$11,544: Genius or Idiot?

A 1986-87 Fleer Michael Jordan rookie in BGS 8 drew 19 bids and closed just under its own grade's comparable median.

A 1986-87 Fleer #57 Michael Jordan rookie in a BGS 8 slab sold at auction on August 26 for $11,544 after 19 bids. Against 15 sales of the same card at the same grade, that is 0.96x the median — a small discount, not a steal.

Why it matters

The #57 rookie trades often enough to be priced honestly. When the same card in the same slab changes hands 15 times in 90 days, the median stops being an opinion. This buyer paid $480 under it.

By the numbers

• $12,024 — the matched-comp median across 15 BGS 8 sales of the 1986-87 Fleer #57 in the trailing 90 days.
• 0.96x — what this buyer paid against that median, or $480 below it.
• 19 bids — the price was set by a contested auction, not by one person clicking Buy It Now.

The intrigue

The pool is clean and drifting up: its middle runs $11,223 at p25 to $13,000 at p75 — an interquartile spread of 1.16x, tight for a card traded this widely. The last 30 days of that same pool ran 3.6% above the full 90-day median across 6 recent sales. Buying a liquid, rising card under its own grade’s median in a contested auction is the textbook version of not overpaying.

Reality check

A 0.96x fill is a thinner edge than the pool’s own dispersion. The same card at the same grade traded as low as $10,000 and as high as $15,500 inside the window, so timing mattered more than the discount. Scarcity scored 0 of 15: unnumbered, unsigned, and not a gem grade. A fair price, paid competently — not a bargain.

What's next

FAIR BUY — 67 out of 100. Comp deviation 36 of 40, price discovery 13 of 15, trend 9 of 15, liquidity 9 of 15, scarcity 0 of 15. No verdict cap was applied; 67 lands inside the FAIR BUY band on its own. Watch the BGS 8 median: comp deviation, trend and liquidity all come from that one pool, so if it slips below $12,024 the score slips with it. Three inputs are absent by construction — no population report, no sell-through, no card-level search volume.

Between the lines

The biggest sale we tracked on August 26 was not this one. A 1997-98 Skybox Premium Kobe Bryant #23, serial-numbered 045/50, sold for $300,000 — and it cannot be scored: a print run of 50 generates no comparable-sales pool. Ten candidates sat above this lead and none could be priced: 4 were rejected for free on their own titles (three short print runs, one current-season product), 5 came back with pools too thin to quote a median from, and 1 was set aside because our Michael Jordan column had already covered it today — a PSA 8 copy of this same card that sold the same day for $17,400. Same card, different grader, a materially different market. Across the 305 confirmed single-card sales we tracked that day the median was $1,850; repeat pulls return different sets, so read every market-wide count as a floor. Yesterday’s edition.

How we track this

RazMania monitors completed eBay sales daily, dropping multi-card lots, reprints, altered slabs and Best Offer Accepted listings — on those eBay publishes the seller’s asking price, not what was paid. Prices are final confirmed sold prices. The verdict is computed from 15 verified sales of the same card at the same grade over the trailing 90 days; that pool must clear a minimum of 8 sales and hard dispersion limits, or no verdict is published at all. Market-wide counts are floors: the day’s sales are sampled, not enumerated. eBay reports sold date, not sold time.