$7,150: Genius or Idiot?

A Dragonite holo drew 41 bids and cleared at 1.04x its own matched-comp median — on a pool sitting exactly on our minimum.

A 2002 Pokemon Expedition #9 Dragonite-Holo in a PSA 8 slab sold for $7,150.00 on October 27 after 41 bids — 1.04x the median of 8 matched sales of the same card at the same grade.

Why it matters

An auction drawing 41 bids is a room of buyers setting a price, not one person deciding alone. That is the best thing this sale has going for it. The worst is what it gets measured against: 8 comparable sales, exactly our floor for quoting a median.

By the numbers

• $6,876.49 — the median of the 8 matched sales. The buyer paid $273.51 more.
• 41 bids — a full 15 of 15 on price discovery, the only component to reach its ceiling.
• $1,900.00 to $8,200.00 — the span of that same pool. The middle is tight; the tails are not.

The intrigue

The case for the buyer is mechanism. A fixed-price listing tells you what one seller asked and one buyer accepted; 41 competing bids tell you where a room of buyers stopped. On that evidence $7,150.00 is a clearing level, not an outlier. The trailing signal agrees: the 6 sales in the pool’s most recent 30 days carry a median 5.1% above the pool as a whole. Paying 1.04x into a rising market is a defensible fill. Yesterday’s edition made the point from the other side.

Reality check

The case against is evidence, not price. 8 sales is a thin foundation, and our own floor is 8 — one fewer and this column publishes nothing. That pool runs from $1,900.00 to $8,200.00, so the median sits inside a market that has not fully agreed with itself. Liquidity scored 3 of 15 and scarcity 0 of 15: no serial number, no signature, and 8 sales is a narrow exit. We hold no population report, no sell-through data and no card-level search volume. More sports collectibles coverage.

What's next

The score is 60 of 100: comp deviation 30 of 40, trend 12 of 15, liquidity 3 of 15, price discovery 15 of 15, scarcity 0 of 15. Verdict: FAIR BUY. The whole gap to the GENIUS band sits in liquidity and scarcity — components describing the exit, not the price paid. Watch the next copy: a sale above $8,200.00 makes today’s median a lagging number; one near $1,900.00 says the wide tail is the real market.

Between the lines

This was not the biggest sale we tracked. A Pokemon Mudkip 018 Black Star Promo Holo from 2004, PSA 10, cleared $110,100.00 the same day, and 61 candidates priced above the Dragonite were set aside first. 45 could not assemble 8 comparable sales; 5 gave pools too dispersed to be one card’s market; 7 came from products still being opened and 1 from a print run too short to trade, all 8 rejected free from their own titles before any comp data was bought; 2 could not be pinned to a card; 1 was already covered. Our browse hit its row cap, so the 1,014 qualifying sales behind today’s figures are a floor, not a census.

How we track this

RazMania reads completed eBay sales daily and drops multi-card lots, reprints, altered cards and Best Offer sales, where eBay publishes the asking price rather than the figure paid. The comparable-sale median here comes from 8 verified sales of the same card, matched on year, card number, grader and grade. The comp pull requests a 90-day window and this edition does not claim the span it received. This run’s category browse returned its full row cap, so every market-wide count above is a floor rather than a total. eBay reports sold date, not sold time.