{
  "url": "https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-basement-of-the-registry",
  "slug": "the-basement-of-the-registry",
  "title": "The Basement of the Registry: at PSA 7, the Slab Stops Being Worth More Than the Card",
  "summary": "A PSA 10 trades at 10.89x the raw price. A PSA 9 at 2.50x. A PSA 8 at 1.35x. At PSA 7 the median lands on 0.96x, and 52.8% of the cards we can measure are worth less in the slab than out of it. Nearly a quarter of the 1.58 million PSA slabs we hold population for sit below a 9.",
  "section": "Grading economics",
  "published": "2026-09-04",
  "readMinutes": 10,
  "publisher": "moonstone",
  "findings": [
    {
      "value": "10.89x",
      "measures": "median PSA 10 against the raw price",
      "basis": "209 cards, 21,562 verified comps"
    },
    {
      "value": "0.96x",
      "measures": "median PSA 7 against the raw price",
      "basis": "the crossover"
    },
    {
      "value": "52.8%",
      "measures": "of PSA 7 cards worth less than raw",
      "basis": null
    },
    {
      "value": "23.25%",
      "measures": "of 1,578,048 PSA slabs sit below a 9",
      "basis": null
    }
  ],
  "tables": [
    {
      "title": "The ladder, measured against the raw price of the same card",
      "columns": [
        "PSA grade",
        "Cards",
        "Verified comps",
        "Median grade / raw",
        "Share worth less than raw"
      ],
      "rows": [
        {
          "PSA grade": "10",
          "Cards": "209",
          "Verified comps": "21,562",
          "Median grade / raw": "10.89x",
          "Share worth less than raw": "0%"
        },
        {
          "PSA grade": "9",
          "Cards": "242",
          "Verified comps": "17,026",
          "Median grade / raw": "2.50x",
          "Share worth less than raw": "13.6%"
        },
        {
          "PSA grade": "8",
          "Cards": "195",
          "Verified comps": "4,309",
          "Median grade / raw": "1.35x",
          "Share worth less than raw": "34.9%"
        },
        {
          "PSA grade": "7",
          "Cards": "89",
          "Verified comps": "1,162",
          "Median grade / raw": "0.96x",
          "Share worth less than raw": "52.8%"
        },
        {
          "PSA grade": "6",
          "Cards": "56",
          "Verified comps": "773",
          "Median grade / raw": "0.80x",
          "Share worth less than raw": "80.4%"
        },
        {
          "PSA grade": "5",
          "Cards": "37",
          "Verified comps": "421",
          "Median grade / raw": "0.62x",
          "Share worth less than raw": "83.8%"
        },
        {
          "PSA grade": "4",
          "Cards": "19",
          "Verified comps": "161",
          "Median grade / raw": "0.52x",
          "Share worth less than raw": "84.2%"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "charts": [],
  "sections": [
    "The step that costs everything, and the three that cost almost nothing",
    "Where those slabs actually are",
    "Where the ratio inverts"
  ],
  "method": [
    "Population: graded ladders exploded from our stored graded payloads, 13,000 grade rows across 1,344 distinct keys and seven graders, resolved to catalog ids with printing-resolved keys preferred and the canonical printing chosen by the same penalty rule the card pages use. 683 English cards carry a usable PSA ladder and 337 also carry a live raw price. Grade prices are provider verified sold medians with their comp counts stated; raw prices resolve through the shared canonical printing rule, not the dump's dearest printing field. Rows with fewer than three verified comps are excluded from every ratio. The unfiltered per grade samples are different sets of cards, with median raw price rising from $14.73 in the PSA 10 sample to $208.70 in the PSA 1 sample, so the headline pattern is confirmed on a 57 card balanced panel carrying all four of grades 10, 9, 8 and 7. No regression is run anywhere in this piece: grade medians and raw prices come from independent sources and are never algebraically linked. Condition multipliers are measured from 901 product printings carrying per condition prices. Population figures are registry counts as reported, on 220 cards; PSA reports many vintage cards against one registry line shared by several printings, so per grade absolutes on those cards describe the line, not a single product. Correction, 2026-09-22, from an independent recomputation against production: the balanced panel's shares of the PSA 10 were first printed as 1.00, 0.19, 0.14 and 0.11, which is the list shifted by a row; on the panel's own medians they are 1.00, 0.25, 0.19 and 0.14, and the step costs quoted beside them (75%, 26%, 25%) were already computed correctly. The Base Set Charizard card note also claimed the PSA 7 was its most common grade, which the same paragraph's own counts contradict: the PSA 6 is, at 18,615. The graded payloads behind the ladder are refreshed in place and carry no history, so the seven grade rows, the 57 card panel medians and the era population splits are as of September 4, 2026 and cannot be recomputed at that date; a rebuild on today's payloads returns the same shape, with the PSA 7 median landing on 1.00x raw and 50.4% of that grade's cards worth less encased than loose."
  ],
  "terms": "Figures are moonstone's own recorded measurements, dated as published. Quote them with the population stated beside them. The article at `url` is the human form of this file."
}