@Paul Weston Hey Paul. Just my 2 cents. I grade with a pretty consistent gem rate and often. I consistently sell to vendors at 75-85% I take the hit because I make friends with these vendors and they always have cash for me at any point. I even pay 100% on most of their raw cards I pick out while haggling, the vendors now knowing I'm scouting their 10s....because I bring them back to them later lol I pay 100% because I want them to do well. I want them to keep coming back and being at shows, for the community to stay strong enough to keep the community going. If you get to a certain level of cards coming back weekly, the hit doesn't matter if you can offload an entire stack of slabs in a couple hours. I'm just saying that I think it's fair after actively being in the hobby a while. It's a market. A market having tiers is a good thing. Anyway, take care!

This is good thinking.

The value of anything is what someone is willing to pay for it. If a card sells for X amount of dollars then that's the value. If it sells again. That's the market. There are a large amount of new collectors in the hobby due to Pokemon pocket, breaking becoming popular, reels of pack openings etc. so there is a lot of money in the industry right now. And with more money in a hobby/market the higher the prices are for the things within the market. It's like how the market corrects itself. 'Sure buddy, buy that ETB for $55 and flip it for $120, but if you want slabs or other similar product....expect to pay a premium on that now.' Then queue 'The Circle of Life' theme song lol Take groceries for example. When one item goes up, another item goes up, like eggs and meats lately. The higher the prices the more money that goes into 'food'. In general 'food' goes up because of high prices. Then people start buying Great Value or other generic food brands because the price is higher here and there. Then the Great Value and generic foods go up slightly because everyone's buying them now. Does this make any sense? haha! Everything in Pokemon is doing well and it's hard to tell if it's actually a bubble or just how it will be for a while. The sets keep getting better unlike before. Sorry... I have a lot of thought on this. I'm happy PSA 10s are making so much because I grade a ton XD

And side note. A PSA 9 is the raw value of the card in most cases, though there are a few exceptions. The differences between a 9 and 10 in terms of physical condition acceptance make exact sense when it comes to the pricing of the card and also adding in desirability(PSA 10s of the original 151 Pokemon always do well for example). Most of my submissions are between 60-80% gem rates and every other submission I'll have a set of perfect 10s. I've just been doing it so precisely for so long. But in doing so I can tell you that what gets accepted on 9s is no where near the 'flawlessness' you'd want on a 'perfect' card, the PSA 10. I look through 200-500 card savers of possible 10s I'd bought from previous shows and I pull the better ones out. Then I look through that stack again and weed more out. And then again. Usually if I look through 500 cards I bought thinking '10 candidate', there'll be only 5-15 I pull out to actually send off. Only a few are going to actually hit PSA 10 and not waste my time. I think the premium in this market for somethings are deserved. Getting PSA 10s is a lil tough but doable =)