobby complaining that grading quality is inconsistent and the quality's gone down, and people already complain about that. So, you know, the more new junior people you bring it off the street, the more of a problem that's going to become for your reputation as a grading company. So it's a difficult balancing act. It has resulted in PSA saying, we got to take a pause while we continue to hire and continue to scale up, which they're actively doing. I think we will get to a better point, you know, in a year or two where it's, you know, turnaround times are back to reasonable again and everything like that. But we're, we're, we're, we're at least a year or two away from that. Right. So in the meantime, the big question is what should people do? And that's obviously what I wanted to get your opinion on today. Let's, I want to talk about, you know, when it is still worth going with PSA because they haven't shut down every level, but they have shut down all of their more affordable levels. Correct. So I'd like to talk about when it still makes sense to go with psa. I'd like to talk about the other grading companies and when it now makes sense to consider them as alternatives. But I want to first start by talking about something entrepreneurial that you've done in the wake of this. You were Johnny, on the spot with this, which, which isn't a replacement by any means for grading, but is something that people can lean on a little bit, maybe heavier than ever before during this period. Talk to me and talk to the audience, Joe, about what, what you've done here. Sure. Literally we'd been working on this for months and we weren't planning on unveiling this until July. But with the timing, we said, okay, we've got to get this product, if you call it that, to the market right away. And we call it got pre grade. GotPregrade.com is where we provide all the info. And what it is, is for years, for clients who've worked with us, we provide a prescreening service where we will look at cards, examine them, give them recommendations as to here are your issues, you know, here are the corner issues, the centering issues, the surface, so forth. And we'll even provide a pre grade estimate, which is our opinion based upon, you know, decades of grading and submitting, submitting cards for grading clients. And so that's been an incredibly popular service that thousands of our clients have taken advantage of. So we decided to take it up a notch or two by actually now putting our brand behind it, putting tamper evident labels on the cards that we have pre screened or pre graded. And then on the website on gotpregred.com they can type in the serial number and actually see what the condition issues are. So it's not just anybody can go out there, buy labels, stick them on a semi rigid. We're actually providing information as to why we've given it that pre grade evaluation. We, why we think it has a shot at a 10 or why we think it should only be an 8 or whatever, whether it be a vintage card, whether it be a New Pokemon card, whatever it is. And so we think it's going to be very helpful at this time specifically, which is why we went ahead and sped up our timetable so that we could start helping clients with this because there are no entry level options that you can get back timely. Right now, you know, our goal is to offer this service for $15 with two week turnaround and then expedited service at $20 for two business day turnaround. And as I've been telling everyone, hey, we're guaranteeing this through the end of June till we can really evaluate how much demand is there for this service. We've already seen a lot of excitement. I was on my way out here, I had a number of phone calls about it. So we're excited. You know, one thing when you talk about consistency, our team consists of all of two people who do the examination. That's myself and Doug Giles, who's been our head of grading for years. And so we've both screened hundreds of thousands of cards over the years and both been in the hobby since the mid, been collectors since the mid-70s as collectors. And he's been a part of our team for many, many years. And so we started working with PSA and SGC back in 1998, which were the first grading companies we worked with. So literally since that time I've been screening cards for, for clients who wanted to grade with us. So we have decades of experience doing it. We're just formalizing it in a sense so that, you know, collectors can maybe transact with this while they're waiting. You know, they can't get cards graded in a timely manner right now at an affordable level. So we're hoping this will meet that need in the hobby we've done it for. I'm a collector at heart. More than I am a dealer, more than I'm a shop owner, I'm a collector. And I know you're a passionate collector as well. And so I understand the needs of collectors and, and our goal is to meet this need for collectors in the industry. I think there's a lot of use cases for it and, and this is the concept of doing this pre grading where you sealed a grade over. This is not a novel concept. In fact, Becket themselves, yeah, they've done it for years, has the raw card review right where they do a similar type service and Dallas Card show does this. There's other, other companies out there that have done this. But I think the need for it right now at this moment in time is actually the greatest it's ever been because as you said, I, I think there's a lot of use cases for it. For me, possibly the biggest use case is with new releases. If you open up a box, if you buy some raw cards from a new