TOP SHOT COACHING MOMENT: RARE LEBRON JAMES FOR $150 (97% BELOW LOWEST ASK)
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
NBA Top Shot is all about numbers: serial numbers, number of moments, sales price, etc. While you don’t need to be a professional stock investor or mathematician, understanding relationships of these numbers are critically important to successfully investing in Top Shot or collecting without being ripped off. This leads me to reiterate Abe Lincoln’s quote above and today’s Coaching Moment lesson: always prepare and do your homework before buying or selling on the Marketplace. This sounds obvious enough, but let’s admit, we don’t always do our due diligence - whether its lack of time or laziness or feeling overwhelmed from the sheer amount of data...and this could cost you BIG.
Image: Moment Ranks
This lesson is best served with an example - on April 23, 2021, a Rare Lebron James Series 1 Dunk Serial #294 went for $150 when the lowest ask at the time was $5,995. That is a whopping 97% below lowest asking price for a decent Serial Number given the total number of minted moments was 750. Needless to say, the moment was swooped up by an opportunist buyer who quickly acted and got a steal.
Image: NBA Top Shot
You do not need to pour hours and hours into figuring out what the precise price of your moment is, though, I’m sure there quant-heavy types out there that do (including me), but at minimum there are some basic metrics you should absolutely know before selling a moment (buying is slightly different and will be covered in another article).
Moment’s Lowest Asking Price: this is easy to find because it is posted in every moment right in front of you - do not ignore this. While not a perfect number to anchor to every time, it’s an indicator for what you could easily liquidate your moment for regardless of serial number. Does it mean you should price at the lowest ask or below? Certainly, not but Top Shot is all about context in which you are operating and lowest ask provides one piece of that.
Price of at least 2 similarly numbered serial numbers that are recent, meaning last couple of days if available. Let me be more specific regarding “similarly number serials” - ideal is plus or minus 20 from your serial at lower circulation counts or plus or minus 100 with high circulation counts. This helps provide further context as to what other sellers are pegging as market value for the moment, and the more you consider the more informed your decision to list can be. However, this too, is not always a perfect measurement of the moment’s true value but we’ll save that discussion for another day.
This should literally take less than 1 minute to accomplish. If you have another 1 minute to spare, and I’m hoping you should given you are spending your hard-earned money, it would be wise to look up your moment’s serial estimated value at Moment Ranks MomentHQ. This is a proprietary tool backed by an algorithm that Moment Ranks developed to determine a fair market value for your serial. Caveat - this is not the end-all-be-all tool, meaning you can’t just assume the estimated value is what will get if you listed, it should serve as another point of data. In fact, Moment Ranks is upfront and reiterates this exact point.
There you have it, the absolutely bare minimum metrics to consider before selling. I believe that you should do much more research than the aforementioned and the above is only scratching the surface of the diligence I do before selling, which I will cover in another article. Taking the time to prepare before executing by simply researching for 1-2 minutes could literally be the difference between leaving tens, hundreds, and in the case of the LBJ moment above, thousands of dollars.
