The Top of the Market Is Lumpy: Weekly Top-Five Totals, July to August

Every Monday SI Collectibles publishes the five biggest trading card sales of the prior week. Add them up and you get a number that looks like a market indicator and mostly is not. The last four tallied weeks: $531,611 (July 5-11), $2,541,000 (July 19-25), $697,200 (August 1-8), $4,470,643 (August 9-16).

What the spikes are

The $2.54 million week was one card: a BGS 9 Illustrator Pikachu at $2 million in a private sale, with the other four spots totaling about $541,000. This week's $4.47 million is two Illustrators ($1.3 million and $1,006,500) plus two Snap contest cards ($809,943 and $640,500); the fifth card was a One Piece trophy. In other words, when trophy-grade cards trade, they trade in clusters, often because the same auction house (Goldin this week) has assembled a marquee sale.

What the floor is

Take the trophy cards out and the "ordinary" top five, the five biggest regular-issue sales in a week, has run between $500,000 and $700,000 all summer. That is the number that reflects the broad high-end market: PSA 10 Gold Stars, first-edition Base Set holos, Call of Legends shinies, the occasional reverse holo. It has been steady, which is a more useful reading than any single spike.

How to use it

Treat the weekly total as a barometer, not a thermometer. A high reading means liquidity exists for the rarest objects in the hobby right now: buyers with seven figures showed up and paid. It does not mean your PSA 9 Charizard went up this week; for that, read the Index, which is built from hundreds of ordinary comps and barely moved. A run of low readings would be the thing to worry about, because it would mean the trophy buyers had stepped back, and they tend to step back before everyone else.

Two weeks are missing from the chart because SI's tallies for July 12-18 and July 26-31 were not available in full at press time; we will carry the series forward from here. Source: SI Collectibles weekly top-five reports, July 12 to August 17, 2026.

Chart of the Day ran in The Pack Report, August 17, 2026: A $4.5 Million Week, and the Illustrator Is Back. Published by Rip Station.