Wow, what a great thread! Now THIS is fun!

Thanks, Steve, for starting the discussion. Some really good ideas and suggestions have come in response to your initial questions and followups.

My esteemed colleague and renowned co-author Allan Myers has stated our methodology and philosophy well. Nothing I can add to that!

Just as a (hopefully) interesting aside, the comment was made somewhere that the number of high-end chips is exploding, so we need to pin their values down a bit more.

For the last couple of years (a new feature in TCR5), we've published statistics which, among other things, lists the number of chips in each value range. Looking at all Z chips, both solid values and no-market asterisked entries, here's what we come up with: TCR5 (1998): 171; TCR6 (1999): 207. That's only about a 20% difference - not really very much at all.

Just pointing out that the magnitude of the issue is somewhat smaller than we might think. The perception that there's been a vast increase in high-end chips may not be supported by the facts.

Michael