PSA 9 is Dead. All Hail Gem Mint 10

Is the PSA 9 dead? I dove into the data across three eras (vintage, modern, ultra-modern) and four sports (baseball, basketball, football, soccer) to find out when PSA 9s hold value, and when they're just an expensive failure certificate.

The numbers are staggering: PSA created 31 million new 10s since 2020, compared to just 5 million total from 1991-2019. In 2025 alone, 6.5 million new PSA 10s entered the market. When gem rates hit 60-70%, the 9 becomes meaningless.

In this episode:

Why vintage PSA 9s command massive premiums over raw
Why modern PSA 9s (Luka, Ohtani, Mahomes, Messi) are collapsing to 2x multiples regardless of scarcity
Why Wembanyama has MORE PSA 10s than 9s and what that means for the hobby
The one number that determines if your PSA 9 has value
Actionable advice on when to grade, when to hold 9s, and when to crack and sell raw
The thesis: It's not about the sport. It's not about the player. It's not even about the era. It's about the gem rate. Know your gem rate, Know your market multiplier.

Keywords: PSA grading, PSA 9 vs PSA 10, sports card investing, gem rate, card grading strategy, vintage cards, modern cards, Wembanyama, Luka Doncic, Shohei Ohtani, Patrick Mahomes, Lionel Messi, soccer cards, basketball cards, baseball cards, football cards, alternative investments, collectibles market

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Transcript

0:13

Hello and welcome to Slabnomics. This is episode 37. Today we're going to do something that I've been alluding to for a while. I've mentioned it throughout previous episodes. We're gonna look at PSA 9 versus PSA 10. I'm going to look at three different eras in order to compare modern, ultra modern and vintage. And we're going to look across sports. So I'm gonna include some soccer, baseball, basketball. and football for you guys. By the time we get to the end of this Slabnomics episode 37, you're going to know a little bit more about why PSA nines are valued the way they are, why it's different now versus when it was before, and what kind of opportunities you can look out for so that you can profit on sports cards Before we get into the episode, also want to mention to you guys that Slabnomics.com is now a thing. Right now it is a newsletter. The first installment of that episode is going to be going out this coming Saturday morning. That is January 17th, 2026. The newsletter is going to be completely free. It's going to be called comped. So head over to slabnomics.com, put in your email address, go to your email and confirm that and you'll be added to that newsletter. So you get the very first edition. Second thing I want to mention before we plow into the episode, this is going to be very data heavy guys. So if you're on YouTube, I'm going to throw some stuff up for you. If you're listening on Spotify or Apple, Make sure you're also following me on Instagram so that you can see the data. I'm going to put it out there for you guys in a very digestible way. As the week goes, you're probably not going to get it Tuesday when this drops, but Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, you should be seeing some of that data roll in. We're gonna make it all nice and pretty for you guys. know how you like to see it. So that's gonna be important for you listeners for me. So with that being said, let's talk about the core thesis here. PSA-9s, are they dead? Or alternatively, are PSA 9 something that might become more valuable in the future and a good buy low opportunity for us? I dove into this data with a pretty open mind. I wanted to let the data speak to me what it wanted to say. And I want to make sure that I was defining it across different eras and across different sports because I think that's important. so as is consistent across all markets, what we're looking at is supply and demand in terms of the economics of that market. So one of the big reasons why PSA nines might never reclaim their status as actually being more valuable than raw is because we've had a grading explosion over the past five years. In 2025, 26.8 million cards were graded. Of that one company, PSA accounted for over 19 million of those cards. The gem rate that they gave us was 34 % across all. which means that 6.5 million new PSA 10s came into the world in 2025. Now let's talk about some historical context, because if that sounds like it's a lot, it is. From 1991 until 2019, PSA actually created only five million new PSA 10s. So 1.5 million less than just 2025 over 28 years time. Now of course, that's pre-COVID. from 2020 until 2025, the production of PSA 10s and the grading got boosted into overdrive. Annual