{
  "url": "https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/twelve-percent-of-the-tape",
  "slug": "twelve-percent-of-the-tape",
  "title": "Twelve Percent of the Sold Record Is Thrown Away, and the Worst of It Is Where the Cheap Slabs Live",
  "summary": "Behind every published graded price sits a pile of listings that were rejected as not-the-card. Across 183,466 kept comps there are 25,176 rejected, 12.07% of everything. On PSA 7 the rejection rate is 26.76%. And a Base Set Charizard PSA 10 is quoted from one verified sale that happened 308 days ago.",
  "section": "Data integrity",
  "published": "2026-09-04",
  "readMinutes": 8,
  "publisher": "moonstone",
  "findings": [
    {
      "value": "12.07%",
      "measures": "of all candidate comps rejected",
      "basis": "25,176 of 208,642"
    },
    {
      "value": "26.76%",
      "measures": "rejection rate at PSA 7",
      "basis": "against 9.50% at PSA 10"
    },
    {
      "value": "55.0%",
      "measures": "of grade rows flagged as thin comps",
      "basis": "7,146 of 13,000"
    },
    {
      "value": "22.7%",
      "measures": "of PSA 10 rows have not traded in 90 days",
      "basis": null
    }
  ],
  "tables": [],
  "charts": [],
  "sections": [
    "The prices built on almost nothing",
    "The cards where most of the record is discarded"
  ],
  "method": [
    "Population: 13,000 grade rows across 1,344 distinct graded keys and seven graders. Kept and rejected counts are the provider's own per row figures; a rejection is a discarded candidate listing, not an established fake sale. Rates are computed at row level as rejected divided by rejected plus kept, then summed, so a handful of very deep cards dominate the pooled figure. Mega Charizard X ex alone contributes 1,507 rejections, which is why the per card median rejection rate of 1.92% is reported alongside the pooled 12.16% for PSA. Staleness is measured from each row's last sale date against a fixed as of date of September 3, 2026. Per card figures are restricted to the 558 cards whose PSA 10 is built on at least ten comps. No regression is run. RECHECKED 2026-09-22: none of this can be replayed at its date. The per card graded payloads live in a short-lived cache whose oldest surviving row was written on September 8, and only 520 distinct cards survive in it today against the 1,344 read on September 3, so every card named above has expired out of the store except Base Set Charizard. What the smaller population does confirm is the shape: 3,747 grade rows over 520 cards return a 5.28% pooled rejection rate that still climbs from PSA 9 to PSA 7, and 58.7% of rows still carry the thin-comps flag. One correction has been applied: the population figure originally printed beside Base Set Charizard's PSA 10 came from a registry line that serves several products at once, and it has been removed rather than restated. Base Set Charizard's PSA 10 today reads one kept comp against fourteen rejected, on a last sale of March 3, 2026."
  ],
  "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."
}