October 14, 2026, Groudon 199, one nine, $96.14 to me.
That figure is not the price of a PSA 9 Groudon 199. It is what one would put in my hand after a marketplace took its cut, and it is a number our own PSA 9 board never reaches for. Cracking a PSA 9 Groudon 199 loses money whether you already own the slab or buy one to crack it, and the gap between those two answers runs to four points of gem rate. The answer in this column is usually hold, and this week it is hold twice, for two different readers, on two different margins.
The attempt costs $59.99 and the queue runs about five months
PSA's pricing page, read this morning, puts Standard at $59.99 against a $1,000 insured value, on an estimate of 90 to 100 business days. Priority costs $79.99 and covers $1,500 on 70 to 80 business days, Express costs $199.00 and covers $2,500 on 20 to 30, and value services are still paused. Nothing on that table has moved since I last read it on October 7, which makes four quiet weeks after two reads that both changed it. That is the longest calm stretch I have recorded since I started reading the page every week. A ten of this card carries $521.80 today, inside the Standard cap.
That is worth more than it sounds, because the board prices every row it carries at the $79.99 tier rather than at the one each card's own ceiling allows. I wrote the long version of that constraint two weeks ago, on a Seismitoad whose ten forced it all the way into Express. On that card the rule pushed the fee up and killed the trade outright. Here the same rule runs the other way and hands $20 back, so everything below uses the $59.99 Standard fee rather than the $79.99 one. The tier rule has had a whole week to itself, and this one belongs to a different mistake.
A ten nets $453.97 and a miss nets $96.14
Sell a ten and the marketplace takes about 13% between its cut and the cost of posting a slab, which is the assumption our board runs on. A ten at $521.80 therefore leaves $453.97 in your hand, and a returned nine at $110.50 leaves $96.14. The whole distance between those two outcomes is $357.83, and that single figure quietly decides everything that follows. Divide it by a hundred and one point of gem rate on this row is worth $3.58.
The question stops being about Groudon at that point and starts being about how many of those $3.58 pieces the fee eats. At $59.99 the fee eats 16.76 of them, so 16.76% of resubmissions have to come back a ten before the attempt has paid for itself, and whatever sits above that line is the only profit this trade will ever make. That is the line to beat if you already hold the slab. It is not the line our board publishes, and the distance between the two is the whole of this week's post.
The board prices a buyer and you are probably a holder
Our board's breakeven takes the nine at its asking price, adds a fee, and asks what share of tens repays the pair. Written out, it divides the fee plus 13% of the nine by the net gap. The row checks: 13% of $110.50 plus $79.99, over $357.83, comes to 26.37%, which the board rounds to the 26% on the tile, so the model behind that published figure is identified rather than guessed at. That extra term in the numerator is the marketplace cut on the nine, and it belongs in the sum only if you are going out with cash to buy a slab you already intend to break open.
That leaves two different lines on one card in the same week. A buyer needs 20.78% to clear at the Standard fee, because they are out $110.50 of cash on top of the $59.99. A holder needs 16.76%, because what they are really spending is the $96.14 sale they are declining plus that same $59.99. The $14.37 between those two cost bases is worth almost exactly four points of gem rate, and four points is an enormous amount on a card where the entire argument lives inside a span of five.
I have been quoting our board's figure across seven weeks of this column without once asking who it was written for, which is exactly the kind of thing a public scorecard exists to catch. It was written for somebody out shopping for slabs to break. Most people reading this one already own the card they are asking about. The arithmetic that fits them is shorter, being the fee divided by what a single point of gem rate is worth.
The trailing rate read 16% on Sunday and 21% a month back
GemRate's published trailing figure for this card is 16%, measured over a window that closed on October 12 across 295 new grades. The stored copy I screen with says 21%, on a window that closed back on September 16, and I nearly took it at face value because the file holding it was written last week. Lifetime across every copy ever submitted is 33.1% off 17,864 grades, so both recent months run some way under the card's own history. That is the usual shape once a card is two years old and the cleanest copies have gone in. One stale month was worth $17.89 a card on this row.
I ran the count myself rather than take a published rate on trust. The stored census holds 17,864 grades carrying 5,918 tens, and this morning's live read holds 18,124 carrying 5,959, so 260 new grades returned 41 tens between the two dates. That works out at 15.77%, which arrives at GemRate's own 16 from a different direction on different days. Both readings sit under the holder's line of 16.76 and a long way under the buyer's 20.78.
Price the two outcomes at 16% and the average payout comes to $153.39 a card. A holder spent $156.13 of declined sale and fee to reach it and loses $2.74, while a buyer who bought the slab first spent $170.49 and loses $17.10. Two hundred and ninety five grades is a real sample rather than a handful, and it puts a 95% interval of roughly 11.8% to 20.2% around that 16. That runs a holder from a $17.69 loss to a $12.22 gain, and it leaves a buyer short across the whole of it. The band is wide, and it is the honest reason I will not call this one harder than hold.
The exit has fallen 18% since late August
PriceCharting's completed sales for this card, read this morning, hold 30 PSA 10 results running from August 27 to October 12. The ten oldest of those carry a median of $625.75 and the ten newest carry a median of $511.00, a fall of $114.75 inside about six weeks. Both windows hold ten sales, so the comparison is not one outlier set against a crowd. The headline $521.80 therefore sits above what the card is fetching. I raised this same worry about a Glaceon whose gap was shrinking faster than its trade paid, and it has not stopped being the right worry.
Run the whole thing again at that realised $511.00 and a holder's line moves up to 17.22% while the loss widens to $4.24 a card. The queue is what makes a falling exit matter rather than merely annoy. Ninety to a hundred business days is about five months of owning something you have chosen not to sell, while the price you are waiting on has gone down over the last six weeks. I will not put a figure on where it lands in March, because I would be inventing one.
The two things that argue the other way
Two things about this card are genuinely kinder than usual and they deserve saying out loud. A returned eight sells for $99.00 against $110.50 for a nine, so each eight instead of a nine costs about $10.01 once the marketplace has taken its share. Last week's gold Mega Dragonite lost $17.40 on exactly that swap, and that is what killed it. The eight band here is 10.91% of every grade rather than better than a quarter of them. So the branch our board refuses to price is not the thing breaking this one, which is worth saying plainly after a week spent arguing that it was.
The second kindness is that the floor under a miss sits high. A returned nine hands back $96.14 of the $156.13 commitment, so a miss leaves a holder down about $60 rather than down the card, and sixty dollars is a very different animal from several hundred. That is a far better shape than a row where nearly all of the value sits in the ten alone, and the gentle downside is the only reason this card came up my screen in the first place. It is also not enough, because a trade that loses on average does not turn into a good one by losing politely.
One real cost appears in none of the figures printed above. Postage to PSA, insurance on the way there, and PSA's own return shipping are all real money. PSA publishes no table I can read for the last of those, so I have left all three out rather than invent a number. Every figure in this piece is therefore a little generous to cracking.
For what it is worth, a raw copy trades at $104.42 on TCGplayer this morning against $110.50 for the nine. That $6.08 of slab premium buys you out of the 13.94% of raw submissions that come back an eight or worse. None of this predicts where the card goes next and none of it is financial advice. Leave the nine alone and read the rate again in December.