A PSA 9 LeBron rookie sold below its comps

$5,400.00 on 17 bids, against a $5,800.00 median across 30 other PSA 9 copies of the same 2003-04 Topps Chrome rookie.

A 2003-04 Topps Chrome LeBron James #111 rookie in a PSA 9 holder sold Wednesday for $5,400.00 after 17 bids. The median across 30 other PSA 9 copies of the same card is $5,800.00.

Why it matters

The Topps Chrome #111 is the benchmark LeBron rookie, and at PSA 9 it changes hands often enough to have a real market rather than a guess. Wednesday’s result says an open auction with 17 bidders in it still landed under that market. If you are pricing one, that is the number to argue with.

By the numbers

• $5,400.00 — the sale, on 17 bids in an open auction.
• $5,800.00 — the median across 30 PSA 9 copies of the same card, trailing 90 days.
• $3,050.00 — an ungraded copy of the identical rookie, sold the same day on 27 bids.

Zoom in

The raw copy pulled more bidders than the slab did — 27 against 17 — and still finished well behind it. That is the grading premium working in the open, on the same card, on the same day, with no comp math required to see it.

Reality check

Two caveats on the numbers above. Our PSA 9 pool runs $3,500.00 to $33,995.00, and that top figure is not a base card — it is a Refractor parallel, which carries the same set, year, card number and grade but is a different card entirely. We quote the median for exactly that reason, because it does not move on one outlier. Separately, the day’s largest figure, $10,000.00, came from a 2025-26 Topps Chrome Update True Gold Refractor /50 sold on an accepted best offer, where eBay publishes the seller’s ask rather than what the buyer paid.

What's next

Wednesday’s $513.50 median across 68 LeBron single-card sales sat under the $595.00 median of the 219 sales in our trailing 90-day sample, so the session ran cool rather than hot. Watch whether more PSA 9 #111 copies reach the market against a $5,800.00 median. See the Aug 10 LeBron market report or the full sports collectibles archive for the running record.

How we track this

RazMania monitors completed eBay sales daily, filtering out multi-card lots, reprints, and cross-listed items to isolate genuine single-card sales. Prices are final sold prices. Comparable-sale medians are calculated from 219 verified sales over the trailing 90 days. eBay reports sold date, not sold time.