release at this moment, let's say you've got some cards that you think are gem mint condition and are worthy of grading, but, but maybe they're not expensive enough to now pay the $80 minimum PSA fee. That could be a really good opportunity to say, well, let me see what Joe and his team think about this. $15 a card and if you put it in one of your sealed, you know, with your sealed, you know, tamper proof label here, that it's, it's a 10. To me that carries validity in the market, that, that allows you to sell it at a premium. Maybe not as high of a premium as if it were PSA grade 10. Right. But it's still worth a premium over the car just being raw. Because whoever, whoever acquires it then has some degree of confidence that when they later down the road someday maybe submit it to PSA for grading, it's got a, it's got a good fighting chance at getting a gem mint 10 from PSA because you've pre screened it and that's where you feel like it's at. Right? And, and we've told some initial customers who've asked us about this, we're like, this is not a guarantee. Just like there's no guarantee when you crack out a BGS 95. There's no guarantee that'll get a 10 at PSA or vice versa. So every company has their own consistency standards and even within one company, you know, we, we both know plenty of clients who have gotten a nine back, cracked it out and sent it back in. And I know some who've sent them in, you know, five times trying to get that 10 or trying to get an eight when they keep getting sevens, whatever. But, but our objective is to, whenever there's any type of flaw, surface, corners, edges, centering, whatever it is, we pinpoint those flaws. We provide that information so that the collector, the submitter, knows what the issues with their card is and they can feel confident when they're reselling to whoever they're selling it to, that person immediately has transparency as to what the issues are. We, our, our objective is to make it, you know, affordable, timely and transparent. Yeah, that's our three main points. It's a, it's a great service and you know, you know, Joe Davis is a good entrepreneur. Because he, the timeliness on this was, you know, key. Right. Like that's one of the things about entrepreneurship and, and running a successful business is sometimes, sometimes it comes down to good timing on things. Right. And Joe saw the, Joe had already been working on this obviously in the background, but then he saw the psa, you know, shutdown of the lower levels and was like, you know what, now is the moment to expedite this and to get this into the market right now. And I think that was super smart because now you've got a affordable solution to be able to offer people. That's an alternative to either having to pay $80 plus to grade with PSA or to submit to one of the other grading companies and wait five or six months, which still have backlogs and all those types of things now. Right. So, you know, you know, there's I, I think it's a good alternative. I'll be interested to see how this does for you. For anybody who wants to check this out, we've updated this or we are updating right now the Sports Card investor website. So sportscard investor.com click grading in the main menu bar and it's going to have information and the ability to submit right there to Joe Davis's pre grade service. Okay, so that's that. I want to talk about PSA and I want to talk about the other grading services as well. So we talk about all the, all the ways people could approach grading today with PSA specifically, you can't submit anything below the regular service level. Now what does that mean for people who are still thinking, man, I really wish I could submit to psa. Is it worth it? Now where do you think that kind of value worth it falls? Well, let's keep in mind what regular service was originally intended for, which was for cards, 500 to $1500. So that's PSA's perspective. If you've got a card worth over $500, that's where it's going to get priced at anyway, even if the bulk services were open. So when you've got something that lands in that price point, you're not going to be getting it any cheaper down the road. With psa you might as well still send it in. So the challenge is where you have to really make those decisions is okay, I've got a $100 card. Is that worth putting $80 into? I've got a $200 card. Does it make sense? And so what I always tell clients with is look at the post graded values. If you've Got a card in hand, especially because regular service comes back much quicker than the bulk. So I don't want to quote what they're at right now because that could, you know, it's changed like a moving target depending on the volume they're taking in. But let's say you turn that in and you get it back in six weeks. So there's not going to be too much hopefully of a shift in the pricing from the time you submit it to the time it comes back. So you look at the card and you say I think this has a shot at nine or a ten. And as a nine maybe I break even. As a ten, I come out ahead. So then you say, is it worth putting the $80 into it? So for me, my thought is you want the raw card to be in the say 2 to $300 range if you're investing $80 on top of that, to risk it. But I mean we have already seen clients turning in cheaper cards at the $80 service level since the shutdown of the lower services. So some want to gamble for those tins and you know, they can't wait. And I get it. I mean we've got all the major shows coming up this summer and a lot of collectors, dealers want to have those PSA slabs in hand so they're willing to pay a premium. And so for me, I, obviously I'm going to recommend, hey, get it pre graded for now and you can hold it and use it later. But again, if it's over a $500 card anyway, that there is no other alternative. If you're wanting to use PSA, it's more when it's down to that $100, 200, whatever your pain tolerance is because you send in $100 card and you pay $80, there's a lot of risk there if you get it wrong. So at least if it's a $253,00 raw card, there's not as much downside if you're throwing another $80 into it. