A PSA 2 Jordan rookie drew 50 bids

Fifty bidders pushed a GOOD 2 copy of the Jordan rookie to $5,700 on Friday, while a PSA 7 of the same card never saw a bid.

A 1986 Fleer #57 Michael Jordan rookie graded PSA 2 closed at $5,700 on eBay Friday after 50 bids. It was not the day’s largest figure, and that is what makes it worth reading.

Why it matters

Friday’s largest Jordan figure was $22,499, on a 1996 Topps Chrome Refractor #139 graded PSA 9 — but that sale was an accepted best offer, and eBay publishes the asking price on those and never the settled one. The $5,700 is a hammer price with 50 bidders standing behind it.

By the numbers

RazMania tracked 227 qualifying single-card Jordan sales on Friday.

• 161 — sales confirmed paid, at a median of $414.42.
• 66 — accepted best offers, where the published figure is a list price rather than a settled one.
• $9,800 — the day’s top confirmed price, a 1985 Star Crunch ‘N Munch #4 graded PSA 8, sold at a fixed price with no bids.

Zoom in

Friday’s board carried two copies of the #57 near the top, and they are not telling the same story. The PSA 2 went to open auction and 50 bidders took it to $5,700. A PSA 7 carried a $12,750 figure, but that one was an accepted best offer — so the number attached to it is an ask, not a result. One of those cards has a price. The other has a list. The same split ran through Tuesday’s board.

Reality check

No comparable-sales multiple is quoted here, because the baseline would not survive inspection. The pool of 104 matching 1986 Fleer #57 sales ran from $65 to $114,999, with quartiles at $6,700 and $17,400 on a $9,400 median. A comparable set that spans that much is not one card’s market — it is several different cards averaged together, and a multiple drawn from it would read as rigorous while being wrong. Valuing off the wrong peer group is the same error our stock-research sister project watches for on the equity side.

How we track this

RazMania monitors completed eBay sales daily, filtering out multi-card lots, reprints, cross-listed items and non-card merchandise to isolate genuine single-card sales. Friday’s window held 227 qualifying Jordan sales, 161 of them confirmed paid. No comparable-sale median is quoted in this piece: the pool of 104 matching sales was too widely dispersed to serve as a like-for-like baseline. Price context was drawn from a trailing window that actually spanned 86 days, not 90. eBay reports sold date, not sold time.