It looks like we have peaked for this event.
I was actually expecting a stronger total sales count, though this now gives a clear indication of market fatigue. It will be interesting to see next month’s data. A 7% reduction of total sales value isn’t much given the context, but given how hard the sales volume has dropped, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a further drop in the TSV.
Let’s keep any comments light, yeah?
Edit: Forgot to credit pokemonprice.com for the data, my bad.
Very interesting graph and thanks for taking the time to construct that for the forum! I’m curious as to how much of the decline in sales count is due to a lack of cards on the market, because of everything being bought out previously compared to a lack of purchasing due to decreased desire or negative outlook.
There’s a decline because I use less ebay and more private sale 
Availability of high end stuff is very low. I’ve never seen so little PSA 10 Gold Stars on Ebay in my entire life!
I don’t have the data to support this statement, but I don’t think so. I’ve noticed supply has been easing if anything in a lot of areas of the market. People just didn’t (and don’t?) want to pay increased prices continously. Sooner or later people either don’t value it as high, or they no longer have the funds to support the purchase. That’s usually when the market sentiment usually changes and there is a pull back. Sometimes it’s a hard pullback and sometimes its a slow cooling and other times its just stagnant for a duration.
I think many people are happy to: take a breather, get back to saving for more cards, see how the incoming PSA supply will affect the market in the next 6 months or so, or switch to another hobby for a while etc.
A market isn’t only high end stuff though, is it. None of this is personal. This is just the data we have.
Sales are down because people bought “everything” up the month before ahaha. ’
plus whatever trickling of graded cards that got finalized have probably sold.
I could see prices still going up even though total sales vale is down.
I think this is a large contributor especially for a graph of public data 
The count is way down with supply but value is only slightly down thus the cards that sold last month sold at a higher average value per card
@rainbow Thanks for putting the data together for us once again :-). I just wanted to comment that there is still plenty of old cards and sets that havnt moved much in price yet. Not going to name which ones but there is always good value buys out there if you look hard enough and try to buy things that are getting less exposure. There is still plenty of hidden gem value buys out there :-). As far as sales decrease it could simply be from people over buying and needing a little time before buying more who knows
Look at ebay’s history, there were a lot of PSA 10 gold star sales.
I enjoy the data-based discussions here, but as any methods scholar will know, correlation does not equal causation and we need to watch out for spurious relationships. For example, when we look at the PSA population data, we see that there are significantly fewer PSA 10s given out to WOTC holos now than in 2018. Is that a result of a shift in grading standards or because mint cards are harder to find and lower grades are worth more? We don’t know just by looking at that one point of data. Looking at other data points like modern grading stats, we can eliminate the “grading standards changed” explanation.
On its own, this data doesn’t really give us much of an idea of what’s happening. I think the private sale argument is irrelevant, private sales are likely a relatively fixed proportion of the lower-end market and eBay is the strongest indicator we have of market movement. However, there can be several explanations for this decrease other than the market slowing down. As people have noted, it could be that there is simply no stock to satisfy demands, while prices have actually continued to increase. I think this is supported by the significant decline in total sales count but a much smaller decline in total sales value. If we somehow had data for average category listing numbers, that could help illuminate things more.
Sure. But most of the sales movement comes from the lower end, where there is simply more supply proportionally than of 10’s.We are seeing softening demand. PSA 10’s sales make up for a lot of transaction value, but not typically so much by way of volume.
There is a lot of stock on the digital shelves, some items have sold out, but people are clearly no longer panic buying everything.
Exactly, the big takeaway for me is that with total sales volume down a lot more than total sales value, that means prices per card were significantly higher in May than they were in April.
I think that the decline in total sales volume can be explained by a few things:
1 - increasing reluctance among some buyers to pay the significantly higher prices (a natural byproduct of price increases)
2 - sellers increasingly reluctant to sell because of fear that prices will continue to rise and they will sell themselves short
3 - the continued fallout of short supply due to the several weeks that PSA had been shut down
Which is softening demand. That’s what happens when people aren’t willing to pay the asking price and no sale is made.
Fourthstartcg, fantastic point of the mention of correlation not equalling causation. Few understand that but very valid point!
Sure, rapidly rising prices will eventually soften demand. That’s inevitable.
But the fact that total sales value barely went down shows that sellers are doing much better with the higher prices. Sellers almost matched a record April while keeping much more of their inventory for future sales.
Where is the data to support this? All you’ve posted is a graph of total sales value vs total sales number, which is incredibly interesting, don’t get me wrong. But we can’t infer anything about softening demand, sales movement on lower grades, or panic buying just from those numbers.
The only thing being proven by the numbers is that cards were sold at higher prices and fewer cards were purchased (two factors that are utterly linked to one another). That’s it.
I don’t know exactly what else @rainbow is suggesting. That people wanted these cards less in May than they did April? There’s absolutely no proof of that and frankly would be nonsense theory.
On the other hand, if rainbow is suggesting that rapid increases in prices lead to fewer sales… Well, welcome to Economics 101.
I had almost nothing to sell in May, believe me if I did it would’ve sold quick.
Inevitable - right.
I don’t think I said sellers weren’t doing well? I said demand has softened and it has.
The Total Sales Value’s decrease of 7% appears small in the context. But both have changed direction this month and I wasn’t anticipating it, given how jubilant the market seemed.