Where every number comes from, how fresh it is, and what cannot be known.
Our market sales and census observations come from pricecharting.com. We do not collect from marketplaces ourselves. Your Binder purchase and sale amounts are the values you enter.
Individual sales are recorded as PriceCharting reports them: date, venue, tier and price. We cannot independently confirm every reported transaction or grading label.
The monthly chart points are our own medians of those individual sales, not the source's monthly estimates. A month with no recorded sales has no observed median. Dotted lines can connect gaps or carry the last median forward; those connections are display aids, not additional sales or measured monthly prices.
Collection time and sale date are different. Our first visit to a card can capture sales that happened before that visit. The available history therefore varies by card and tier. Each card's ledger states where its own record begins; it is not a guarantee that we captured every sale since that date.
A complete market-wide sales history. Our source exposes a limited recent-sales list — a bucket — for each tier. Sales missing from that list when we visit may never enter our record; an empty month does not prove no sales occurred.
Census history before our first observation. We collect current snapshots, not a complete historical census supplied by the graders.
A reliable grading company for every sale below grade 10. The source's tiers pool companies below 10. A listing title may name a company, but our pooled prices do not become company-specific prices on that basis.
Below 10, the source's price tiers combine grading companies. The Grade 8 tier can include PSA, CGC, BGS and other companies' 8s. Raw is separate, and each company's 10 is a tier of its own.
We label these values as pooled tiers. We do not apply a multiplier to turn a pooled price into a company-specific estimate.
The collector revisits cards in priority order. Visit intervals vary, so the latest sale we hold is not necessarily the latest sale that happened.
Opening a card page can request a fresh visit. If the card has not been visited in the last 8 hours, the page requests a refresh. A successful refresh updates the displayed data; a failed request does not erase the existing record.
Recent sales can arrive late. The Volume and Volume trend signals end their counting windows 23 days before today to reduce the effect of incomplete recent capture. That does not guarantee older counts are final. Browse's Sales / mo count includes recorded sales through today, across every tier, Raw included. Prices also use the newest eligible sales we have, without that counting delay.
The current month's median can change as sales arrive. When it has observations, its chart connection is dashed and its endpoint hollow. A closed month can restate too when an older sale is captured later.
The market index is a daily chain. Every card at its carried value — the newest sales, carried forward when nothing has sold — equal-weighted across every series priced on two consecutive nights, anchored at 100 on 1 September 2026, one point per night. Each point is what was known that night and is never revised: a sale enters the record when the collector next visits its card, so a point can lag the market by days, and that lag is left in rather than averaged away.
Market-wide calculations begin in September 2026. Sales from before our collecting began, in late July 2026, came from the limited history visible when cards were first visited. That history reaches back different lengths of time for busy and quiet cards, so it is not a consistent sample of the earlier market. August 2026 is left out as well: our first pass over the catalog was still under way, so it is not a whole month of the market. The floor limits our calculations; it does not guarantee complete coverage after that date.
A card's own chart and signals can use its older recorded sales. Signals still need enough observations for their specific calculation; a long calendar span alone is not enough.
Calendar-based unlock rules use 1 September 2026 as a deliberate cutoff. Other sufficiency rules depend on the actual sales or periods available, so there is not always a date on which a metric is guaranteed to unlock.
Metric states include OK, LOW DATA, LOCKED, UNDEFINED window and UNSTABLE FIT. An unavailable result is not a measured zero.
Cardstock is a fan-made analytics project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Nintendo, The Pokémon Company, Creatures Inc., or any grading company or marketplace. Pokémon names and card references are used for identification only; all trademarks belong to their owners.
Nothing here is financial advice. Collectible prices are volatile and thinly traded; signals describe the past, not the future. Do your own research before spending money on cardboard.