Episode 08 Data Mining and Practical Takeaways Ft. Gemrate

Released: July 8, 2025 | Duration: 48:48

Prefer audio-only? spotify slabnomics podcast linkslabnomics apple podcasts link

About This Episode

This episode features Ryan, the founder of Gemrate, discussing how population data, gem rates, and grading trends reveal opportunities that most collectors miss. Gemrate started as a solution to a personal problem: Ryan needed better tools to understand card supply and pricing beyond what was available on individual grader pop reports. He built a platform that aggregates PSA, Beckett, and SGC data, allowing users to compare gem rates across graders, track population trends over time, and research player catalogs with full context.

The conversation covers the state of the grading industry, including PSA's dominance at 90% market share, Beckett's fall from grace despite still grading 60,000 cards per month, and why liquidity has become the deciding factor for which grading company collectors choose. Ryan explains why BGS 9s are mispriced right now, how subgrades add friction in a flipper's market, and why condition is actually a subset of rarity rather than a separate factor.

The episode also dives into practical use cases for Gemrate's tools, including the Advanced Stats Pop Report that shows population trends over specific time windows, the player catalog feature that reveals which cards matter most for a given athlete, and how to use total population data instead of relying on misleading claims like PSA Pop 1. Ryan shares his vision for integrating more data sources, including pricing integrations with Card Ladder and representative cert images for every card in the database.

Topics Covered

  • How Gemrate was built to solve the problem of fragmented grading data across PSA, Beckett, and SGC
  • Why total population matters more than PSA Pop 1, and how sellers misrepresent supply
  • The state of the grading industry: PSA at 90% market share, Beckett at 3% by volume but still relevant for high-end cards
  • How liquidity became the most important factor in choosing a grading company, not just value
  • Why PSA’s operational improvements post-acquisition have cemented their dominance
  • How SGC carved out a niche by focusing on fast turnaround times instead of premium values
  • Why Beckett is too big to fail with 11 million slabs in circulation, despite perception challenges
  • The role of subgrades: valuable for submitters, but adding friction for flippers
  • Why BGS 9s are undervalued right now, and the arbitrage opportunity in cracking and resubmitting to PSA
  • Gem rate analysis: PSA at 34% sports gem rate vs Beckett at 44%, but Beckett’s 9.5 inflates the number
  • How to use gem rate data to identify outliers and understand set quality over time
  • The Advanced Stats Pop Report: tracking population and gem rate trends over specific time windows
  • Player catalog analysis: understanding which cards matter for a player based on what’s been graded most
  • Why rookie cards are a separate catalog from the rest of a player’s cards
  • The importance of milestone cards like MVP years, and how they could shift in value
  • Why condition is a subset of rarity, not a separate factor
  • Gemrate’s integration with Card Ladder for recent transaction data and representative cert images
  • The vision for Gemrate as a Bloomberg for sports cards: neutral data integration across multiple sources
  • The concept of the junk parallel era and how to use base rates to extrapolate print runs

Full Transcript Summary

Introduction and Gemrate's Origin Story

Ryan is the founder of Gemrate, a platform that provides population data and gem rate analysis for sports cards across PSA, Beckett, and SGC. The conversation begins with Ryan explaining what brought Gemrate into existence.

Ryan worked in banking for eight years, then moved into the startup world doing data and analytics work. Like many people, he jumped back into the hobby in 2020. He had some money to put into the card market, saw how it was trending, and was excited to participate. He did a ton of buying, making the classic mistake of spending a lot of money without fully understanding the nuance of what determines a card's pricing. For example, he was buying baseball cards and did not understand that true colors matter way more than other parallels and variants with shimmers.

He got to a point where he needed to start selling and wanted to understand the pricing of assets better. Pop reports were great data, but hard to come by and hard to make sense of. The way pop reports were presented five years ago made it difficult to navigate. Ryan was interested in the grading business and dug into pop reports deeper. He realized this was data he wanted in an Excel format or on a website that was more powerful and allowed customization.

Ryan set out to collect the data for each grading company programmatically and create a tool that would allow users to slice and dice the data differently. He started in January 2021 and has been doing it full-time ever since. Gemrate has been his only focus and project since then.

Why Pop Data Matters and How Sellers Misrepresent Supply

Before Gemrate existed, people were buying cards that were misrepresented in their presentation, whether on eBay or through marketplaces. People presented pop through the lens of an individual grader, which does a disservice to what supply actually is. It favored the seller, and it was an accepted standard in the hobby: PSA Pop 1, none higher. But that could be a card released in 2015 when Beckett was at its peak and most people were grading with Beckett. A PSA Pop 1 means nothing in the context of how many of those cards have actually been evaluated and graded.