PSA volume was about 15 million graded cards per year, So about 5 million new PSA 10s, give or take. add it all up and over the past six years, we added about 31 million PSA 10s versus the five million that had existed in all years previous. Honestly, I think that's being pretty generous with how many PSA 10s you are getting throughout the 90s and into the early 2000s. So I would say having six X more PSA tens through those six years versus the rest of it combined It's actually way too conservative of a number. It's probably easily 10 to 12 X. All things being equal, it's pretty clear we just have a lot more PSA 10s than we ever did before. A lot of that has to do with modernity printing to the moon, especially in sports that are more established like basketball, baseball and football. But the pop also speaks to the fact that the QC is much better than it used to be, And people just took less good care of them than they do now. People know to grade stuff. So this has led us into the junk slab era. Everything is getting graded, really only tens matter. Nines a lot of times are selling for less than raw. The fundamental question that I wanted to answer was how do we value a PSA 9 versus a PSA 10 so that we can see if there's opportunity to buy them for future gain. One of the hypotheses that I've come up with while combing through data as well as actually buying cards on my own is that the ratio from nine to 10 is actually going to be based off of the population of one to the other. So for instance, if there's only 10 PSA 10s, but there are 50 PSA nines, then you should get about 5x premium for that PSA 10 versus PSA 9. In some cases, this does hold. I wanted to see how universal this was and I'm going to let you guys know what I found. So let's start with vintage first. I compared across the three biggies, baseball, football, and basketball, and I wanted to use pop counts that were pretty similar as well as a tier of player that was also pretty similar. Baseball is an older market, So the population supply has had much more time to grow. Football supply is next in terms of rate of growth and then basketball was later. A lot of this is due to when the sets actually started up. Baseball of course started with 1951 tops if you want to go with tops itself And you had releases way before that, like 1948 Bowman. If you want to go into play sports, Goudy, all of that good stuff, but just looking at tops itself. 1951 for baseball, When football came next, 1956, Tops came out with their first football set. Basketball came much later with their 1969 set. And of course, again, we're just talking about Tops. So when it comes to printing and population, baseball is going to have higher population for older releases. Then it's going to be football. Then it's going to be basketball. They ramp up printing. They can't just start by printing it to the moon. So the cards that I decided to compare across these three sports were first for baseball, 1968 tops, card number 177, Mets rookie stars. the famous Jerry Kooseman rookie card and the guy named Nolan Ryan on there as well. For football, you have the 1976 tops, iconic card number 148, Walter Payton. and then for basketball, How about the sweet 1980 to 81 tops? Card number six. the absolutely legendary Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and Dr. J So when comparing these cards, I chose these because their populations of graded are actually as similar as I could get. But what I want to see was what does a nine to a 10 jump look like in value across these three sports and these three iconic cards? Do we have patterns? Are they consistent? And here's what I found. In baseball, the Nolan Ryan rookie card has one PSA 10 and it has 68 PSA nines. That PSA 10 last sold in 2020. It sold for $600,000, which I would say is an absolute steal. But PSA 9 sells anywhere from 70 to 115K, And that gives us a nine to 10 price ratio of between five to eight X. Now I'm going to also caveat this that there's only one PSA 10. It hasn't sold since 2020. I think if you were to sell it now, you might be able to get it for more like five to six million. Call me crazy. But I don't think the guy that has that is letting it go for anything less than that. And if it goes for six million, that would be 60 X 100,000. which would mean that our ratio from nine to 10 would be 60x and our pop ratio would be 68X, definitely in line with each other. Now, of course, this is a crazy circumstance. This is a lot of conjecture. This is a lot of map making numbers work. Let's look at the other sports and see if it bears out. The 1976 Walter Payton has a little bit more gems, so we have 56 of those for