Collecting Price Guides

Building on the previous posts this section will discuss how to benchmark your cards through card collecting price guides. Once you have gone through and examined the Ebay listings and Terapeak listings related to your card it is now time to start classifying your football card's quality relative to the other cards that are for sale.

The best way to classify card value is to benchmark the card against a grading service. Each of the major grading services offer a card collecting price guide for sale. Becketts and PSA, the two major card grading services have retail guides to help pinpoint the value of the card. Looking at your card, the grading service will look at many features of the card that will establish the price of the card. In general, the grading companies will look at the following features: corner sharpness, edges, picture centering, surface quality, and vividness of graphics. These will be compared to a standard that will then establish the grade of the card. The grade of the card helps to establish the overall value of the card.

In the next post we will start to explore how these features using some actual cards.