There were not any tools delivering total population data or gem rate context. That was where the name Gemrate came from. Collection management tools had tucked gem rate into their platforms, but it was narrow in the sense that it was just through a specific card. Ryan wanted to look at and compare gem rates across cards, across sets, across a player's catalog to understand outliers or what an era of manufacturing looked like for a player or set.

Education materials are very limited in the sports card space and very narrow when they surface. The idea behind Gemrate was to bring more information to the potential buyer pool so they could make thoughtful decisions and not feel like they got suckered. The more confident the buyer pool is, the better the hobby does, because you get better purchase behavior, better retention, and people are more likely to recommend it to others.

The Grading Industry: PSA Dominance and Beckett's Fall

PSA now dominates grading volume. They are pushing the premise that PSA-graded cards command higher prices. The Collector's Umbrella, which owns PSA, owns 90% of the grading activity each month. Beckett is a small player relative to that, though they still see a lot of important cards walk through their doors.

Beckett is doing about 60,000 cards per month right now, which has been their sweet spot over the last five years. They have been up and down between 50,000 to 80,000 for five years. Their peak was probably around 1 million cards in a single year. For perspective, PSA did 1.6 million in May alone and 1.4 million in June. They are orders of magnitude away in behavior and scale.

Beckett took for granted that they were a leader during the pandemic. They shut down, undercommunicated, and did not put together a customer-centric approach to navigate the surge in grading demand. Part of the reason PSA emerged and why SGC emerged as a secondary sports grader was that liquidity became really important. More people were spending, more people needed to turn over inventory, and the easiest way to make money is to grade cards. PSA built on their lead from a value standpoint. Gem Mint 10 is the gold standard. SGC focused on turnaround times, getting cards back quicker so you could move into the next card sooner. That really stood out.

Beckett was not doing much to innovate. They were kind of like the AOL of the hobby, reaping the benefit of a strong install base but not pushing boundaries. The perception has changed significantly, even though they are still grading nearly as many cards as they were a few years ago. They still grade a lot of high-end cards. The perception has really changed.

Is Beckett Too Big to Fail?

Short answer: yes. In the short term, Beckett is too big to fail. Ryan listens to Dr. Beckett's podcast a few times a week. Management understands they have mishandled the last few years and are trying to recalibrate. There have been a series of missteps through different leadership teams.

Gemrate has an iconic tracker that focuses on cards with real significance in the hobby and what is being graded. What is interesting is that Beckett still gets a lot of high-value cards. They still have a sweet spot within basketball. People who do not want to pay the PSA upcharge for higher tiers of grading will pay a flat fee and go to Beckett to grade higher-end cards. Beckett is known for being a more favorable grade for thick cards.

Ryan published a report on 2024 Prizm Football. The number of one-of-ones of high-profile quarterbacks from the class that went to PSA versus Beckett was a 65-35 split. It is not what it looks like when you look at volume numbers, where Beckett only has 3% share. But when you look at high-profile cards, it speaks to the question of whether they are too big to fail. They have a very loyal base that was well earned but has been taken for granted over the years.

Why BGS 9s Are Undervalued Right Now

There are pockets of the hobby that lean into one known fact or understanding and lean into it as hard as they can. There are people making good money off cracking BGS 9s and resubmitting them, hoping for the outlier 10, but knowing you are probably still holding on to some value by moving it into a PSA slab and covering your grading cost. You are getting a free shot at an upgrade but still moving it to a slab that is more liquid and has slightly more of a premium.

BGS 9s are mispriced in the sense that if people are buying the card and not the grade, and Beckett still has really strong grading standards in place, the progressive valuation of PSA 9s versus Beckett 9s probably does not have many glaring differences at scale. They are probably closely matched. If there is a price discrepancy, buying a BGS 9 versus a PSA 9 is a strong value proposition. They are probably the same card. Subgrades are favorable as a submitter and seller of cards, but not great from a liquidity standpoint for someone trying to get deals done quick. Subgrades add friction. That has done Beckett a disservice in the current environment, which is part of why BGS 9s sometimes trade at a discount to PSA 9s.

The longer-term play is to grab BGS 9s, wait for Beckett to rebound, and maybe the BGS 9 is worth more than the PSA 9 eventually. It is hard to argue they can reach the PSA spot on the leaderboard, but they can definitely regain momentum.