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's, that's a good way of thinking about it. How do we anticipate the turnaround time though going for regular submissions? Because one thing that I do worry about, in the past obviously regular submissions were relatively fast. I, I forget what the quota turnaround time was, but a couple of months in that nature compared to the value submissions which were, which were much longer. But now I worry. You just mentioned that you've got people coming to you to submit now via the regular submission option who have Cards that are less expensive and normally wouldn't be ones that they would consider for that option. Does that mean that PSA kind of starts to get flooded with people paying the $80 for regular submissions and then our turnaround time on that starts to get really slow too? Well, I hope not. The one thing that I think the one way the shutdown can benefit us that have thousands of cards out there like I do is that they're receiving teams are going to have a lot less work right now. There's going to be so many fewer submissions coming in the door that my hope, PSA can reallocate others to getting shipments out the door. Not, not, not, not taking people who normally do receiving and turning them into graders, but getting more cards processed out the door once they are graded. And so I hope the shipping teams are doing, you know, double duty now to get stuff out the door. So I hope the backlog that I get more submissions back, you get more submissions back like before the national. I need more slabs in hand before then. So my hope is that the regular service doesn't slow down anymore just because they will get more of that. But percentage wise I think it'll still be infinitely smaller. Yeah, I don't see large, I mean I haven't had, you know, I haven't had people who Normally give me 200 cards at a time now giving me 200 cards at a time. For regular, they're giving me 10 cards at a time. Yeah, they're much more picky and selective. Sure. So you gotta be, it just, it doesn't make sense. So it's, it's either stay on the sidelines and wait it out or choose an alternative company. But, but again those turn times for all the other companies are slowing down too right now. Yeah, well, let's talk about the other grading companies and before I do, for everybody watching, those of you who have seen Joe on this, on the show before know that for a long time we've had, we, you know, at Sports Card Investor we've been connected with Joe and we offer his services through our website. So whether you're interested in his pre screening or you're interested in submitting to PSA or any of the other grading companies through Joe, go to sportscardinvestor.com Click Grading in the main menu bar and you can actually submit through Joe. He'll, he and his team will handle everything for you right there. So go check that out. Sportscardinvestor.com Grading in the main menu bar. Where do you want to start? Should we talk about Beckett first. They've been the company that Beckett and Beckett and CGC I think are the two that have put forth the most kind of reinvestment into their company. And, and Beckett's made news recently, you know, in the fact that they've been expanding their grading output and new labels, new labels, all that type of thing. You know, Greg Beckett, of course, is the company that we've talked many times on the show about. They were the king of grading. You know, if you go back at one time, you go, go back a couple decades ago, then they, they really kind of fell off in the last five or six years, but now they're somewhat rallying back. Now, of course they're owned by collectors now, the same parent company as psa. But this could be a big moment for them, you know, to kind of establish prominence again within the sports card world. This is an opportunity. How do you see Beckett at the moment and what does it make sense for collectors to send their way? Yeah, I think they probably have the biggest opportunity to grow their numbers. I mean, cgc, we'll get to them. But CGC is a clear number two right now in the industry in terms of volume. But I think BGS has the best shot at benefiting from the shutdown because, you know, they're highly respected for sports especially. They've grown a lot of in prominence with TCG also. But they do have that legacy in the sports collecting hobby. And you know, I still have a lot of, I mean, the jersey patch cards, stuff like that, a lot of people love those in the BGS holders. And so I think if they can't fall too far behind with their turnaround times, their pricing is very reasonable. I think they have a lot of opportunity to grow here. I mean, they're several months behind as well. But I spoke with one of the reps there just last week and he said he feels like they have a good shot at weathering the storm, being able to scale to handle increased volume. Because that was my first concern with the PSA shutdown of their lower level services is do more dominoes fall? Does BGS announce they're shutting down? Does SGC