UltraBall Research

How the research figures are built

Every research page rests on two stores UltraBall runs itself: a ledger of verified eBay US sales of English Pokémon cards, and a store of live eBay listings matched to an exact card. This page defines each figure, says what is left out, and says how it should be read. The card prices themselves are explained on how UltraBall prices cards.

The data behind every figure

Sold ledger. Completed eBay US listings of English Pokémon cards, taken daily, each judged by UltraBall’s exact-card matcher against the catalogue card, printing (1st Edition, Shadowless, Unlimited, reverse holo and so on), grade and language. Only sales the matcher verified are used; sales held for review or rejected never count. Every sale carries the format eBay reported (auction, fixed price, fixed price with an offer taken, best offer accepted) and the UltraBall price of that exact copy on the day of sale. The ledger is complete from 1 June 2026; before that it holds the sales that priced each card rather than every sale.

Live listing store. Current eBay listings matched the same way, with the first and last time each was seen. Refresh is on a schedule by card: watched copies hourly, the busiest cards every few hours, every card above the price gate at least daily. eBay US is read throughout; eBay UK is fetched on demand. Coverage is therefore “the cards UltraBall tracks”, which is every English card in the catalogue with a price, not all of eBay.

Card prices. UltraBall’s price for a card, condition and grade, rebuilt nightly from the ledger as described on the pricing methodology page. Figures that use a price (the indexes, the grading premium, the “against UltraBall’s price” ratios) read the price in force at the time.

Record sales file. The largest sales UltraBall has recorded, from eBay and from auction houses (Fanatics Collect, Goldin) whose results are public. Every entry names its marketplace and date.

Not used. Nothing on a research page comes from an individual member’s collection, watchlist, scans or searches. UltraBall’s AI grade estimates are not used in any research figure.

UltraBall Market Index

Ten daily indexes, base 100 on 1 August 2026. The UltraBall 100 holds the 100 cards with most verified sales over the trailing 90 days, each as its ungraded Near Mint price and its PSA 10 price; sister indexes hold the vintage, modern, PSA 10 and ungraded cuts, plus Charizard, Pikachu, the Eeveelutions, Sword & Shield and Scarlet & Violet. Each constituent is weighted equally at the base date and the index is the chained geometric mean of daily price relatives, so one card doubling moves the index as much as another halving. The constituents are refreshed on the first of each month and the index is chained across the change, so a membership change is never a price move. A night on which the pricing method changed is carried flat and marked in the method log. A day’s point is written once that day’s prices are published, around 06:00 UTC.

Most Expensive Pokémon Card Sales

The record file, shown as the sales clearing $100,000, $250,000, $500,000 and $1 million by calendar year, and as the ranked top list. A sale counts once at the price the marketplace reported; auction-house prices include the buyer’s premium where the house reports it that way. Private sales reported in the press without a verifiable source are not included. Below the file’s floor, the page shows how many eBay US sales of $10,000 or more the ledger holds per month from June 2026, the point from which the ledger is complete; earlier months are not shown because they would understate the count.

Most Traded Pokémon Cards

Cards ranked by the number of verified eBay US sales across every condition and grade in the trailing 90 days, with the 30-day count alongside. Estimated dollar volume multiplies each grade’s 90-day sale count by that grade’s 90-day median sale price and sums the grades that have a median; grades too thin for a median add nothing, so volume is a floor. Sets and Pokémon are rolled up from the same per-card counts. The liquidity band is the one shown on the card page.

PSA 10 Grading Premium Index

A card is eligible on a day when its ungraded line has at least 5 verified sales in the trailing 90 days, its PSA 10 line at least 3, its ungraded price is $1 or more, and its PSA 10 price was built from sales rather than filled from a price guide. The multiple is PSA 10 price ÷ ungraded price; the gap is the difference. The headline is the median multiple across eligible cards, with the 25th and 75th percentiles. Breakdowns by ungraded price band, era and Pokémon (five or more eligible cards) are medians over the same cards. The leaderboard of largest multiples requires an ungraded price of $10 or more so a $0.50 raw card against a scarce slab does not head the list. The PSA 9 figure is built the same way from the PSA 9 line.

The daily line reads each card’s price history on the current pricing method and takes the median over the cards eligible today, so a method change carries no move, and the line describes today’s set rather than a fixed basket: cards that only recently gained a sales-based PSA 10 price appear across its whole length. A day on which fewer than half the eligible set has readings has no point.