Gem Rates: PSA vs Beckett

Ryan published a report that looked at overall gem rates for the first half of 2025 for sports for each company. For PSA, the gem rate for all sports was 34%. That is across all eras of cards, including vintage, the 90s, and ultra-modern. Beckett was 44%.

Beckett is higher, but Beckett has a more lenient scale. The 9.5 Gem Mint, especially a min 9.5 where you had three 9.5s and one 9, was a safety net. It allowed you to get that Gem Mint grade with less risk. If you knew you had a flawed corner but everything else looked great, you knew it was not going to gem at PSA, but you could ship it to Beckett and still escape with the 9.5 and get a solid price.

The market has adjusted for that now. If you eliminate the min 9.5 and hold it more to a true gem, that probably moves much closer to 34% than people realize. You probably get a 10% bump of cards that are on the margins enough to be given that Gem Mint label but probably would not qualify if they were tighter with standards. Big picture, they grade at a fairly equivalent rate, with the nuance of certain cards grading more favorably with each grader.

Player Catalogs and Set Analysis

Gemrate has a different point of view on how people might want to consume information, presenting a catalog through the lens of sets or through the lens of cards available for a player. For example, Trey Murphy of the Pelicans was injured his first year and did not play much. He was not featured in a lot of cards. His market looks very different relative to other rookies in the 2021 class. He does not have SSPs, kabooms, downtowns, or high-profile cards. Navigating what matters for him is very different than navigating what might matter for Anthony Edwards from 2020.

When you look at a player's catalog, context matters as it relates to what has been graded a bunch. What has been graded a bunch typically correlates to what has moved a lot in the aftermarket. Grading is often used as a way to make cards more liquid.

Gemrate now integrates with Card Ladder so users can look at recent transactions on Card Ladder for every card in the catalog. It removes friction. You do not have to go type in 2020 Anthony Edwards Prizm Silver. You just click that on the Gemrate page and it takes you to that data. Gemrate thinks of itself as a Bloomberg, neutral as it relates to different players that provide data, and more about integrating and hooking in different sources to allow people to advance through the hobby.

Advanced Stats Pop Report

At the beginning of the year, Gemrate launched the Advanced Stats Pop Report. When you think about a pop report, it is a set of data looking at population in aggregate. It shows all cards that have been graded all time. You cannot slice and dice it to say what cards have been graded in the past week, month, or year. You cannot look at different periods of time like you might look at a pricing chart.

Gemrate is trying to show trends that allow you to see what things looked like over the last week, month, or year. That matters from the standpoint of what players are emerging. It might be surprising if you are in discovery mode trying to understand a player's catalog or the nuances of a specific set.

What Ryan loves most about it is you can see the gem rate over a period of time. You get a very different picture if you look at an all-time gem rate of a card versus what it looks like over the last year or last month. Typically, the best cards surface first and get graded first, and the long tail gets graded over time but tends to not be as strong from a quality standpoint.

The Junk Parallel Era and Estimating Print Runs

There are a lot of non-numbered parallels in the hobby. You can start to have base rates of how many times a parallel gets graded relative to the base card. You can extrapolate what the actual print run might look like, or if these were serial numbered, what that might be.

The vision for Gemrate is to provide tooling to let people advance their narratives from a buyer standpoint, helping figure out how to make the right decisions on what to own. From a seller standpoint, it is about conveying the value that should be associated with a card, not value from a pricing standpoint but value from a context standpoint. Here is how to think about the significance of this card through the lens of the player or the set.

Condition as a Subset of Rarity

Ryan was asked whether condition or rarity is more important. His answer: condition is a subset of rarity. Grading of superfactors or one-of-ones is a great example. People flip out when they see a graded one-of-one on Instagram. Why bother? But people who only look at that single card are missing the point. People who look at the catalog of cards are going to factor a PSA 9 superfactor differently than a PSA 10 superfactor of a nearby neighbor of that set. People take for granted that it does not matter, but it does.

Ultimately, Ryan thinks of condition as a subset of the rarity equation.

The Vision for Gemrate

Four years ago, Ryan's dream was to build a Chrome extension to overlay supply data over many of the highest-profile sites in the hobby. Gemrate is now integrated into a lot of the larger auction houses and collection management tools. The dream has always been to make the eBay process simpler. In the meantime, the dream has always been to allow you to overlay it.

The vision is to translate supply data to the transaction side of the market. Market cap or gem cap is a great starting point. Taking the price of a card and multiplying it times the known supply across all grades helps you understand how much money has been invested into a card at this point in time. That helps people understand sets better. 99% of cards work their way to zero. Price is limiting in your understanding of a card. The more we can understand the supply side of the equation too, the better.

Related Episodes