Michael Jordan 623 Project #27
MJ Slab Buy Ratings - 1987
Welcome back. The Michael Jordan slab buy rating series moves to 1987. The idea here is to apply a statistical model to rate how worthy each slab is of buying. Of course all ratings deserve individual scrutiny to discern if the model passes the sniff test for any particular card, but on the whole, I’m convinced it’s a great starting point to identify cards that might not be viewed as they should.
Links if you want to check out the posts done up to this point:
Quick recap on how this all works. There are four key factors that are going into this rating. I played around with it and for now this seems pretty logical. Here they are with their weightings on the final Buy Rating. Sales are as of early/middle February so a lot of these ubiquitous slabs will have more recent ones.
Dollar value vs grade higher (lower for PSA 10) (20%)
Pop + pop higher (40%)
Gem Rate (15%)
PSA total population (25%)
I have 16 slabs from just two cards for his second-year. The 1997 Fleer base and sticker. Not a lot of opportunity this post according to the model. So get used to it for these early years with a lot of demand.
Overall sentiment here to me is that these low-grade copies are not giving you the discount you might want. In fact many are negative meaning last sale or estimates are pricier vs next grade up. With the market what it is right now - I tend to think the era adjustment for the sale is having a hard time with these lower grade cards. Mentioned this in the last post too.
Aside from that - you get a sense of these cards from the fact that that grade+ and subs percentiles are the lowest in the game and the gem rate is near the highest (highest meaning worse gem rate - more value for high grade).
My takeaway is that pricing on low grade cards is pretty inconsistent and wild to try to track on this. But things make a little more sense when you look at the higher grades.
Let’s move on to those with the top-ten Buy Ratings from 1986:
