Archie…

What you have posted here and in the past implies that you feel that internet auction sales are NOT an indication of the value of chips in general and, it follows, any individual chip. Now, I think that quite a few more people will want to chime in as to their feelings regarding the overall percentage of chip sales that take place in internet auctions, but without prematurely referring to a figure or range, I’d like to throw some numbers at you…

I have a filter that effectively removes home poker sets from eBay listings. Using this filter, there are currently 4,101 chip auctions on ebay.

Let’s assume that the average auction is 7 days (that’s high)

Let’s also assume that 75% of auctions actually sell (that’s ballpark)

Let’s further assume that today and the auctions listed today represent an average day or time period (I think that’s probably the case)

This means that there is an average of 585 auctions ending each day with about 440 sales completed.

This computes to 160,000 chip sales (forgetting about multiple-chip auctions) per year just on eBay alone.

Now… the $64,000 question is then – how many retail chip sales take place overall every year?

A million? A half million? 200,000? How many major dealers are there? How many chips can they sell outside of the auction arena? (Many of them, of course, sell IN the auction arena as well).

There are lots of questions that I’d like to throw around, but I threw those six out first. I’ll say right now, however, that 160,000 chip sales should be taken into consideration in calculating values, regardless of the intent of the buyer. If you can buy a chip at a price point, Archie, that means that there is not demand at that moment at a higher one... think about that, please.

As far as the poor "off-line" collector is concerned, we'll save that for a different discussion, because then you're dealing with an uneducated buyer on whose purchases you are willing to base chip valuations.