announce? Because that would be devastating if there were no solid alternatives out there for the industry. So at least there are some really good alternatives right now. So if they can keep turning cards out and they don't have to shut down, and from what his words, he feels like they're in a good place. And so that's a great sign to hear that he thinks they're going to be able to handle increased volume that they're going to be receiving. I know as soon as we had to stop taking PSA value bulk submissions, our BGS numbers went up. Like the very next day I had clients bringing in, hey, I'm going to go with BGS now, which we're heavier on sports than anything, but we saw a number and we've gotten a lot of emails. Hey, I'm sending you cards for BGS now. And I've personally started pulling some for BGS as well as for some of the other companies. But I think they have a really good shot if they can keep their pricing where they're at, if they can keep their turnaround times about where they're at. I think you, hopefully for them you might see some improvement in their resale values relative to psa. Because the more you use a service, the more you're passionate about that brand and then the more you become a buyer of that from others. And so some who've never used BGS may start using them now and then they might become collectors of BGS also. That, that would be a big win. I mean, the, the reason why PSA is so dominant in the market is because their secondary market resale value is so dominant compared to the other companies. Not even close. Yeah. And it didn't used to be that way, correct? Well, I mean, obviously we go way back and we've talked about on the show before, there were times when BGS 9 fives would actually outsell PSA 10s. Believe it or not, people, that actually was the case many years ago. But even when I got really, you know, back into the hobby, 2018, 2019, the gap between a PSA10 and a BGS9.5 was much smaller than it is today. And it seems to kind of have grown over time. And so, you know, that's why everybody is like, so, you know, many, many times almost feels forced to go with PSA because it's. Their secondary market values are just so much better. It would be great to see Beckett close that gap a little bit again. Maybe on the heels of this, who knows how the market's going to react. But if the market did, if, if your theory holds true, more people submit to Beckett, they get the stuff back, they like the experience, they like the slabs that then causes them to maybe be a little more open to buying BGS labs on the secondary market in the future, then that helps raise demand and then that helps raise prices and then that helps the gap between PSA and Beckett close that would be a really interesting phenomenon if that occurs. Yeah. And that same is true for the other. Sure. You know, CGC and sgc, same things could happen. But I think each of them, and we'll get to it, each of them have their own unique niche where they're, where there's more demand for their cards in certain, for certain types of cards in sports specifically. You know, based on maybe even the reaction you've seen from your customers over the last week, do you think BGS is the kind of the default where more people are going to go than not after psa? Like if PSA is no longer the alternative, do you think, you know, versus, like let's say CGC or sgc, do you expect more people to be using BGS compared to those other two? I think it's more of what you're submitting. Okay. You know my. In my recommendations based upon things I see because we see thousands of submitters send us a BGS I think is going to be the default for modern sports cards. I think SGC is going to be the default for vintage sports cards. I think CGC is not nearly as well known for their sports card grading yet, but they are making huge inroads in tcg. They're number two by a long shot with tcg. But also a lot of submitters like to try BGS with their Pokemon. They like to try it for a, a black label, you know, so, so I think modern sports is going to be mainly people are going to go to BGs, vintage, vintage SGC sports or non sports for vintage. And then the TCG, I think to be more of a mix between BGS and cgc. Okay, and for bgs, what type of turnarounds are we looking at? What, what is the general pricing and turnaround right now for people who want to think about bgs? What we're offering, which includes shipping and insurance out and back and forth is 20 a card for no sub grades, $24 a card with sub grades. And of course we offer prescreening services on top of that. But turnaround time, we've been getting stuff back in about three to four months lately with BGS on entry level submissions. Again, that could shift with the volume they take in. That's what we've been seeing lately. So. And hopefully they'll be able, as I said, hopefully they'll hold that pricing and again we include shipping as part of that. But my hope is that they can hold on to the pricing and hold on to those turnaround times because if they turn into. If they suddenly announce, hey, we're at seven to eight months. Now, if that were to happen, then I think more and more submitters just sit on the sidelines and say, well, if I'm waiting that long, I might as well just wait it out, you know. So the, the key advantage that any of those other competitors have right now is a little. Is faster turnaround times than what you can experience with PSA right now, especially since you can't even turn them in right now. It's funny, it's BGS's turnaround times and pricing is kind of where PSA was like a year ago, you