$16,100: Genius or Idiot?

Someone paid 1.07x the matched-comp median for a PSA 10 LeBron James rookie, and had to beat 28 bids to do it.

A 2003 Topps Chrome #111 LeBron James rookie in PSA 10 sold for $16,100.00 on September 6, closing a live auction that drew 28 bids. The buy lands at 1.07x the median of 8 matched sales of the same card in the same grade.

Why it matters

Pricing a Chrome LeBron James rookie is usually the easy job in this hobby. This one was not: the matched pool came back at 8 sales, exactly our floor of 8, so the median quoted here is thin and weakly supported. That caveat belongs in front of the number, not behind it.

By the numbers

• $16,100.00 — the price paid, in an auction that ran to 28 bids.
• $15,113.49 — the median of 8 matched sales of the same card and grade: a 1.07x fill, a premium of $986.51.
• 1.11 — the interquartile spread of that pool, whose full range runs $14,488.00 to $16,751.00.

The intrigue

Price discovery is the strongest thing this purchase has going for it, and the only component that maxes out: price discovery 15 of 15. 28 bids means the number was argued over by a room of buyers, not set by one person clicking a fixed price. The comp window is flat at 0.0%, and the 4 most recent sales are clearing where the older ones did, so nobody bought into a spike.

Reality check

Buyers still paid $986.51 above the median, and the case against this fill is the pool it rests on. 8 sales is thin, our floor of 8 exactly, and the pool’s middle runs $14,900.00 to $16,500.00, so a $16,100.00 purchase sits high inside that band. Liquidity 3 of 15 says the same from the other side: a shallow exit if this buyer wants out. Comp deviation 30 of 40, trend 9 of 15 and scarcity 4 of 15 fill out the rest.

What's next

Verdict: FAIR BUY, 61 of 100, no cap applied. Comp deviation 30 of 40 is the model’s heaviest component, and 30 is what a 1.07x fill earns: above the median, nowhere near a mistake. What to watch is whether the pool deepens, because at this grade a wider window should settle whether $16,100.00 was a shade rich or simply the going rate. RazMania scores this with no population report, no sell-through data and no card-level search volume, because we do not have them.

How we track this

RazMania monitors completed eBay sales daily, dropping multi-card lots, reprints, altered cards, and best-offer listings, where the figure eBay publishes is the seller’s asking price rather than what was paid. This verdict rests on a card-specific comparable pull over a requested 90-day window, matched on year, card number, grader and grade, with the lead sale itself excluded from its own pool. That pull returned 8 sales, our floor for quoting a median at all. It carries no population report, no sell-through and no card-level search volume, because we do not license that data. eBay reports sold date, not sold time.