Site Forum

Definitely no for me as well.

When the OP asks " Would anyone like to see the value of the cards in a Trade transaction? ", most people understandably may take the word "value" here to mean "true worth" or at least a somewhat accurate appraisal of an card's worth. I think we can all agree that a card's "value" is subjective (influenced by or based on personal beliefs or feelings, rather than based on facts ) and card values change all the time.

imho it may be very helpful for many members if there was a way to determine and display at least a "ballpark value" of cards in a trade transaction. It may discourage lopsided trade proposals (who here has not gotten one of those?) from our ethically-challenged members. Those who have no use for ballpark values can simply ignore them.

But how would we define and implement a reliable "ballpark value" for TCDb trades? That's the big question.

I also agree to NO for adding that as part of the transactions. Most collectors already know what their cards are "worth". Modern stuff is completely fluid though and changes from day to day. Ebay, COMC and so on are not actually relevant to value, especially for the past year or so. Most stuff is HIGHLY inflated over the past year and not what the cards are actually worth to anyone. TCDB values have never been accurate in the 6+ years that I have been a member. Some are way too low and some are way too high. Thanks to the pandemic, cards are leaning way off to the "way too high" side now. In the past, I used Beckett values as my mark. They list it at THIS mark and I want to pay 30% of that mark or sell for 50% of that mark. But now I don't care what they say OR what the online community says is the price to sell it. I'm just trying to move my extra cards to the people that want them more than me. I know if I am getting an equal trade value by looking through the lists of cards. If I am buying or selling, a counteroffer is always a possibility and welcomed if I deem it to be fair.

I am in the majority which is the "NO" crowd.  There are several reasons for this, some mentioned, some not expanded on.

1. The prices entered here are too small of a sample to be a true value of any card.  Lately, these have been affected byt he volatile market and do not reflect the true value of cards.  Just because there is a spike in prices (for whatever reasons), does not make the value of any card increase to those peak prices.

2. Price guides (without mentioning any names) are also not reliable even though some will quote those prices to substantiate the fairness of a trade. Through 30+ years of collecting, I have learned that those are also very much influenced by the spikes of the market.  For example, every year in the new base sets there are probably 30-40 "RC". These are chased by the "investors" in the hobby and flipped by those who buy boxes and boxes of the new product. But many of these RC players will not make any impact in the top league of their sport and that RC that someone was selling for $10-20 is found in the commons box and can be had for $0.10 (baseballcards.ca) or $0.18 (Sportlots).  There will only be 2 or 3 of those cards that hold any value, inflated as that may also be. If you doubt what I say, look up Brien Taylor or Ben McDonald or Mo Vaughn or...

3. Not long ago, I had a trade offer where the other individual had totalled the price value of the cards in the trade to be almost equal at around $30. On his side, he asked for stars and HoF while I was being offered mostly commons from the more recent years.  I looked up all the cards he offered me and to no surprise, I could have gotten each and every card for $0.18 from Sportlots bringing the value down by 60%.  We have thousands of cards on here with prices that are 4 or 5 times the price of what one could buy them from any seller in Sportslots or baseballcards.ca. I explained this to him, he verified what I was saying and we still came up with what was a much fairer trade. This is not a slag against him but an example of why this proposal would not work.

I think enough said.  If you still think this is a good idea, not sure what more I could say.

For as much as some people feel this would help with getting fair trades I'm afraid there will be as many or more poor offers justified with the value is equal. This could also potentially hurt the already bad pricing here by encouraging some poor members to inflate the price on their cards.

My first reaction when I read this last night was in theory it might work but when it came to practice it would be a harder climb. First with only about 23-24% of listings actually having a price (and many "debatable" at that) not to mention "card condition" ( again largely subjective) it might prove difficult to arrive at a "trade value". Since the changes brought about in price submission criteria has evolved the prices should reflect more accurately the worth (again other factors involved in that being defined) . Until a larger majority of cards are priced (likely a enormous undertaking) in the future and that would appear to have not enough membership desire at this moment I think each trade will be merited on what each person deems "worthy" by the cards offered/countered.

While you could argue it helps those who don't know the value of cards and if a proposal is even, if we can't trust the values to be even then it's just as likely someone's getting hindered by false values.

It would hasten the decline of trading on this site.  I've already seen a shift over the last decade; "trade value" being used as a guide. It's not hard to predict trades devolving into purely a $$ comparison which, I feel, ruins the intent of trading. 

This! That is exactly what happened to Beckett's trading site. Everyone was so obessed with Book Value. Then others would only trade by "ebay sales value." It got to the point of finding people to trade with on the basis of "Hey I have about 20 similar cards you need and you have about 20 similar cards I need want to swap?" was near impossible.

Veering left on topic. I'd be all for some type of computer algorithm that would automatically update pricing based on E-bay sold data. Now I know people will scream what about LCS, comc, cardlot, FB etc pricing and I get it but my thoughts are these?  E-Bay is probably the biggest and most used for cards.  Also we have some type of agreement with them already because they appear all over our pages. Every day my collection value changes under my collection page.  Thousands of cards don't have any pricing which makes the whole collection value mechanism we currently have useless any way.  This would also eventually correct those crazy prices that every RC goes through.  One day a Luis Robert parallel is $800 the next month it's $80. Most times those corrections don't get updated for months or sometimes never. I've seen 90's cards of stars listed for $25 bucks here but sold on E-bay for $4.  You can't update it unless you have a sold link to copy.  Then there's the Beckett Bastards. Still considered by many as the standard.  That would probably be an easy one to integrate but those thieving SOB's prolly would never sign off on a deal like that.