$8,000: Genius or Idiot?

A collector paid $8,000 for a PSA 10 Sabrina's Gengar — 0.95x the median of 17 matched sales of the same card in the same grade.

A 1999 Pokémon Japanese Gym 2 #94 Sabrina’s Gengar Holo in a PSA 10 slab closed at $8,000 on September 5, a fixed-price listing with 0 bids behind it. That is 0.95x the median of 17 matched sales of the same card at the same grade.

Why it matters

The verdict rests on a comp pool, not on a ranking: 17 completed sales of the same card at the same grader and grade, with this sale excluded from its own pool.

By the numbers

• $8,000 — paid, fixed-price, 0 bids. One buyer set this number, not a room of them.
• $8,450 — the median of 17 matched sales, p25 $8,200 and p75 $8,550.
• $450 — paid under that median, not over it, on a PSA 10 with no serial numbering.

The intrigue

The buyer landed at 0.95x the matched-comp median — a $450 discount, not a premium — and the pool behind that median is unusually tight: an interquartile spread of 1.04, $8,200 to $8,550, the whole range only $7,777.77 to $9,000. Comp deviation is the heaviest component in the model at 36 of 40. Dispersion that narrow is what makes a median quotable at all.

Reality check

Trend 9 of 15 is the neutral band. The 7 most recent sales clear -1.8% against the full pool, so this card is drifting slightly soft, not rising. Price discovery 3 of 15 is the weaker plank: a fixed-price listing with 0 bids means nobody competed, and a $450 gap on a pool spanning $7,777.77 to $9,000 sits inside the noise. Liquidity 9 of 15 reflects 17 sales — a genuine exit, not a deep one.

What's next

Score 61 of 100. FAIR BUY. Comp deviation 36 of 40, trend 9 of 15, liquidity 9 of 15, price discovery 3 of 15, scarcity 4 of 15. No cap was applied; the verdict is what the components produced. GENIUS needs 70 points and a price at or below the median — this buy cleared the second test and missed the first by 9, almost entirely on the absence of bidding. Watch whether the 7 most recent sales keep sliding: 0.95x of a median drifting down is closer to flat than to a steal. The previous edition ran the same test.

How we track this

RazMania monitors completed eBay sales daily and drops multi-card lots, reprints, altered slabs and best-offer rows, on which eBay publishes the seller’s asking price rather than what was paid. The comparable-sale median here is computed from 17 confirmed sales of the same card at the same grader and grade, with the lead sale excluded from its own pool. The buy score does not include a population report, sell-through, or card-level search volume, because we do not have that data and will not estimate it. eBay reports sold date, not sold time.