Superman V2 #210A

Comics CovrPrice | Values
1

Covrprice has a value for the NM bucket but the price is being pulled from the FN bucket. Mine is a 9.6 and is in the NM bucket
It’s defaulting to the Most Common Condition bucket.

I’m seeing this in several titles.

image
image1920×1045 102 KB

2

CovrPrice has a NM+ bucket. From their website, the top few buckets are:

  • Bucket 1 Near Mint +
    • 9.6 - 9.8 - 9.9 - 10.0
  • Bucket 2 Near Mint
    • 9.0 - 9.2 - 9.4
  • Bucket 3 Very Fine
    • 7.0 - 7.5 - 8.0 - 8.5

(You can see all of the buckets on their FAQs.)

I assume in your case, there haven’t been any confirmed for NM+ copies of that comic. So because the NM+ bucket doesn’t have anything in it, you’re getting the value for the most common condition (which is FN for this comic).

The staff at either CLZ or CP may chime in here, but I think you’d likely get more consistent values if you set your comics at 9.4 (even if you believe your copy is 9.6). That’s the top end of the NM bucket and stays out of the NM+ bucket. In this specific example, if you set your comic to 9.4 instead of 9.6, you’d get $6 as the value.

I assume the majority of online sellers (mycomicshop, eBay and more) likely call their raw comics NM to allow for some minor imperfections.

3

Man @Reinharc - we might need to hire you over here at CP! That was an excellent answer and right on!!!

TLDR Version to supplement @Reinharc’s explanation:

  • Raw Grade Buckets Generally: As pointed out, we have raw grade buckets that we slot sales into. These buckets are less granular than slabbed buckets because of the wider range of grading quality for unprofessionally graded comics. NM+ covers the highest range of grades, and NM is next on the list. If you have a book marked as 9.6, then its going to be in that NM+ bucket.

  • NM vs NM+ Raw Buckets: For modern books, its MUCH more common to have NM range sales than it is to have NM+ sales. So much so that while we’ve captured over 30 NM range sales for that Superman #210, we have 0 NM+ sales captured. This is likely because for such a lower $$ book, there’s little motivation for sellers to go out on a limb and claim they have a NM+ book. Would likely cause more problems than its worth - and as such the gravitate to a lower grade tier. Also - there just aren’t as many super high grade copies of comics as there are the lower grade levels. I did some hunting and I still could not find a recent NM+ raw sale for that Superman #210. To @Reinharc 's point, if you’re borderline between NM and NM+ on a book, you’ll get a better quality price point from CP if you choose NM the vast majority of the time.

  • Why so many FN range sales?: This specific case is a bit odd because there are so many FN range sales. Normally you’d expect to see more NM or maybe VF for a 2004 comic. In this case, however, MCS sold a LOT of FN copies. So they must have had a semi damaged stack of these Superman 210’s and sold them off over the last few years.

  • How did CP get THAT price?: At CovrPrice we first use sales data for the grade bucket that the user has for their comic, but it gets tricky when we don’t have sales data for that grade range - like as is the case here. Many people say, just use the next closest grade bucket - seems totally logical. However we’ve found that there’s various factors that go into the value of a comic, and oftentimes just the next grade bucket causes problems. For instance, if the last sale at the closest grade bucket was 6 years ago but there are sales from last week at a grade bucket a couple of tiers away that is a lot more representative of where the market has moved, you might end up with a really bad approximation for the user’s value. So we use what’s called the Most Common Condition Fair Market Value. We look at all of the sales for the book, look for which bucket has the most sales, and that bucket is deemed the MCCFMV. We use that for providing a value to a user for their book if there is no sales data for their specific comic/grade combo. Of course that might not be optimal as well - but its the best we found we could do without trying to create an extremely complicated algorithm (one that, frankly, has failed at some other price guides who have tried it).

  • So what can we do about this?: Well, I was able to locate some more NM range books - enough to surpass the FN bucket and make NM the MCCFMV for Superman #210. Of course, that might be temporary if MCS has a bunch more FN’s sitting out there and they sell them in greater quantity than people sell NM copies across the platforms we track (for modern raws like this its largely eBay and MCS). On both the CLZ and CP platforms, you have the ability to provide your own price for a book. So if you think the MCCFMV is not giving you a decent value, you can override the MCCFMV. For the longer term, at CP we are exploring other pricing options based on closest grade bucket to give users some options beyond MCCFMV and override.

Hope that helps. If you have any additional questions just reply here or DM me.

2 Likes