Highlights
- $144.6M in tracked sales — within +3% of Q2 2025's $140.3M.
- PSA standard turnaround crossed 90 days for the first time since Q4 2022.
- BGS announced a 'submission pause' for non-bulk service tiers in August.
- Heritage Auctions tracked September sale topped $40M — the year's largest single-house sale outside Sotheby's.
- Concert poster category posted +28% YoY on Bay Area first-printing strength.
What Q3 2025 actually looked like
The third quarter of 2025 produced $144.6M in tracked sales — solid sequential growth, but no headline-driving outlier. The operative story of Q3 was upstream of the auction floor: in the grading and authentication services that gate every premium-tier sale.
PSA's standard turnaround crossed 90 days for the first time since Q4 2022. In a category where standard service used to be 30–45 days, the 90-day threshold has practical consequences. A consigner deciding in May whether to send a card to PSA for fall auction has to decide before knowing what grade they will get. That structurally changes consignment economics — and it pushes some consignors toward the express tiers (which raise costs by 3–10x) or toward competing services with lighter market acceptance (CSG, HGA).
BGS announced a submission pause for non-bulk tiers in August. The pause lasted through mid-September and was framed as inventory-clearing for the backlog. The immediate effect was a 14% spike in PSA submission volume during the pause window, which lengthened PSA's queue further. Authentication-services capacity in the memorabilia category operates as a closely-coupled system; constraint at one service propagates to all.
The bottleneck is leading-indicator. Items in queue today are 2026 auction lots. That is not bad news for the market — it suggests a strong supply pipeline. It is bad news for sellers who need liquidity in the next 90 days. It is also a structural risk for any individual item: an item submitted but not yet graded carries grading-outcome risk that is currently un-priced in the comps available.
Numbers we tracked
| Category | Q3 2025 tracked | QoQ change | Median sale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trading cards | $52.1M | -4% | $26,800 |
| Sports memorabilia | $24.8M | +8% | $44,500 |
| Comics | $17.4M | -2% | $21,800 |
| Movie/TV memorabilia | $22.6M | +12% | $58,100 |
| Music memorabilia | $12.4M | +8% | $32,600 |
| Political/historical | $7.8M | +6% | $34,200 |
| Autographs | $5.2M | -1% | $12,100 |
| Toys | $2.3M | +4% | $7,900 |
The trading cards QoQ contraction (-4%) is the authentication-bottleneck story showing up in the data. Consignors who could not get cards graded in time for September auctions held back. We expect partial reversal in Q4 as items work through the queue.
Heritage September
The single largest tracked event of Q3 was Heritage Auctions' September Comics Signature Auction, which cleared $40.3M across approximately 1,800 lots. The strength of that sale was distributed: the high-grade Silver Age category (Amazing Spider-Man, Iron Man, Avengers first appearances) posted +18% YoY on price per lot. Heritage's specialist Lon Allen called it "the most consistent depth of bidding I've seen in this category in five years." Whether that depth holds into 2026 depends on the supply pipeline, which is tightening at the high end.
Concert posters: a category to watch
Concert posters posted +28% YoY by tracked volume in Q3. Bay Area first-printings — Family Dog, Bill Graham Presents (BG series), Fillmore — drove the gain. Eric King's reference catalog has become the de facto standard for first-print verification; auction houses now lead descriptions with King's catalog number.
The buyer cohort is interesting: a meaningful portion of Q3 concert poster bids came from buyers under 40 who were not part of the 1960s/1970s collecting cohort that drove the category's first wave of attention in the 1990s. The driver appears to be the visual/aesthetic appeal of psychedelic poster art rather than nostalgia, which suggests structural rather than cyclical demand.
Authentication-bottleneck implications
The 90-day PSA turnaround has three downstream effects worth tracking:
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Higher prices on already-graded items. Items that are already in slabs and ready to consign command a premium because they bypass the queue. We tracked a 4–7% premium on PSA-already-graded modern cards versus equivalent items needing submission.
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Migration to alternate authenticators. SGC saw a 17% submission-volume increase in Q3. CSG and HGA, smaller but accepted by some auction houses, also saw growth. The market is sorting out which alternates will achieve durable acceptance.
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Increased risk on raw items. Buyers of raw modern cards are increasingly demanding "grade-or-refund" terms — i.e., the price assumes a specific grade and is adjusted if the item grades lower. This is a sophisticated trade and not available everywhere, but it is becoming the working compromise during bottleneck periods.
Methodology note
Tracked sales above the Field Index threshold ($5,000 for cards, $10,000 for memorabilia, $25,000 for documents and props) are sourced from public auction-house catalogs, trade-press reporting, and grading-service population data. Tracked sales include reported hammer + buyer's premium; figures may differ from auction-house internal records.