Four eras of graded sports cards: 12 fixed cards per era, each tracked at one exact PSA grade and priced from its recent sold prices, in US dollars. How it works →
How the Sports Card Era Indexes work
The four eras
- Vintage 1979 and earlier
- Mantle, Mays, Clemente, Wilt, Ryan, the 1979-80 O-Pee-Chee Gretzky.
- '80s & Junk Wax 1980–1993
- From Bird/Magic and Rickey Henderson through the mass-production years to the 1993 SP Jeter.
- Modern 1994–2019
- The chrome, Prizm and Young Guns era: Kobe, LeBron, Brady, Trout, Ohtani.
- Ultra-Modern 2020 onward
- Today's rookies: Wembanyama, Caitlin Clark, Bedard, Skenes, Daniels.
How it's calculated
Each index holds 12 fixed cards, each at one exact PSA grade, across baseball, basketball, football and hockey. A card's price is the median of its sold prices over the last 30 days; if it sold fewer than 3 times in 30 days, it's the median of its last 5 sales. Only true copies count: the exact card and grade, no half grades or qualifiers, no autographs, other graders, lots, reprints or parallels, and no accepted best offers (the final price isn't shown). Sales under half or over twice the card's recent median are dropped. The index is equal-weighted: 1,000 × the average of each card's price divided by its base price, so a five-figure grail and a $30 rookie count the same. Base 1,000 = Oct 22, 2026, with the base prices frozen.
Updated weekly, every Thursday. History starts at launch: nothing is backfilled, so the 7-day change appears with the second weekly reading. A card is only swapped (for example to a grade that trades more often) by hand, and the swap is chained in so the index doesn't jump. Full method →
Prices: recent sold prices (USD), PSA-graded at the exact grade shown. Card pictures are scans of the card design, shown to identify each card, not the graded copies that were sold.
