🌟 The Hobby This Week: PSA Acquisition, Star Jordans, and Vintage Insight

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The collectibles world is buzzing after PSA’s parent company, Collectors, completed its acquisition of Beckett, giving it ownership of three of the four major card grading brands and leaving only CGC standing independently. This move has huge implications for competition, pricing power, and choice in the hobby.

Read our full breakdown — including what this means for collectors, grading fees, and the future of meaningful alternatives — right here:

👉 PSA Extends Its Monopoly With Beckett Acquisition, But Does It Matter?
🔗 https://allvintagecards.com/psa-extends-its-monopoly-with-beckett-acquisition-but-does-it-matter/

In the piece, we explore:

How PSA’s position has strengthened with each major acquisition
Why true competition is hard to sustain in grading
What collectors might consider doing if submitting options shrink further

One Card I’d Rather Own Than Cash Right Now

1939 Goudey Premiums – Ted Williams

It’s not cheap, but prices for the Ted Williams Goudey Premium have been surprisingly rational given the importance of the set and the enduring demand for cards of the Splendid Splinter. The Williams photo is simply a thing of beauty — dark sepia tones, the familiar batting stance, and his unmistakable penmanship all come together on one of the most visually striking issues of the era. These premiums are inherently fragile and difficult to find in strong condition. PSA has graded just 28 copies of the Williams example, making supply meaningfully tighter than many collectors realize. A recent PSA 3 sold for over $18,000 at auction in October. If you can find a lower-grade copy priced under $10K, I would strongly consider it.

Search eBay For Any Copies of Ted Williams Goudey Premiums

A Sale That Caught My Eye This Week

This 1984-85 Star Court Kings 5×7 Jordan sold for $18,500 at auction this week. This has long been one of my favorite cards and, in my opinion, one of the more underrated Star Jordan cards. Trends for this grade (BGS 8.5) had been hovering around $7K since the beginning of 2025. However, prices have been trending much higher, with one sale of a similar grade topping $20K back in October. I think the trends will continue higher here, and I’d recommend seeking this card out if possible.

1984 Star Michael Jordan Court Kings 5x7 #26 BGS 8.5

A Reader Question On A Trimmed Card

I get a lot of reader questions about trimmed cards, and this one recently came my way – a T206 Sherry Magie error card.

The reader’s specific concern was whether the top edge of the card appeared to be trimmed.

The first thing to establish is an important limitation: it’s extremely difficult to determine trimming from photos alone. Grading companies rely on close inspection of edges, fiber breaks, and cutting patterns — things that simply can’t be confirmed from an image.

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But what can we gather from this photo on its own?

The card in question is slabbed as ‘Authentic’ by SGC. I checked SGC’s website to look up the certificate number and found that the card was graded in 2015, which must be an error, as SGC moved to these black labels in 2018. Maybe a new holder? Possibly.

It’s also worth noting that prior to roughly 2021, SGC’s Authentic designation functioned as an umbrella grade.

An “A” label indicated something was off, but it did not specify why. In more recent years, SGC has added explicit notations (e.g., “Trimmed,” “Altered,” “Restored”) when assigning an Authentic grade. That was not always the case.

Because of that historical context, it is entirely possible — and frankly common — for a card graded Authentic before those notations existed to have been trimmed or altered, even if the label does not say so.

How To Spot A Trimmed Card

But based on the card, an educated guess is that it was trimmed. In fact, the reader asked about the top of the card, but I think the left side was cut, as the border (despite the grainy image) looks slightly uneven to me. The card may have a slight diamond cut (from the factory), which could explain the uneven top and bottom borders.

In any case, the safest thing to assume with any card graded as ‘Authentic’ before any grading notations were included is that yes, the card was indeed trimmed or altered in some way.

As one longtime collector succinctly put it on the Net54 forums:

A is used as an umbrella grade. It can be on a card that was altered, is in poor condition, is just Authentic (as some card issues were), or some collectors prefer a card slabbed and an A used instead of a numerical.