that 1976 card. On the PSA 9 pop we have 860 of them, which means about a 15x population ratio from nine to 10. PSA 9 sells for around $5k pretty consistently. and a PSA 10 goes for $85,000. That's 17 X in terms of what the PSA nine prices to get to your PSA 10 price in the face of the population being 15 X 15 X 17 X spitting distance. How about that bird magic card from 1980 and basketball? There are 24 PSA tens. There are 613 PSA nine. So what does it look like when we have so many more PSA nines? because we have a ratio of 25 to 1 on the 9 to 10 population. So the price for a nine anywhere from nine to $16,000, but that PSA 10 price is about 500K plus. So truthfully, this nine to 10 value ratio for this card is actually way higher than what the pop is. And I would say that's because you have three legendary Hall of Fame rookie cards in one card. This is one of the GOAT cards across all sets, all sports. So the nine to 10 premium gets a significant boost because I think it's recognized and has more demand factors that play into it than usual. So that's the deal with vintage guys. The gem rates are so, so small. That Nolan Ryan is less than 0.01 % gem rate. The Walter Payton 0.3 % gem rate. and the triple panel 0.15 % gem rate. This is true scarcity where the difference between 9 and 10 is really the only thing that sets values for supply and demand for the collectors of that set and for anyone collecting those sports or those players. and survival premium compounds. The older they are, the less the survival rates become, the less likely it is that there's going to be more gems, kind of like Bitcoin having, if you want to look at that way. So the older they get, the more that 10 is a true miracle. So all right, vintage makes sense. I'll bet I haven't lost too many of you there. What about modern? What does it look like trying to go from a nine to a 10 in modern? Now this is where we start to get parallels. So I did look at not just the base, but also the silver, because I think that's relevant and important to take a look at. I also opened it up to a fourth sport that is soccer. It plays nicely with our timelines and it gives you another data point in case you want to look at some stuff there. So we have four generational players across the sports that fall around the same time period. So the four are Luka for basketball, Ohtani for baseball, Mahomes for football, and Messi for soccer. So the specific cards that I looked at for those guys were the 2017 tops chrome for Messi both the base and the refractor, the 2017 prism silver for my homes on the refractor or silver side, as well as on the base side, the 2017 downrush optic. For Shohei, the 2018 tops Chrome Base as well as the Refractor. And then for Luca, the 2018 prism as well as the prism silver. For messy, this is a flagship ship. This is a flagship set, not as rookie set. If you come in and yell at me, why didn't I do 2004 mega cracks on this? You are missing the point of what I'm trying to do here. So, 9s to 10s, what does it look like for these generational players all coming at the same time for the modern sets? Let's start with the base cards for Luca. His PSA 10 was about $210. His PSA 9 about $84. That gives us a 2.5 X ratio, which a lot of people will say is the rule of thumb for a nine to a 10 these days. The gem ray is about 70%, which is something we're gonna get back to in a little while. So just remember that. The Otani tops Chrome base is about 825 for a PSA 10. And the PSA nine $417. That gives us a two X price ratio for nine to 10. Gem rate on that, is about 30 to 40%. Very interesting. On the Mahomes optic base, since as you might know, the Prism doesn't have a base, only a silver, since he was a rookie that year. It's gonna run you a cool thousand bucks to get that optic bass in a 10. Your PSA nine is gonna be 400 to 500 bucks. That gives us about a 2.3 X multiple. Gem rate's about 40 % on that. A messy Chrome base is somewhere around 240 bucks. It's been rising a lot guys. And the PSA nine, you can usually get for about a hundred to 120 bucks, about a two X ratio. So across those, have a consistent 2.5 multiple across those four different sports, And I think that's really important to call out the first year prism have been going for almost a decade. And same thing in football. Top Scrom and baseball has been going forever. But that messy top scrum, that's the first year that they ever put it out. it's like if you look at 2012 basketball or 2012 football, but it's showing the same metrics from nine to 10 as these almost 10th year of the other sports. It's out of whack. And I'm going to tell you why that is, at least why I think it