Best Grading company right now

[daeve]

Hey all,

So the very first show I plan on setting up as a dealer at is coming up in a little over 2 months. I had planned on subbing a bunch of the very best of the low-mid range raw stuff I've purchased over the past 3-4 years, or however long it's been since I submitted anything [was definitely pre-Covid, I think late 2019]... but kept putting it off as I've just gotten less and less confident/impressed with grading on the whole. But now that it's crunch time and I finally have a bit of free time this week to really look over batches of raw cards I've found that I'm still very unsure how to tackle this.

For some background, I have never had an acct with any grading company before, and have only submitted largely modern cards and through well established bulk submitters, though I had pretty great success in 2018-19. The trend since 2019 seems to be that grading has gotten more harsh, or at least PSA has [?]... this was also partly why I've held off as long as I have.

Which leads me to a few questions for this very knowledgeable + experienced forum:

1- If you were in my shoes, who do you submit with, keeping in mind time constraints [when the show is, plus factoring in holidays] ? I had planned on not outsourcing and just opening an acct with either PSA/SGC/CGC... though lately I have re-considered BGS also.

2- Should I just not submit and try to label some raw cards as 'gradable' at the show? While I would never do this with public sales to the masses online, like say on ebay - I think it's perhaps an advantage of selling in-person. But I do wonder if that would open me up to non-stop questions all day at the show with buyers wanting to inspect my 'gradable' box which may include pulling cards out of toploaders and generally taking up a lot of time and/or space, while also attracting the 'flipper' crowd who will want to grade for the flip and perhaps be not so fun to deal with.

3- I was pretty heavily leaning towards CGC as I really liked their clear and seemingly high quality holders, though I did finally purchase a single which has their new flip and sadly wasn't too impressed. I liked the green ones better *shrugs*.

4- I do also plan on subbing some cards that I don't necessarily plan on selling in late January, and which are more PC items, or items I'm fine with sitting on myslabs or in a vault for a little while until prices realize. Should I just bite the bullet and submit the higher-end stuff with PSA and through a known submitter?

[FrankAZHP]

With your time constraints and the fact that it'd be a bunch of midrange stuff, if I were you, I'd do SGC.

[daeve]

Thanks for the reply Frank - I will look into SGC, I don't think I was giving them enough thought before, so thanks for the rec!

[darz90scardz]

Take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt because I’ve never submitted anything, but just to address some of your other concerns…

I could be mistaken but I think in the context of sportscards, CGC gets the lowest premiums out of the 4 companies you named. Can anyone confirm?

Regarding #2, that actually sounds great for buyers, but labels indicating such just makes me picture them asking if they could see cards outside of the sleeves more than they would otherwise. Curious to hear if this is the case from people with heavy show experience. I guess that doesn’t even matter if you don’t mind the extra time and requests to hold them raw. The latter would prob drive me nuts, lol.

I’m also not totally confident in my own strategy whenever I do finally get stuff graded. All I had in mind was to send the cards in best condition to PSA, and send more condition sensitive or outright visibly worn stuff to BGS. It’s probably also worth noting that PSA can be extremely lax on centering, so I wouldn’t necessarily remove PSA candidates for that subgrade alone.

I can’t really speak on SGC as much, I know they’ve been outperforming BGS in terms of sub rate, but I don’t know if that also translates to resale value. What I can say is that I love their slabs, it’s like a cross between psa and bgs - clarity of the psa slab combined with the more bulky bgs slab.

I’ve said this before but if BGS would just fix their damn cloudy cases, they would hands down be the nicest slabs because of their already top notch labels. How thin or thick a given slab is has always been an afterthought for me, so what I’m saying goes out the window if that’s a big concern.

[daeve]

Take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt because I’ve never submitted anything, but just to address some of your other concerns…

I could be mistaken but I think in the context of sportscards, CGC gets the lowest premiums out of the 4 companies you named. Can anyone confirm?

Regarding #2, that actually sounds great for buyers, but labels indicating such just makes me picture them asking if they could see cards outside of the sleeves more than they would otherwise. Curious to hear if this is the case from people with heavy show experience. I guess that doesn’t even matter if you don’t mind the extra time and requests to hold them raw. The latter would prob drive me nuts, lol.

I’m also not totally confident in my own strategy whenever I do finally get stuff graded. All I had in mind was to send the cards in best condition to PSA, and send more condition sensitive or outright visibly worn stuff to BGS. It’s probably also worth noting that PSA can be extremely lax on centering, so I wouldn’t necessarily remove PSA candidates for that subgrade alone.

I can’t really speak on SGC as much, I know they’ve been outperforming BGS in terms of sub rate, but I don’t know if that also translates to resale value. What I can say is that I love their slabs, it’s like a cross between psa and bgs - clarity of the psa slab combined with the more bulky bgs slab.

I’ve said this before but if BGS would just fix their damn cloudy cases, they would hands down be the nicest slabs because of their already top notch labels. How thin or thick a given slab is has always been an afterthought for me, so what I’m saying goes out the window if that’s a big concern.

Hey Darz, just now seeing this reply!

I believe you may be right in that CGC gets the lowest premium of the 4. A few years ago I was confident they would make up some of the gap, but I'm way less confident in that now. I've also noted it elsewhere but I am not a fan of their newer flip, looks cheap and easy to reproduce should their value ever go up to the point where they may be counterfeited I would be slightly concerned about that.

So by now the show I worked is well past, and I had fun! I chose to keep the 'potentially gradable' cards in Card Savers rather than regular toploaders and then let interested buyers know. It was also not a lot of cards, and mostly just ones in my showcase. I ended up selling most of them.

Yeah I agree with you on BGS, I wish they could figure out a clearer plastic because shiny stuff just typically doesn't look good in their cases. So with SGC eaten up, now you either get upcharged by PSA, cloudy cases by BGS, or bad flip design by CGC. Sigh