How our numbers work

What “Fair Market Value Estimate” means

Every price on SealedEX — on product cards, product pages, your portfolio, and price alerts — is a Fair Market Value Estimate: our best estimate of what a sealed product currently trades for, built from licensed market data. One number, used consistently everywhere on the site.

Estimates, not guarantees

Sealed markets are thin. The same box can sell for meaningfully different prices in the same week depending on venue, listing quality, and timing. A Fair Market Value Estimate is a reference point for tracking and comparison — it is not a promise of what you will pay or receive.

Monthly index history

The backbone of SealedEX is a monthly price history reaching back to 1999, sourced from PriceCharting’s market data. Each product carries the index value at each month close — no interpolation, no synthetic smoothing, no active-listing inflation. This history powers the charts, 1-year deltas, and era baskets.

Weekly modern-product snapshots

For modern-era products, we additionally capture weekly marketplace snapshots (TCGplayer-derived data from a licensed marketplace data partner) — covering many modern products in the catalog. These weekly reads sharpen current estimates where the market moves fastest.

Human-reviewed calibration

When sources disagree materially — a stale feed, a mismatched listing, an implausible spike — a human reviews the product and records an explicit decision about which source to trust. Every decision is dated, auditable, and never auto-generated. Dozens of active decisions currently calibrate the catalog.

Known coverage gaps

Vintage products have no weekly marketplace source by nature — their estimates rest on the monthly index. A small number of modern SKUs (for example, certain Pokémon Center exclusives) also lack weekly data; those fall back to monthly values. We track these gaps internally rather than papering over them.

Alert cadence

Alerts are evaluated weekly and at monthly index updates — not in real time. When an evaluation runs, your thresholds are checked against the freshest Fair Market Value Estimates from the schedule above.

Data freshness & schedule

The refresh rhythm is fixed and intentional: the monthly index updates at the start of each calendar month, weekly modern snapshots are captured on a regular schedule, and calibration reviews happen as source disagreements surface. Nothing on SealedEX ticks continuously, and we’d rather show you exactly how fresh a number is than pretend otherwise. Product pages display each product’s own last-updated date next to its estimate.

Monthly index

Jun 2026

Latest monthly period in the price index. Refreshes at the start of each calendar month.

Weekly modern snapshots

Jun 11

Latest weekly capture, covering 309 modern products. Captured on a regular schedule.

Human review

Jun 11

Most recent fair-value calibration review. 43 active human-reviewed decisions.

Alerts

Weekly + monthly

Alerts are evaluated weekly and at monthly index updates — not in real time.

Not financial advice

SealedEX is a tracking and research tool, not investment advice. An estimate is not an exit price: selling sealed product takes time, fees, and a willing buyer. For the full breakdown of data sources, licensing, and which integrations are active versus in progress, see the data-source disclosure page.