is. It's because the demand for soccer cards is still so low. All of these are functions of supply and demand. Soccer has amazingly low populations, especially in these early years, but the demand has not yet come in. Now remember those were base. Let's look at the silvers right quick. Make sure we're not crazy, which I'm a little bit crazy. So for our Luca silver PSA 10 is going to run you about 1300, maybe 1400 the PSA nine about 550 bucks. That gives us a 2.5 X. And that gem rate is about 60%. So about the same as that base that was 70 % for Luca, The Otani pitching refractor card number 150 is going to be about 2200 for a PSA 10 and it's going to be just over a thousand for a PSA nine. There's actually more PSA tens than there are nine, about 1800 versus 741 for PSA nines. So that two X multiple is interesting, isn't it? We saw two and a half X for Luca. at a 70 % gem rate. And now for this 69 % gem rate for Shohei, we're seeing 2X. One more data point we will get back there. I promise my home's prism silver big boy card. It's about 4,000 4,300. If you want to PSA 10. PSA 9 is about a thousand. You're going to get a 3.5 to a 3.9 X ratio on that. So higher than the base and the silver that we've been talking about for the modern era. But that's because the gem rate is 18%, incredibly low for modern era standards. So that 4x multiple is almost acting a little bit more like the vintage multiples where it's 5x in terms of the nine to the 10 population. And so the multiple is boosted from that two to 2.5 X that we usually see for modern and reflects that scarcity that we see That's why it's around four X For your rarity scarcity multiplier to get that Mahomes silver 10. But then back to the 2017 messy refractor for Topps Chrome, it's going to exhibit a lot of the other signs that we've seen for the Luca, for the Otani. You're going to see about a 2x multiple on that currently. I think that goes back into demand again, but it's about 650, 700 bucks to get that messy refractor in a 10, and you can usually get a nine for about 300. Give or take. So what does it mean in modernity to get a PSA 10 instead of a PSA 9? When we're grading millions and millions of these cards a 10 becomes normal and a nine just becomes a failure. In many cards, it's almost advisable to crack your nine and sell it raw. How crazy is that? in reality, what modern has become is that you're buying the label, the label of the 10. And anything below that is simply a failure. because until there's enough people. that want to buy a thousand nines at the same time, you're just not going to see those nines ever come back. So vintage, modern, let's talk about ultra modern. Do you think the pattern is gonna continue? Before I get into ultra modern, remember slabnomics.com. You can sign up for a free newsletter. Just put your email in. You're going to be getting this stuff delivered, hand fed to you through your email. Back to ultra modern. Now the card comparisons get a little bit dicey here because we get into the 2020 to 2025 era. We can't go too far into 2024 2025 because those players markets haven't really settled in yet. And then in 2020 we have a lot of disparity between the level of players. This is post show. Hey, Otani, it's kind of hard to find the next guy for baseball. but I chose Fernando Tatis Jr. because he was a peak hype prospect, a generational guy. And then in football, we went with Joey B, my guy, Joe Burrow. Basketball, we have the phenom Victor Webinyama and then soccer, the kid, Lamine Yamal. And this is where we PSA 9's get clobbered. In modern, it was already pretty bad, but you could still sell a Luca base for a hundred bucks. if you got lucky. Here, if you want to sell a Tati base in a nine, might get about 10 bucks. Burrow, of course he's popular. must be a lot better for Burrow. Maybe 25 bucks. Maybe get your grading feedback. Wemba Nama because they printed that to the moon, maybe 40 bucks. And Lamine Yamal printed those a lot to about 35 bucks. And your PSA tens aren't really going to be, aren't really going to have you rolling in it either. Tati's since he's fallen from grace is 25 bucks or so. Burrow 90, a hundred bucks on that base 10 women. Yama, you can get Wemby for about 135 and Yamal is about 150. So we've seen base really get clobbered more than anything else. The low end got overprinted so much as these sets continue to grow. that PSA 10s went down in value and PSA 9s became almost non-existent in terms of being able to make money off of your grading fees. But the wild thing is, because the gem rate is 55 to 60 % on all of these cards, and you're dealing with such low numbers, the ratio from nine to 10 is