{
  "url": "https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/the-frozen-tape",
  "slug": "the-frozen-tape",
  "title": "The Frozen Tape: 38% of Card Prices Are Last Week's Price",
  "summary": "As of September 2, 2026 we held 756,262 price observations across 7,014 cards. Compare each card's price to the same card's price exactly seven days earlier, inside the era where the feed runs daily, and 37.5% of the time the number has not changed by a cent. At one day apart it is 72.0%. The median card in the sample spent a 28-day stretch of the last year completely still. A price that does not move is not a stable price. It is a price with nothing behind it.",
  "section": "Data forensics",
  "published": "2026-09-03",
  "readMinutes": 8,
  "publisher": "moonstone",
  "findings": [
    {
      "value": "37.5%",
      "measures": "of week-apart observations are identical",
      "basis": "126,769 of 337,605 pairs, daily era, June 8 to August 31, 2026"
    },
    {
      "value": "72.0%",
      "measures": "of day-apart observations are identical",
      "basis": "268,436 of 372,831 pairs, same cards, same era"
    },
    {
      "value": "28 days",
      "measures": "median card's longest fully frozen stretch",
      "basis": "in the twelve months to August 2026"
    },
    {
      "value": "16.6%",
      "measures": "of cards had a 90-day stretch with no change at all",
      "basis": "1,165 of 7,014"
    }
  ],
  "tables": [
    {
      "title": "Share of observations identical to the earlier reading, by the card's current price (daily era only)",
      "columns": [
        "Price band",
        "Cards in the sample",
        "Day-apart pairs",
        "Identical, 1 day",
        "Week-apart pairs",
        "Identical, 7 days"
      ],
      "rows": [
        {
          "Price band": "Under $0.25",
          "Cards in the sample": "1,265",
          "Day-apart pairs": "69,937",
          "Identical, 1 day": "75.4%",
          "Week-apart pairs": "63,291",
          "Identical, 7 days": "42.4%"
        },
        {
          "Price band": "$0.25 to $1",
          "Cards in the sample": "2,286",
          "Day-apart pairs": "120,950",
          "Identical, 1 day": "76.4%",
          "Week-apart pairs": "109,281",
          "Identical, 7 days": "43.7%"
        },
        {
          "Price band": "$1 to $5",
          "Cards in the sample": "1,767",
          "Day-apart pairs": "87,887",
          "Identical, 1 day": "67.4%",
          "Week-apart pairs": "79,207",
          "Identical, 7 days": "37.8%"
        },
        {
          "Price band": "$5 to $20",
          "Cards in the sample": "994",
          "Day-apart pairs": "55,175",
          "Identical, 1 day": "64.3%",
          "Week-apart pairs": "50,344",
          "Identical, 7 days": "24.7%"
        },
        {
          "Price band": "$20 to $100",
          "Cards in the sample": "521",
          "Day-apart pairs": "29,295",
          "Identical, 1 day": "72.1%",
          "Week-apart pairs": "26,754",
          "Identical, 7 days": "27.0%"
        },
        {
          "Price band": "Over $100",
          "Cards in the sample": "181",
          "Day-apart pairs": "9,587",
          "Identical, 1 day": "77.3%",
          "Week-apart pairs": "8,728",
          "Identical, 7 days": "29.5%"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "charts": [],
  "sections": [
    "One era, or the comparison means nothing",
    "Which prices freeze",
    "The stretches, not the ticks",
    "The cross-check, and what it is not",
    "What to do with a stale number"
  ],
  "method": [
    "Primary source: 7,039 cached per-card price histories read from moonstone production on September 2, 2026, of which 7,014 carried at least eight usable observations, holding 756,262 observations and 749,248 consecutive pairs in total; an earlier version of this piece described the 749,248 pairs as observations. Series start dates range from September 2024 to August 2026 and end dates from September 2025 to August 2026. The feed changed cadence in June 2026, from weekly to daily, and this matters more than any other methodological choice here: pairs exactly one day apart exist only from June 8, 2026 onward, and pairs exactly seven days apart are overwhelmingly pre-June. All headline repeat rates are therefore computed on the DAILY era only, from June 8 to August 31, 2026, where the same 6,684 cards supply both spacings: 372,831 pairs one day apart, 337,605 pairs seven days apart, both built by looking up each observation's counterpart at an exact date offset rather than by walking adjacent points. The pre-June weekly era gives 42.2% identical at seven days on 363,745 pairs and is reported separately rather than averaged in. Identical means equal to the cent. Frozen-stretch lengths are measured within the window from September 1, 2025 onward and are reported in days between the first and last observation of an unchanged run, so a run bounded by weekly observations is measured at weekly resolution and its true length may be slightly longer. The three-day cross-check uses our own daily price-history table at day buckets 20695 and 20698 (August 30 and September 2, 2026), 51,764 cards priced on both days; that table's earliest bucket is August 30, not August 29 as an earlier version stated, and its four buckets contain three distinct snapshots. Both sources read the same upstream market-price field and are therefore one instrument at two cadences, not two independent instruments; that is stated in the body rather than only here. In the price-band table the Cards column is the full 7,014-card sample and the pair columns are the 6,684 cards supplying both spacings, so the two halves of each row count slightly different populations. The Shining Tyranitar quote in the hero row, $4,249.99, is the recorded market price on September 2, 2026, and it was the card's 1st Edition Holofoil leg under the dearest-printing rule this site retired in September 2026; the canonical Unlimited Holofoil price is $662.25, and the card page now shows that. The cached history read for this piece has since grown from 7,039 series to more than 26,000, mostly daily ones, so the repeat rates recompute close (72.0% to 73.7% at one day, 42.2% to 42.3% in the weekly era, 37.5% to 40.9% at seven days) while the frozen-stretch figures, which are measured at the resolution of whatever observations a series happens to carry, do not: on that larger and denser sample the median longest stretch reads 12 days rather than 28. The stretch figures are true of the September 2, 2026 sample and are not reproducible on today's coverage. This piece measures quote staleness, which is a property of the price feed, and is not a measurement of trading volume."
  ],
  "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."
}