Price history

Price history is an overview of how the price of a Pokémon card has developed over time, usually shown as a chart or a table. It gives a picture of what the card has gone for in the past, but no answer about what happens next.

What a price chart rests on

A price series is assembled from individual points, often daily or weekly values from a platform. Each point can be a single sale, an average, a lowest listed price or a calculated market price. It matters to know which kind of figure the chart shows, since sale prices and listed prices say different things, see sold vs listed prices. How far back the data goes depends on the source.

Series normally cover one card in one condition, one edition and one currency. If a card moves from near mint to graded in another series, it is no longer the same comparison.

How a curve is read

• Trend: over longer periods the price can rise, fall or stay roughly flat. Short periods say little about direction.
• Peaks and troughs: a sudden jump that quickly falls back can be due to a single sale or short-lived attention, see hype and price bubbles.
• Swings: how much the price moves from point to point is called volatility, see volatility.
• Gaps in the series: cards that rarely trade have few points, and the line between them is merely a drawn stroke, see liquidity.
• Moving average: a smoothed curve that dampens single outliers but lags behind reality.

Sources of error

Several things can make a chart misleading:

• Single sales with the wrong condition or wrong edition can pull the figure up or down.
• The scale of the axis can make a small change look large, and the reverse.
• The exchange rate can move the price in kroner without the card having changed, see currency.
• Platforms can change how they calculate figures, so the series is not comparable backwards.
• Graded and ungraded cards can be mixed in the same figure if the source does not separate them.

Use with care

History shows what has happened, not what will happen. Patterns from the past do not necessarily repeat, and a card that has risen or fallen can behave differently later. Many collectors use price history to put a price in context, for example to see whether today's figure is close to or far from where the card has been. On HoloInvestor you can find price data for individual cards in the card browser. This entry gives no forecasts.