What it is not. A grading return. A PSA 10 multiple of 15× means a PSA 10 copy sells for fifteen times the ungraded price; it does not mean grading a raw copy returns fifteen times its cost, because grading costs money and time and most submissions do not grade 10. UltraBall writes “premium”, “multiple” or “price gap”, never “profit”.

Live Market Supply Index

A live listing is one in the listing store that was seen on its last refresh and has not since gone, been hidden or been held for review. Counts are by listing, not by quantity offered. Formats are eBay’s: Buy It Now, Buy It Now with offers accepted, and auction. The grader is the one the listing states, with ungraded and sealed product counted apart. Medians are of asking prices on eBay US in US dollars, with an auction’s current bid as its price. Sealed products are in the totals and out of every card breakdown. “Auctions ending in 7 days” counts auctions whose end time is within the next seven days, and those with at least one bid.

The daily line is one reading a day, taken around 05:50 UTC and stored. Days before stored readings began are rebuilt from each listing’s first-seen and gone stamps and marked “reconstructed” in the CSV. They are approximate in both directions: the earliest days run low because a crawl discovers listings that were already live, and the latest run high because a listing counts until the crawl noticed it gone, which can lag the real end by days. For that reason the 7-day and 30-day changes are measured only between stored readings and are shown once enough exist. Verified deals are the published UltraBall deals pipeline: a live listing priced under UltraBall’s price for the exact copy, built from at least four recent sales, re-verified within twelve hours; the counts are of open deals at the time of reading.

Auction vs Buy It Now

From the sold ledger over the trailing 90 days. The headline pairs each card, printing and grade that had at least three auction sales and three fixed-price sales in the window, divides the auction median by the fixed-price median, and reports the median of those ratios with its quartiles, so a card counts once however often it sold, and a 1st Edition copy is never set against an Unlimited one. Ungraded and graded, price bands (by the pair’s fixed-price median) and eras are medians over the pairs in each group, shown when a group has at least three pairs.

“Against UltraBall’s price” divides each sale by UltraBall’s price for the exact copy on the day and takes the median over every sale of the format; 100% means sold at UltraBall’s price. Fixed-price sales where an offer was accepted carry eBay’s asking price, not the amount paid, so they are reported on their own row and never pooled with fixed-price sales. The weekly line uses weeks starting Monday, drawn only when a format has at least 20 sales that week; the current week is in progress. The figure is read from the ledger hourly and the daily reading is stored.

Weekly Market Report

One record per week, Monday to Sunday, built on the Monday after from the stores above and kept at its own URL. Index closes are the published daily levels on each Sunday, and the week change is Sunday against the Sunday before, so it reads the same line as the index page. Sales are the sold ledger’s verified eBay US sales dated within the week, unusual sales excluded; “sold value” sums the sales whose price paid is known (every format but a Buy It Now listing that took an offer, which carries the asking price), so it is a floor on the money that changed hands. The biggest-sales list is drawn from the same price-known sales; the most-traded list counts every grade. Auction and Buy It Now figures are the week’s median of sale ÷ UltraBall’s price per format. The PSA 10 premium is the Sunday point of the daily premium line; live listings are the stored Sunday readings, shown only where both Sundays have one. Auction-house sales are the record file’s entries dated within the week. A day counts as recorded when at least 2,000 verified sales are dated on it; where a week has fewer than 7 recorded days (the ledger was not collecting from 19 to 31 August 2026), the page says how many, the sales count covers only those days, and no week-on-week sales change is shown for that week or the one after.

A week is rebuilt once, on the second Monday after it ends, because a week’s eBay sales keep being observed for a few days; after that it is never recomputed, so a figure quoted from a week stays what it was. Weeks begin with the week ending 9 August 2026, the first full week after the index base.

Wording and what UltraBall does not claim

Every figure is a market reading, not a forecast or advice. Prices are of sales that happened; they say nothing about what a card will fetch next. “Premium” and “gap” describe a difference between two prices; UltraBall never says a grade “earns” or “returns” anything. Deals are listings under a sold-based price with their confidence stated; a listing that failed verification is never published as a deal. No research figure is built from any member’s own activity. UltraBall’s AI grade estimates are estimates and are kept out of research. When a figure rests on a thin count (a leaderboard row with three sales, a week with twenty), the count is on the page; please quote it with the figure.

Changes to method

Each asset carries a version in its download. When a definition changes, the history is rebuilt on the new definition across its whole length so the line never shows a method change as a market move, the version changes, and the change is noted here with its date. 12 October 2026: first publication of the six assets above.

Corrections and questions: the media page or hello@ultraball.com.