know, before PSA took, you know, yet another price hike. And then their turnaround times became, you know, super long before they shut down. And that's not, I mean, that's not a bad place to be. I mean, 20 to $24 to get a card graded three to four month turnaround time, that's not a bad place to like, that's okay. In my opinion. I'd like to see it a little quicker than that. But like, that's still within some form of reasonable. It's. And so hopefully Beckett can hold to that because I do think that makes them a viable alternative to PSA right now. As you said though, if three to four months becomes seven to eight months, then at that point it's. I don't see any purpose in submitting to BGS versus just sitting on the sideline. Yeah. So hopefully that. Hopefully. But I know Beckett has been aggressively scaling their volume, you know, their graders, their intake abilities, all that stuff. So hopefully they, hopefully that scale they've added can help maintain that turnaround time, even in the wake of what I'm sure is a lot more submissions coming their way right now. Well, I remember right after collectors bought BGs, Nat Turner said something about this is a brand I treasure and I forgo his exact wording, but he made it clear that he had great respect for that brand and that they were going to be good caretakers of that brand. And that includes collectors putting money into them to help them scale and to keep that brand strong and reputable and recognized throughout the globe. Yeah, and I think that's proving true. I mean, I think he has demonstrated that with the reinvestment they put into them. The fact they are scaling and have now quite a bit better output than they did six months ago or eight months ago when that first occurred. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It'll be interesting to watch. That's good information on bgs. And once again, if you want to submit your cards to BGS or PSA or any of the grading companies, go to sportscard investor.com click rating the main menu bar. Joe and his team are there to help you. Let's talk about cgc. As you mentioned, they're now the dominant number two in the TCG space. Although some people do like Beckett because of the black label possibility. CGC has been trying to, to win more market share on the sports card side. I know they've been trying relatively aggressively. They've done partnerships with us here at Cards HQ over time. They've done partnerships with Fanatics Collect, you know, they're connected in with the Fanatics Collect vault. Right. They're trying. It still seems like they have a ways to go on the sports card side. But I suspect CGC sees all of this, you know, as a potentially a big moment for them as well. Where do you think, how do you see this playing out with cgc? I think it's a huge opportunity for them because they're already putting out huge volumes. I mean they're already doing, depending on which month you look at reports, they're doing about 20 to 25% of the volume of PSA already, which is exponentially more than BGS or sgc. So they have a huge opportunity because they probably already have the things in place to scale because they've already been handling, you know, 400,000 plus slabs, turning them, you know, in a month. So I think it's a great opportunity for them. Yeah, they haven't been able to crack the sports market yet in my opinion on the resale value yet. But you know, a lot of collectors who submit with us like them for non sports, they like them for gaming. And so in a lot of cases their numbers are very strong relative to psa. I don't know, I haven't looked at exact percentages lately. But there is, there's a lot of respect for that holder with those who submit, you know, a lot of TCG cards. Yeah, the holder looks nice. You know, we sell, we sell a decent amount of CGC in our store. We do, we actually have a number of like tcg. We have some TCG sports or we have some cgc. I keep saying tcg. We sell a good amount of CGC in our store. A lot of it is tcg. You know, if you go into our Pokemon aisles, we've got a lot of CGC there. It does pretty well there. Also a lot of our non sports is CGC graded. It does fairly well. There is, you know, too doesn't do as good with sports. But what we found at Cards HQ is like our niche for using CGC for sports is really been lower dollar cards. Like if we, we, we, we for example, grade a lot of Tops now cards through cgc. If we do oftentimes when a new Tops now release comes out, if it's a player who we think is going to be interesting to our local customer base, maybe it's a Braves player or maybe it's just a player like Ohtani who's everybody loves, will often buy, you know, a certain number of those cards off tops now 50 or 100 or something like that. And we'll often grade those with CGC because it's a lower cost, a little bit of a quicker turnaround alternative. And it, it's a card that and a lot of those cards naturally grade well. So it's an option now have a good shot at tens. Yeah. So it, so we get a lot of those back as CGC 10s and that's, so that's kind of, that's where we've seen a little bit of a niche where we like using CGC ourselves. I would, I, I would love to see CGC gain a little more respect on the sports card side and, and be able to, you know, chip away at PSA's market the market value differential. But right now there is a pretty big market value differential on the sports side especially. Right? Yeah. Their, their partnership with Fanatics Collect is because I shop on Fanatics Collect a lot and you see a lot of CGC stuff on there, just stuff they've authenticated