HOW ALT PRICES TRADING CARDS

Community

January 17, 2023

We get a lot of questions about how we determine ALT Value and price cards on our Exchange. While the formulas we use to determine card valuations are quite complex, the explanation can be pretty simple. So in this blog post we want to give an overview of our method, which involves three major areas from which we pull data to come up with the most up-to-date valuations for millions of trading cards across the copy.

The example here uses the 2013 Giannis Antetokounmpo National Treasures Rookie Patch Autograph #130 BGS 9.5 56/99, which is available for bidding in this week’s Liquid Auctions (ending January, 19th 2023).

Bid Now on Giannis Antetokounmpo

First we look at the transaction history.

BGS 9.5 Giannis NT RPAs had six transactions between October 20, 2017 and December 17, 2022 — roughly one sale per year. The most recent of which was for $186,000 just last month. We can also see that the card value has decreased since it sold for $360,000 in March, 2021, which was the biggest sale for this specific card. Now, you may ask why we don’t just use the last sale as the price for a specific card, but that doesn’t tell us the whole story of what a card is currently worth.

Next we check out comparable sales.

In this example we chose two Giannis NT RPAs to compare with the one we’re pricing. One with the exact same BGS 9.5 grade, and another in a BGS 9. The reason we looked at BGS 9 is that there are no BGS 10 cards, making this the closest comparison in a similar grade. In certain cases you could look at PSA graded transactions, but each grading company has an influence on overall card valuation, so it’s better to compare BGS graded cards with other BGS graded cards.

The BGS 9 we looked at is a very similar card, which means we gave it a similarity score of 9 out of 10. We factored in the grade difference with a ratio score, since a card graded BGS 9.5 will be more valuable than a BGS 9. The ratio score determines how much more or less a card is worth compared to a very similar one.

The BGS 9.5 was, not surprisingly, given a similarity score of 10. This card was also given a ratio score, but since the patch on the comparable card has three colors, whereas the one we’re pricing only has two, we determined that the comparable card is slightly more valuable.

Finally, we will look at how the market has been trending.

The last part uses ALT’s indices (our market trends) to tell us how the player, and overall market, has been trending. Looking at Giannis’ individual player index tells us the increase or decrease in his assets since the last comparable sales of this card. Of the two cards we looked at, one was sold last November, and since then the Giannis player index is down 0.5%. Our other comp’s most recent transaction was in June, 2022 and since then, Giannis’ index is down 15.5%, showing a clear dip in market value. And since our market trends are updated daily, the ALT Value of all assets, including this card, should regularly change along with it.

These three factors help us come up with what we consider to be the fairest, most up-to-date, and accurate prices in the hobby. And hopefully this walkthrough helped provide some insight into how our pricing and data teams work together to price the cards you see on our Exchange. As always, if you have any questions about this or anything else, please don’t hesitate to reach out to support@alt.xyz

This round of Liquid Auctions closes on Thursday, January 19th at 6pm PT / 9pm ET, bid now!