The making of a BUY.
Most pricing tools hand you a number and a confidence percentage. Cardpulse hands you the receipt — every comp it pulled, every outlier it dropped, every signal that moved the conviction, and every sentence the reviewer wrote. This is one card, watched through nine consecutive decisions, in the order the system actually makes them.
One slab. Nine decisions to make.
We're tracking a 2024 Topps Chrome Caleb Williams rookie card, PSA 10. The market last cleared at $285. Over the next nine scenes, the system decides whether to hold steady, recommend a Sell, or call it a Buy at a higher price target.
slab · psa 10 · gem mt
- Subject
- Caleb Williams
- Set
- 2024 Topps Chrome RC
- Variant
- Base · #220
- Last clear
- $285
- Pop · PSA 10
- 1,284
- Most recent
- 12 hours ago
A slab arrives. The agent reads the cert first.
Before any pricing math runs, Cardpulse needs to know — with near-certainty — which card it's looking at. A PSA cert number unlocks the registry: subject, year, set, variant, grade, all in one resolution.
For raw cards or unsupported graders, the identity cascade falls back through Scryfall, pokemontcg.io, ComicVine, then the trigram catalog matcher — each step lower in confidence, each tagged so the rest of the pipeline knows how much trust to place in the inputs downstream.
psa cert resolves at 100%. anything lower would soften the conviction.
The trades come in. All twelve, all venues.
Every realized sale of this exact variant in the last 30 days streams in from the venues we cover — eBay sold, Goldin past results, Fanatics Collect, PWCC, Heritage, PriceCharting. Each row is tagged with its source so the venue's quirks can be reasoned about rather than averaged over.
Cross-listing reconciliation runs on the way in: the same slab listed across multiple venues is deduplicated by cert number, so a single physical trophy sale can't double-count itself into the comp ladder.
12 sold rows · cert-deduplicated · venue tags preserved
One trade looks wrong. The agent drops it.
A $5,200 trade lands in the ladder. That's eighteen times the median — almost certainly a celebrity-purchase trophy comp, a typo, or a charity auction. Whatever it is, it's not what the next PSA 10 will sell for, and including it would skew the central estimate.
The filter is the Iglewicz–Hoaglin modified z-score — the comp's median absolute deviation from the rest of the sample. A score above 3.5 means “this trade is so unusual that the rest of the data points elsewhere.” The dropped row stays auditable in the receipt.
median absolute deviation · m_i > 3.5 → drop · trimmed sample n = 11
iglewicz–hoaglin · modified z-score
mad-based · breakdown 50% · trophy-comp safe
The price isn't a number. It's a range.
With eleven clean comps in hand, Cardpulse computes the 80% confidence band — the price range that ought to contain eight out of ten future sales. Median lands at $285, with $268 at p10 and $312 at p90, the IQR fence rejecting any comps outside 1.5× the interquartile range.
Real bands beat fake-precision percentages. Two cards with the same $285 median can have wildly different bands — one tightly clustered, one spread thin. The band shape is the honest signal of how much the next sale could surprise.
80% band · p10 / p50 / p90 · iqr fence active
The agent goes reading. Reddit, ESPN, the works.
Comps tell you what people paid yesterday. Sentiment tells you what's about to change. The Scout agent searches the subject across the relevant communities and news, scores each post for bullish or bearish weight, and writes a fresh set of signals against this card.
Sentiment severity is calibrated — a single ESPN injury squib won't flip a vintage star. The Bayesian shrinkage on signal mass (more independent posts → tighter conviction shift) means Caleb Williams' 4-TD MNF performance counts more than a single tweet, and a single tweet counts more than nothing.
3 signals · avg +0.58 bullish · 1.2× rookie-narrative amp
The forecast is built additively. Layer by layer.
Cardpulse never collapses the price model into a single opaque coefficient. Each layer — baseline regression, sentiment, grade tier amplification, rookie premium — is named, computed, weighted by its own confidence, and shown alongside the rationale. You can see exactly which layer carried the call.
Total expected move: +11.7% over 30 days. Multiply across the current $285 median and the layer math hands the next stage a target of $322 — where the critic gets the floor.
layered · auditable · agg confidence 0.82
A second agent reads the receipt. It can downgrade.
Before the conviction ships, a Sonnet-class reviewer reads the entire chain — comps, signals, layers, the rationale paragraph — and decides whether the evidence holds. The critic has explicit permission to soften a Buy or Sell to Hold when something feels thin or one-sided.
The reviewer's verdict is shown verbatim, not summarized. A single ESPN injury squib can't flip a vintage star to Sell anymore; an old, single-source comp ladder won't survive a Buy call. You see the reviewer's actual reasoning, not a confidence percentage hand-waved over the top.
claude sonnet · zero-shot review of the full evidence chain
rationale draft
Caleb Williams threw 4 TDs against KC on MNF; PSA 10 rookie tier amplifies the move 1.6×. Sustained sentiment lift plus scarcity in PSA 10 pop suggests the 30-day target north of $322 holds.
Buy. With every step on the receipt.
The conviction lands: Buy at a 30-day p50 target of $322 — a 13% expected move from the current $285. The 80% band says $280 to $368, anchored on the eleven trimmed comps, three sentiment signals, and the four-layer math the reviewer signed off on.
A Buy isn't a guarantee. It's a structured, falsifiable claim with a horizon and a confidence interval. If the predicted band turns out to miss, the calibration soak notices, the model version gets flagged, and the receipt stays auditable for the post-mortem.
conviction · 30d · target $322 · band $280 – $368
30-day p50
$322+13.0%
80% band $280 – $368
rationale · verbatim
Caleb Williams threw 4 TDs against KC on MNF; PSA 10 rookie tier amplifies the move 1.6×.
The verdict travels. Watchers get pinged.
A Buy doesn't sit in a database. It rides through the alert engine — anyone watching this player, this card, or this sentiment threshold gets notified, with the underlying signal cited so they know why the alert fired.
Anticipatory alerts have a 24-hour debounce, so a flapping conviction can't spam an inbox. Four rule kinds — market drift, ask-vs-market gap, anticipatory sentiment swings, weekly sentiment shifts — each with its own threshold and severity grade.
anticipatory swing · 12 min ago · debounced
Nine decisions. Every one auditable.
You don't have to trust Cardpulse. You just have to read the receipt. Every comp, every dropped outlier, every signal, every layer percentage, the reviewer's own sentence — all surface in the card detail panel, exactly the way you saw them here.
- 0100:00cert 47318251 → PSA · slab read · 100%
- 0200:0212 sold comps loaded · 4 sources · 30d
- 0300:031 outlier dropped (Iglewicz–Hoaglin z 4.8)
- 0400:04ci $268 – $312 · 80% band · trimmed n=11
- 0500:053 sentiment signals · avg +0.58 bullish
- 0600:06layer math · base +4.2 · sent +3.6 · grade +2.2 · rookie +1.7
- 0700:07critic approved · evidence holds · target $322
- 0800:08verdict · BUY 30d · p50 $322 · +13.0%
- 0900:09alert fired · 'Caleb Williams · score +0.78'