Card market reports

We count every public completed card sale we can see, every day, and publish two things from it. The first is a weekly index: what share of all card sales a fixed group of players holds, measured against the whole market rather than against itself.

Groups are fixed before any week is measured. That matters, because picking the biggest mover out of hundreds of players mostly finds the luckiest one rather than a real change. A group that was chosen in advance cannot be selected after the fact.

Six groups are published: retired and active players in basketball, baseball and American football. Retired NBA is eleven names including Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal. Active NBA is six names including LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Victor Wembanyama. Between late May and late August 2026 the retired basketball group gained share of the market while the active basketball group lost it.

Every value is published with the range you get by leaving any one player out. A narrow range means the group moved together. A wide one means a single player is carrying the number, which is a different and much weaker claim.

A week is only published once all seven of its days have arrived, and once the week is not far smaller than the weeks before it. A short week would make every share in it read high. A week counted from a much smaller record of the market would do the same thing for a whole different reason, so both are refused rather than adjusted.

The index is currently held at the week of 17 August 2026. On 25 August our daily record of completed sales fell from roughly 350,000 sales a day to between 45,000 and 78,000, and the sales still arriving are not a fair sample of the ones that stopped: more of them are graded and more of them are old cards. Publishing weeks measured against that record would report that older players gained, when what changed is what we can count. The page says so in place of the missing weeks.

The second thing we publish is reports on individual players. One asks why Shaquille O'Neal's cards started selling in far greater numbers from 27 July 2026, and finds that the same card in the same condition also sells for about sixty percent more; we could not identify a cause. The other measures what a Michael Jordan card sale actually is: one in every 72 cards sold, four out of five of them printed in the 1990s, and about one in a hundred of them a 1986 card.

These are counts of sales, not appraisals or investment advice.