and slabs both. So having a huge presence on that major industry marketplace is, is a big deal because it's exposing more and more collectors to that brand. Yeah, yeah. And hopefully over time that will continue to build. I do think, I do think having some, you know, some choice, some diversity in who you can submit to ultimately is beneficial because when you go through a period of time like what we're going through right now, where you know, the king grading company PSA is in a shutdown mode, you want other good alternates to be able to utilize. Right. And with how the grading market ebbs and flows, I think it's just, it's healthy for everybody to have multiple options. So hopefully, hopefully CGC does take this alternative to build. So if someone were to walk in the door tomorrow, Joe, to your store and say, hey Joe, I've got these cards, should I consider cgc? You would, would you tell them, you know, yes for TCG or kind of what's your advice there? Yeah, if it was tcg, I would, I would say you're probably your two best alternatives in my opinion right now is BGS or cgc. And if it was sports, I'd probably lean them more. If it's modern sports, I would, I'd push them more towards BGS right now. And then let's talk about sgc because you said earlier if it's vintage, that's where SGC still is a standout option for you. Yes. Yeah, yeah. SGC for years has been our secondary option for, and for. In many occasions it was the quicker option. So if we had someone come in with a mid-50s to mid-60s collection and they wanted, and it would say it's mid grade and they wanted them back quickly and they wanted us to resell them for them or whatever, or they just wanted them for their collection. SGC is a great option because for a long time SGC was giving us one month turnaround. That's not the case anymore. They're more at three plus right now. But SGC is very respected still by vintage collectors. So they don't have much of a market at all in TCG right now. And they're not nearly as strong from what I see on like brand new releases, stuff like that with sports. But for vintage, non sports, vintage sports, there's still plenty of demand for sgc. I personally sent a lot in last week after the shutdown with psa, I took in a vintage collection. I'm like, okay, SGC is where these make sense. So we will be giving them a lot more stuff because we do buy so many vintage collections, we'll be giving them a lot more support. I'm sure the next few months. During the last, during the last PSA shutdown during the COVID bubble, SGC suddenly got very popular as an alternative for grading ultra modern cards. And a lot of people started sending lower end ultra modern cards to SGC. It seems like that aspect of SGC's business has kind of died off. It is not really the focus as much anymore. When collectors bought sgc, collectors said, we're kind of turning them back into more of a boutique grading company again. And it felt like with a specialization around vintage, I don't know that collectors ever officially said we're turning him into a boutique vintage grading company. No, I never heard that. But it, but it feels like that's kind of, that's what SGC's roots were. I mean prior to, prior to Covid and everything like that. If you go Back to the two, you know, 2000s, they were almost exclusively a vintage grading company. They weren't doing any, hardly any ultra modern at all. And so it seems like we're back there more so with sgc. Do you agree? I mean would you ever consider them at this point for ultra modern or is it really, they're the right choice for maybe lower end vintage for you? I mean we do still take in submissions for them for ultra modern cards, but if I'm just making the recommendations at the state of the market right now, I would lean more towards 80s products and older, not necessarily new releases. It just seems that the demand we see in our shop anyway is more tailored towards BGS if it's a new sports card. But for vintage, BGS has very little market demand. But for, you know, SGC does. I mean SGC's had some, you know, at one time world record prices for the sale of some of the vintage car. You think about the mantle 9.5 years ago. And so, you know there's. And with some Wagners are in there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. T206 collectors, there's plenty of demand for cards in SGC holders and goudies and things like that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. A lot of those cards do really well. Okay, that's a good overview of where things sit. Sit. I'm curious. I know this is complete speculation at this point, but for people who have listened to this whole episode and they're like, you know what, I'm just going to wait for psa. I'm going to wait for PSA to open back up my, you know, $25 bulk level. How long do you think those people might be waiting for? Well, let's do the math. I mean PSA announced, when they announced they were going to be shutting down, they said, I think they said up to four months. There was some terminology about four months. I think up to that. That was before they took in another 4 million cards in five days, which is what Nat Turner just announced. They said that their backlog is around 14 million now, which is actually more than the peak back in 2021 when they shut down then. Now the difference now is they have far more capacity to handle that that they didn't have back then. So let's hope for the best at four months, which would mean they're taking bulk submissions again starting in October. We all hope and pray for that, that it's that soon. And then