Grading Signals
When buying raw and grading yourself nets more than buying the slab on the open market.
What “Return” takes into account
There are two ways to read the return, and you can switch between them up top.
- Expected is what you’d make on average, factoring in the odds of actually pulling a PSA 10 (the gem rate) and a turnaround-time price haircut. It’s the honest default, and it leans the ranking toward cards likelier to actually grade a 10, so reliable gem rates rise and noisy longshots sink.
- Best case is the return if it grades a PSA 10, ignoring the odds and the wait. It’s the ceiling, not the expectation, so treat it as the upside if everything breaks your way.
Either way you’re looking at the same cards. Best case just re-ranks and re-prices the list. It never adds longshots that don’t pencil out on the odds.
What goes into the Expected number:
- Raw price plus your grading fee: what the attempt costs.
- PSA-10 market price: the payoff if it grades a 10.
- Gem rate: how often this card actually grades a 10, so the payoff is weighted by your real odds, not the best case.
- Turnaround: a haircut for PSA-10 prices drifting while you wait, larger on fresh sets.
The gem rate is the part that surprises people. You only hit a 10 a fraction of the time, so the Expected return sits well below “PSA-10 minus your cost.” It also leans conservative: a miss still leaves you a graded card worth roughly raw, and we don’t count PSA 9s that sell above raw as upside.
Expected: what you’d make on average, after the odds of pulling a PSA 10 (the gem rate) and a turnaround-time price haircut. The honest default.
Includes shipping. Default ≈ PSA's current Regular pricing; Bulk is cheaper and Express more — plug in your tier.
Longer wait, bigger PSA-10 price haircut. While your card sits at PSA, more 10s flood in and the early hype fades, so the price you’d sell into drifts down. Fresh sets get cut harder; mature sets barely move. (Expected view only.)
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How to read this board
This isn't model fair-value math — it's observed-market arithmetic. For every Tier A card we compute the expected acquisition cost of a PSA-10 via grading: (raw + fee) / gem_rate, and compare against the live slab market. If the slab trades above that number, the gap is the signal.
Gem rate is the dominant variable. A card with a 60% gem rate is half as risky as one at 30%, even if the per-card math looks identical — low-gem-rate cards have noisier estimates, and the dollar outcomes vary more per submission. Pair the margin with the liquidity tier and your own thesis on set momentum before pulling the trigger.
Longer turnaround means a larger PSA-10 price haircut on the expected sale: fresh sets see more 10s flood in and raw hype fade while PSA holds your cards, so a 16-week wait is discounted harder than a 4-week one (mature sets converge to roughly no haircut). Use the turnaround toggle to model Bulk vs Regular vs Express; the fee input lets you plug in current PSA pricing.
Strong = margin ≥ 50% and gem rate ≥ 20% · Watch = margin ≥ 25% and gem rate ≥ 15% · Lean = margin ≥ 10%. Tier thresholds use the build-time $80 default fee; the displayed margin updates live with your fee input.