How we collect card market data
Every figure in our market pages comes from Card Ladder's public trending ladder. We do not price cards ourselves, and we do not adjust the numbers. Last refreshed Oct 2, 2026, covering 180 cards across 9 categories.
What "trending" means here
Card Ladder publishes a trending ladder per category, roughly 20 cards each. That is what we capture. It is not the most valuable cards in a sport, not the most traded, and not a full index. It is the set Card Ladder currently surfaces as moving.
This is why every ranking on these pages is written as scoped to that set. A card topping our football list is the biggest 30-day mover among Card Ladder's trending football cards on the capture date, and nothing broader than that.
How often it refreshes
A full sweep of every category runs weekly. One flagship category refreshes daily. Each page carries the date its own data was captured, because categories can refresh on different days when a scrape fails and we keep the previous figures rather than overwrite good data with nothing.
A page whose data is more than 14 days old shows a visible warning and stays indexed. Past 45 days it is removed from search, because a list of currently trending cards that is a month and a half old is making a claim about the present it can no longer support.
What the fields mean
- Last sale is the most recent sale Card Ladder recorded for that exact card and grade.
- 30-day change is Card Ladder's own index movement over the trailing month.
- Population is the graded population at that grade. It is absent for ungraded cards, and we show a dash rather than a zero, because an unknown population and a population of zero are different facts.
- Sales volume is the count of recorded sales behind the index.
- Market cap is population multiplied by value, as Card Ladder computes it.
Four things this data cannot tell you
It cannot price an arbitrary card. The source is a trending list, not a search index, so a card outside that list has no figure here at all.
It cannot show history beyond 30 days yet. Longer windows are paywalled at the source, so we store every snapshot ourselves and build the history forward from our first capture. That archive grows weekly and is never rewritten.
It cannot tell you what a card will do next. A 30-day gain is a record of what happened, and nothing on these pages is investment advice or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything.
It cannot be complete. A category whose scrape returns nothing keeps its previous figures and says when they were captured, and a category the source does not publish at all does not appear.
Images
We do not display Card Ladder's card images. The figures are theirs and credited; the photography is not ours to republish.