Research
A population report counts how many copies of a card a grading company has assigned each grade. It is the closest thing the hobby has to a scarcity measure — as long as you know what it does not tell you.
Per-card population is not available on Poke-Trade yet
We do not have a population feed that covers the catalog, and we will not estimate one. Population counts belong to the grading companies, so for now the authoritative numbers are on their own reports — linked below. Individual certifications you look up through Poke-Trade do return the population figures the provider publishes for that card.
Each provider publishes its own report. Check the provider that graded the card you care about.
PSA
Publishes a public population report.
CGC
Publishes a public population report.
Beckett
Publishes population data per product line rather than as a single public report.
SGC
Publishes a public population report.
Grading, authentication, certification and storage services are provided independently by their respective providers. Poke-Trade is not affiliated with or endorsed by a provider unless specifically stated.
Five things that change what the number means.
A report is a running total of everything that provider has ever graded. Cards are lost, damaged and cracked out of slabs, but those never come back off the count. Treat the number as an upper bound on how many slabs exist.
For a card you own, the useful figure is not the total — it is how many copies grade above yours. A PSA 9 with four thousand PSA 10s above it is a very different asset from one with forty.
PSA's report does not know what CGC has graded, and vice versa. Adding populations across providers to get a 'total graded' figure overstates scarcity comparisons between them.
Population is low when nobody has bothered submitting the card, which is often because it is not worth grading. Scarcity only prices when there is demand behind it.
When a card starts rising, submissions rise with it. A population figure from a year ago on a card that has since run up can be badly out of date.
Population is an input to a decision, not the decision.
