There is a version of this page that pretends to know where prices are going. This is not it. Nobody selling out of a binder can forecast a card market, and the people who say they can are selling a subscription rather than a card. What you can do — for nothing, in about twenty minutes — is decide in advance when you will stop. Timing a sale is not a prediction. It is a schedule you write down before the listing goes live, so that the decision is already made on the day you would otherwise be making it badly.

▸ THE QUICK VERSION

You are not forecasting anything. You are choosing a window, a short ladder of cuts and a floor, in writing, before you list.

Two clocks run under every card. One is printed by the company that makes the game. The other is hype, and can only be noticed, never planned around.

The price event is the announcement, not the shipment. A reprint does its damage the week it is revealed.

Windows end. When yours does, the card joins the bulk lot — and that is a result, not a failure.

Two clocks, and only one of them is printed

WHAT YOU CAN PUT IN A DIARY

The first clock is published months ahead by the company that prints the game, and it is astonishingly under-read. Set release dates are announced. Reprints are announced, usually with a picture of the card. Rotation — the date on which a card stops being legal in the format most people build for — is announced well in advance, and in the Pokémon TCG it is stamped on the card itself as a small regulation mark. Yu-Gi-Oh! players get a Forbidden & Limited list on a schedule Konami publishes in the open. None of this is inside information. It is a product calendar with a news page attached.

The second clock is the one everybody actually watches. A deck wins something, a video goes up, and a card nobody wanted on Tuesday is unbuyable by Friday. That clock cannot be diarised, only spotted — and if you catch one, the honest advice is the boring advice: list into it while it is running, at the price it is running at.

So read the first clock and treat the second as weather. Two free habits cover most of it — look at your game's official product page once a month, and check what cards like yours have genuinely changed hands for. On eBay that is the filter marked sold listings, and it is the only number on the site that is evidence rather than hope.

▸ THE TWO CLOCKS, AND WHO IS IN THE ROOM

Three tracks, one example year, one calendar. The top is printed in advance. The middle never is. The bottom is simply who turns up.

All three tracks are ruled on the one twelve-month calendar at the foot, so a column really does mean a month. In this example year the four published dates fall in February, April, August and October; each label sits over the tick it belongs to, because every one of them is a day rather than a season. The middle line has no ticks on purpose — the spike lands in June only because that is when somebody happened to win something, and it gives most of itself back. The bottom track is the quietest useful fact on this page: buyers thin out after the new year and thicken through the autumn into December, and no month is ever empty, which is why waiting for a “good month” is a much weaker move than picking any month and finishing.

The announcement is the price event

NOT THE DAY IT SHIPS

A reprint does not have to arrive to change what your copy is worth. It changes it the week it is revealed, because everybody else holding one is reading the same announcement on the same afternoon. By the time the product is on a shelf, the move has happened and you are late. The same thing runs in reverse around rotation: the drift begins when the date is confirmed, not on the date itself.

Two consequences. If you were ever going to sell ahead of a reprint, the listing goes up in the week of the reveal. And singles from a new set are usually dearest in the first days of release and drift for weeks afterwards as packs keep being opened — so a card pulled on release weekend is on a different clock from one that has sat in a binder for three years.

If the card is going to be graded first, your calendar gets longer by however long the grader has it. PSA calls the tier you pay for a service level, and each one quotes its own turnaround. That time is part of your window whether you planned for it or not, and it is the reason deciding to slab a card is a timing decision as much as a value one.

You cannot time the market. You can time yourself, and the difference between the two is a diary.

Write the window before you write the listing

THE PROCEDURE

Name the window in days, not moods

Thirty days is a sensible default for an ordinary single. A week if you are listing into something that is already moving. A season for a graded card you are in no hurry about. Write the end date down; that is the whole trick.

Write the rungs, with their dates beside them

An opening ask, one cut, one more cut. Two cuts is enough for a thirty-day window — a listing that changes price every other day reads as a seller who does not know what the card is worth, because that is what it is.

Put the last rung on your floor

Your floor is the price below which one card in one parcel cannot win — roughly four times your flat cost, worked out on the fees page. It is not the point where the card stops covering its costs: at four times flat cost about sixty per cent of the price still reaches you. It is the point where a single listing stops being worth the afternoon, which is why everything under it belongs in a lot. The bottom rung sits on it. There is no fourth rung.

Decide now what happens when the window shuts

It goes into the bulk lot, or back in the binder for a stated reason with a date on it. “Still listed” is not an outcome; it is a listing you stopped reading three months ago.

▸ ONE LISTING, THIRTY DAYS, WRITTEN IN ADVANCE

A staircase you drew before the card went up — and a floor the staircase stands on.

Read the staircase from the left. Nothing about it is a forecast — every step was drawn before the card went up, which is why the drops land on tidy dates rather than on the evening you got impatient. The dashed line is the floor from the fees page, and the lowest step rests on it exactly. About sixty per cent of that price still reaches you, so the floor is not where the card stops paying for its own postage — it is where one listing, handled one card at a time, stops being worth the afternoon it costs. Past day thirty the line simply stops, because the card is no longer a listing. It is part of a lot.

Four ways the timing goes wrong

ALL FOUR ARE CALENDAR MISTAKES

Selling on the shipment instead of the announcementPeople see the reprint arrive in shops and only then decide to list. The market read that news weeks earlier. If the reveal is the event, the listing goes up in the week of the reveal or it does not go up on that argument at all.

Chasing a spike after it has finished spikingA card jumps, you notice a fortnight later, and you list at the peak price for the next four months. Spikes give most of themselves back. Either you were there for it or you price against what has actually sold since — never against the screenshot everyone was sharing.

Starting a thirty-day window in the thinnest week of the yearBuyer traffic is not flat across the year. If the card can wait and you are staring at the quiet weeks after the new year, waiting is free — but if it cannot wait, list anyway. A card sold in a quiet month beats one you never got round to.

Leaving it up forever because taking it down feels like losingAn unsold listing is not free. It costs the attention you would have spent on the next thing, and it slowly teaches you a price nobody has agreed to pay.

Not one of those four required an opinion about where the market is going. Every one of them is a mistake about your own calendar.

What the schedule actually buys you

WHERE THIS PAGE LANDS

Written down, the whole thing fits on an index card: the end date, two cuts with their dates, the floor, and what happens after. It will not squeeze the maximum out of any single card — nothing will. What it does is finish sales, and a collection sold at ninety per cent of its best-imaginable price beats one that is permanently ninety per cent listed.

Work out what a sale really nets you on the fees page first, because your floor comes from there. What the ask should be in the first place is checking prices, and the reason any of these numbers move at all is market basics. Everything else in this chapter assumes you have already decided to sell. This page is only about when you stop.

How to Time a Sale You Have Already Decided to Make