One LeBron Rookie, Three Sales, $11,519 Apart

A PSA 10 took $15,227 and an ungraded copy took $3,708 — same card, same day, and all three copies went to open auction.

Three copies of the 2003-04 Topps Chrome #111 LeBron James rookie closed on eBay on Monday, and every one of them sold at open auction. The PSA 10 took $15,227.00. The ungraded copy took $3,708.00.

Why it matters

Grading ladders are usually assembled from sales weeks apart, in different markets, at different moments of demand. This one priced itself in a single day, and no part of it was a fixed-price listing — bidders set all three numbers.

By the numbers

• $15,227.00 — the PSA 10, on 36 bids.
• $8,350.00 — a BGS 9.5 of the same card, on 21 bids.
• $3,708.00 — the ungraded copy, on 37 bids: the most contested of the three.

Zoom in

The cheapest copy drew the most bidders. A raw Chrome rookie is the one lottery ticket in the group — it has never been through a grading room, so its ceiling is still open — and 37 bids is what that optionality costs.

Reality check

Most of a 4.11x gap like this is the grade itself, which is what grading is for. This is not a mispricing, and nobody got a bargain. We found 5 same-card pairs across both players we track on Monday and this was the only one that cleared our spread floors. Two 1986 Fleer #57 Michael Jordan rookies also changed hands, at $11,000.00 and $10,600.00 — $400.00 apart, too narrow for us to call it a story.

What's next

If you hold a raw Chrome #111, Monday says the auction floor is real and it is being bid by people pricing a grade that does not exist yet. Jordan’s side of the ledger stayed quiet: his confirmed-paid median was $366.88 against $739.00 for LeBron. Sunday’s edition found a single qualifying pair too.

How we track this

RazMania compares completed eBay sales of the same card that closed on the same day. Two sales are treated as the same card only when the player, year, set, card number, parallel or photo variation, print-run serial, autograph status and altered status all match — so a Refractor is never compared against a base card. Best Offer sales are excluded entirely, because eBay publishes the seller’s asking price on those and never the settled figure; every price here is a confirmed paid price. Multi-card lots, reprints and customs are filtered out. We quote no comparable-sales median and no 90-day pool — both prices in every comparison closed on the same day. eBay reports sold date, not sold time.