8CIOReview | | MAY 2024IN MY OPINIONTHE ART OF PREDICTING THE PRICE OF COLLECTIBLES: HOW MACHINE LEARNING IS REVOLUTIONIZING VALUATIONBy Dan Van Tran, Chief Technology Officer, CollectorsImagining a New WorldWhen you go out to buy a car or a house, you have an idea of what the price range should be. There is a lot of readily-available data to help you to understand the market and give you a sense of what to expect. You can shop around, make deals, and search for bargains with confidence. The availability of this data allows the automobile and real estate industries to be exceptionally fluid and for consumers to be well-informed, leading to highly active markets.Unfortunately, there isn't anything like that for collectibles. For example, trading cards come in packs or boxes, so the price of an individual card is unclear. Other collectibles are unique and don't have many, if any, similar sales to compare to. Many buyers and sellers end up using multiple unrelated sales points to guess a value, leading to high volatility and variability and inconsistent sales.As the CTO of Collectors, this is one of the problems that I wanted to help solve for the industry. Given the position that our company has as a leader in the industry, we were well-equipped to take on this challenge. For the past 37 years, Collectors has been the trusted destination for grading, authenticating, selling, vaulting (and now valuation!) of collectibles ­ notably coins, cards, video games, and
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