if they keep the current turnaround time of seven, eight months, if you're including business days and Weekends and everything else. So you're taking four months now, adding eight months to that. You're looking at possibly up to a year before you're going to get those cards back because you can't even submit them for maybe four months. I think that's, I know nothing beyond what they've announced. My hope is that in two months they say, hey, we're now going to go ahead and introduce Value Max back and Value plus and things like that. And then they start scaling down to value bulk. But that remains to be seen. So, so right now, yeah, if you're going to sit on the sidelines and you want to wait for the cheapest services that PSA offers, you know, it's probably going to be 11 to 12 months before you're ever going to actually have those Hart cards graded. And that's based on the, you know, their turnaround time and their estimate of when they're going to reopen. And to be honest, I think those numbers are probably overly optimistic. I just think, I don't, I don't see them opening back up, especially the lowest bulk level. I don't see them opening that back up in four months. I just don't. I know that's what they originally said, but then they got hit with those additional millions of cards in the last few days. I just, I wouldn't be surprised if, I would not be surprised if it is sometime in 2027, hopefully early 2027, but I would not be surprised if we're past the first of the year before all of their service levels get reopened. Yeah, that's, that's if I'm not a betting man, but if I was, that would be my guess. Yeah. You know, because I don't think even. It's crazy when you're at a company and you're the industry leader in service providing for this industry. I don't think they even could have guessed that they're going to take in 4 million submissions in five days. That's just unheard of. I mean, you're talking about, it used to take multiple years for them to take in that many cars back then, and then they did it in less than a week. So I don't know what choice they had. They could have made everyone mad by saying, hey, sorry, we've shut down our lower level services or they could have given us time, which they did. And all of us who submitted are appreciative of that. But it created even more of a problem, more, more of a challenge. So, yeah, I would agree with you. If I had to guess, I would say it's probably not going to be till 2027. And I hope they prove me wrong. Yeah, I hope so, too. I hope they prove us wrong. And I. And I do hope that when they bring their services back, they do open up certain service levels before others. That would at least be a win. I hope it's not just we got to wait till 2027 to get any of the value levels open again. I'm hoping that they. Yeah, the value max or the Value plus or whatever the. I hope you start to see those open up before the end of the year. And then finally, sometime early next year, the full bulk is back open again. Well, if you want to hear what I really hope for, I hope they go back and I'm going to irritate all the TCG fans out there, but I hope they go back to two lanes. Yeah, I hope they go back to a TCG lane and a sports lane because the sports are such a small percentage right now. And a lot of my hardcore sports fans come in and they're like all those TCG collectors, they slow down my cars. And so my hope is that they do two lanes because then as a sports heavy store, I think they could turn the sports quicker. And maybe the biggest demand in the industry is for tcg. So I know that's going to be slower, but I would love to see that. And honestly, I think. Not that they've asked me for advice, but as someone who screens a lot of cards, there are certain things you look for, no matter whether it's sports or tcg, but there are certain characteristics of rounded gaming cards that are different than typical squared sports cards. And so I think you can specialize your graders who can become just incredible experts on the TCG side for what to look for on the card stock. And then you have your separate lane for the sports graders. And I think you could improve efficiency of graders by splitting them. But that's just my humble. I love the idea because as somebody who collects almost exclusively sports, we would not be dealing with the shutdown and the. And the, you know, year turnaround and everything, because it's not. It's actually not the sport. The sports volume that's created this. Correct. It's the TCG volume that's created. Yes. You know, but as a shop owner, where TCG represents a huge part of our revenue as well, I also, I also respect and appreciate all the. All the passion around TCG right now. Oh, yeah. You know, I mean, we want to keep all we want to keep every client happy who submits. Absolutely. It's just I think that could, if they could streamline, I think that could be positive for both. I like it. I agree. I agree. All right, Joe. Well, this was appreciate you coming by. Sure thing. This was really informative. I think the audience probably got a lot of value of it as well. Hope so. And I want to remind everybody out there that if you want to submit your cards through Joe Davis and his team or take advantage of his new pre screening service, just go to sportscardinvestor.com and click Grading in the main menu bar. Thanks for watching the show this week. We'll see you back soon with our next episode. Don't forget to subscribe everywhere, Apple podcasts, Spotify and on YouTube. And we'll see you soon with our next Jeff Wilson show. Take care of.