I mainly profit from sports cards in two ways:

There are certainly other ways to make money, but after 5 years and thousands of transactions, this is what’s worked the best for me.

A few weeks ago, I shared my framework for buy and flip… so today we'll cover buy and grade!

Quick note: in my upcoming live Bootcamp, I’ll spend over 2 hours on buying & grading… with examples, walkthroughs, and covering all the finer details.

It’s too much to share here, so today will be a high-level overview that should help connect some of the dots on grading.

Grading cards is the most consistently profitable activity in the hobby.

You can 2x or 3x the value of your cards, and the timeline is more predictable than buy & holds.

Here are a few recent flips that I’ve done:

It’s hard to find those types of numbers on a straight flip (unless you bought PCA back in June!).

And I also love how predictable grading is. You don’t have to rely so much on:

Those certainly play a factor, but they’re not the end-all, be-all like they are on a buy & flip. The main factors are:

What is this card selling for raw and what does it sell for as a PSA 10?

The idea is simple, but executing it isn’t if you’re new to this.

Here’s what I look at before buying every card to grade.

I covered finding the right players & cards in great detail here, so I’ll keep it short today.

Make sure that you buy:

Your best flips will naturally increase in value while your card is away at PSA for 4-5 months… so buying quality cards where the timing & pricing work out can supercharge your profits or keep your losses minimal.

What I tell my students is that grading only feels scary if you don’t know the numbers.

When I send my cards in to get graded, the upside is high and the downside is minimal. Almost every batch with at least 3-4 cards is profitable.

So, there are 3 main outcomes when grading cards:

Sure, you could get an 8 or lower, but that’s fairly rare (when you do this right). Plus, you could crack the slab and sell raw, which on ultra-modern cards is generally pretty similar to a PSA 9 in value anyway.

So in order to do the math, you need to know:

Most of my flips end up with math like this:

You can see that the return isn’t just generally positive; it’s overwhelmingly in your favor!

50% of the time you make $400 and 50% of the time you lose $150 (the average of ungradable and PSA 9). You’d average a return of $275 per card.

But it’s also possible that you send in only 1-2 cards and they both come back as 9s. That stinks, and it’s what leads to many people thinking this doesn’t work.

That’s why you should either send in orders of at least 4-5 cards, or send in frequent orders of 2 cards. If you have a bad order, you only have to wait a bit to get back your next order that likely makes up for it.

With enough volume, and following the right system, you’ll pretty much guarantee great profit over time.

Please… DO. NOT. SKIP. THIS. STEP. It changed my grading more than anything else once I started using it.

Use GemRate.com’s Universal Search to see what percent of the time your card gets a gem mint grade (e.g., PSA 10).

If this number falls below 60%, I rarely grade. Ideally, look for 70% and above.

While you can’t fully assess if a card is gradable through eBay pics, you can still usually spot the most egregious condition issues.

The main things to check at this point are centering and corners. If the image is blurry and you can’t see if the corners are sharp, ask for better pics. If they don’t send them, onto the next card!

Minor surface issues often aren’t noticeable on a screen, but you can see if there are any print lines or places where the card has a chip or parts are flaking off.

So by now, you have:

Now, you’ve purchased the card and you have it in hand.

And yes, we’re going to look at it again as a final check to ensure it’s gradable. PSA looks at these four factors:

I put together a whole post about assessing your cards, but honestly a lot of this will come down to experience.

Of the cards I get in hand, they’re gradable about 75% of the time.

If it’s not gradable, I’ll do one of the following:

If you’re nervous about doing this… I get it. I was for a long while.

But what makes it feel doable and safe?

Math, math, math.

Yes, there’s an element of checking cards yourself to ensure good condition, but I just think about it this way:

If I can only find one minor issue on the card (or no issues), and Gem Rate says it has a high chance of grading… well that’s always worked out for me across my batches.

At first, be super picky. Buy cards with massive upside and high gem rates. Yes, it can take a while to find the right cards, but they’re out there and keep searching!

If you could find cards in 5 minutes to grade, the whole world would do it and there’d be no profit.

There is profit precisely because there’s knowledge, research, and costs involved.

Anyway, I hope this helps! If you have any grading questions, feel free to reply to this email and I’ll try to help you out!