Fed

I am sure you have what I imagine you call "the watch charts discussion" like 5 x/d. I imagine someone says "But watch charts says it is 10K" and you say "well, go buy it from watch charts then" or something like that.

Question: where do you land on watch charts data?

FWIW: I find it directionally accurate for heavily traded pieces meaning if things are trending up or down you get a sense of that. For really heavily traded pieces (an average sub maybe) you can get pretty close on price. On the other hand, it is oftentimes nonsensical for anything rare, old, not heavily traded, etc. My gripes are that they never account for service history anywhere (e.g. service is given zero value) which skews the entire market for what peple should be caring about.

I have other thoughts about how easy it would be to game the numbers on something not heavily traded (I am positive I can throw up some random Reddit posts and ebay listings that nobody would buy but it would get incorporated into the data), why the numbers are extra silly because they include random forum posts that you will never have access to in the future, only really focus on asking price and on and on. I imagine they have some algorithm built in to account for this stuff but without knowing the math I am unable to replicate their data for anything that isnt a hype piece or something like a modern sub.

Interested in your thoughts about the value of WC, how you manage watch charts number, and how you would advise collectors to use the information.

Anything better method out there for a starting point?