The number that matters
The lowest you should take for a card
Everybody has an asking price. Far fewer people have decided, in advance, the number at which they say no — which is the number that actually decides what happens.
A walk-away price — a floor — is the price below which you keep the card. Not "would rather not sell". Keep.
It sounds like a small distinction. It is the whole thing. An asking price is a wish; a floor is a decision. And because a floor is a decision, it is far better made in advance than in the middle of somebody talking at you.
What a floor should be built from
What you paid
For the first stretch of owning a card, your floor should protect your cost. Not by a dollar — by enough to be worth the transaction. Fifteen percent over what you paid is a reasonable place to put it. Below that you are doing paperwork for free.
What it is worth now
The more profit a card is carrying, the further its floor can fall and still leave you happy. A card you are up $1,800 on can take a real haggle. A card you are up $12 on cannot, and pretending otherwise is how you end up working a whole weekend for nothing.
How long you have held it
This is the one people leave out, and it is the one that costs the most. Cost protection should have an expiry. After about 90 days, holding a price up to get your money back stops being a strategy — the market has told you something and you are not listening.
After that point the floor should start coming down toward what the card is genuinely worth. That is not defeat. That is the difference between a dealer and a collector with a spreadsheet.
How scarce it is
If you have graded cards, the population report is worth reading, and it points the opposite way to most people's instinct.
A floor answers one question: what happens if I say no? On a pop 4 card, nothing happens. The buyer cannot go and find another one forty feet away, because there are four in the world. You can hold firm.
On a pop 11,000 card, the buyer says fine, walks down the aisle, and buys the same card from somebody else. Your leverage is gone. That card should deal further.
Work it out once, then just read it
The point of settling a floor in advance is not that the math is difficult. It is that you cannot do math well eleven times an hour with somebody watching your face, and when you guess under pressure you guess low. Everybody does. Tiredness has a direction.
Never show it
Your floor is the single most valuable piece of information at your table, and it is worth exactly nothing to you the moment a buyer sees it. Same for what you paid and what you are up.
If you keep your prices on a phone or a tablet, assume the person across the table can read it, because sometimes they can. Any number below your floor should not be on the screen at all.
A floor is not a prediction
It will not always be right. Some cards you will keep that you should have sold, and you will watch the market drift down over the following six months. That is the cost of having a rule.
The alternative is having no rule, which does not mean you avoid the cost — it means you pay it in a different currency, one card at a time, on the days you happen to be tired.
Raw & Slabbed works a floor out for every card you own from exactly these inputs — what you paid, what it is worth, how long you have held it, and the population if you have it — then holds it steady while somebody talks at you, and hides every price below it.
I'm Justin — I sell cards on eBay as WTX Sports Cards and across a table at shows in West Texas. I built it for my own case first.
The demo is the whole app and needs no account. $19.99 a month or $199 once.