actually higher than it is in modern. We were seeing two to 2.5 on the modern side for bass, but on ultra modern. We're seeing more like 2.5 up to 4x on these. Of course, that might just be because some of them are a little bit newer. But honestly, when Benyama and Yamal being 3.5 and 4x on the ratio from nine to 10, it's pretty in line with burrow at 3.5. Crazy thing about Wemby is This population of tens is actually more than double the nines. So if anything, his base showing us a 2.5 X is what lets us know that this is about buying the label, buying the success of a PSA 10, not any kind of supply and demand So to boil down the findings from those things, vintage is going to operate according to a loose comparison between nines to tens in terms of the premium you pay going from a nine to a ten. Now, another caveat on that. This is for the legends, the icons, the cards everyone knows The lower tier player you get, the less that premium is going to track that nine to 10 ratio. So in summation, vintage tracks well. When it's just a pure scarcity play, the nine to 10 ratio is going to track very well with the price. As we get into moderns where millions and millions of cards continue to be graded and millions and millions of cards were printed. The scarcity dynamics just aren't there. not at the base in the silver tiers, but in the rare tiers? Maybe they will be. Maybe within the gold sets, that's where we're going to see the modern actually turn into vintage over time. But what I can tell you is if your gem rate 60 to 70 % on a card, it's really not going to have the kind of scarcity multiple that you're going to want to have to view it as an investment long term. Remember, PSA's graded 110 million cards over the last six years, and they've created over 31 million gems. So actionable advice, if you're pre grading a card, which you should always do, and you're taking a look at it and you see any scratches, any corner where any edge where and it's a modern or ultra modern card, that's a silver or any non rare parallel, it should not be graded. If you're looking at nines and trying to see if they're a long-term play. They're never going to be one if there's a lot of tens. The only way nines are ever really going to be a play for modern or ultra modern cards is if you have almost no tens, which is usually going to mean you're going to need to have a rare parallel. You're going to need to be in your oranges, your golds, maybe at least a blue or a red in order to have some kind of scarcity factor to make nines actually worth grading, worth having, worth holding. And the true crux of this episode, guys, is that the rarity multiple matters, but it doesn't matter when it's not rare anymore at all. So are nines dead? in the millions and millions of cards that have been printed over the past eight, nine years. Yeah, pretty much. However, with that knowledge that you now have, you can understand which cards are different and understanding which cards are different when other people don't means you're creating opportunities to find value that people don't see. If a card has a really low gem rate, that means that nines actually do become very valuable. But a lot of people will look at a nine and not know what the pop is and not know what the gem rate is. and they'll just slough off nines because nines aren't worth anything. But nines are only not worth something when population is out of whack. So be on the lookout for rare nines of players that matter. Rare nines and sets that matter. Because the more knowledge that comes to the market, the more the market will correct itself. That's what happens. Markets get out of whack for a while, but education comes, people start talking to each other, and it corrects itself. That's the way it's always been. That's the way it will always be. So what we found is it's not about the sport. It's not about the player. It's really not even about the era if you look at it like that. It's about the gem rate. It's about the supply and the demand. When you have a 70 % gem rate, anything that's not that 70 % is an absolute failure. So know your gem rate, know your market, know when to walk away and know when to run and get that nine. Thanks for following along on this episode. know it was number heavy. Make sure to follow me at Slabnomics on Instagram. Give a like to this video. If you're on YouTube, leave me a comment. I always respond to the comments and go to Slabnomics.com. Put your email You're going to get a free newsletter into your inbox every Saturday morning with all of the really nerdy stuff for you guys. So thanks for being with me here. Keep building and I will talk to you later.