Evidence quality: the number that matters more than the price
A card jumps 12% in a day. Is that a signal or noise? The price alone can't answer that — you need to know how much real market activity sits behind the move.
What evidence quality is not
It is not a prediction. It is not a confidence score about where the price goes next. It does not tell you whether to buy.
What it actually measures
Evidence quality scores how much the observed price move is backed by real, diverse trading activity rather than a handful of thin listings:
- Sales depth. How many completed sales fed the read, not just how many listings exist.
- Seller concentration. Whether the move came from many independent sellers or a small cluster that could be one actor.
- Source coverage. Whether multiple markets agree, or the read leans on a single thin source.
A card that moved 12% on 3 sales from 2 sellers and a card that moved 12% on 40 sales from 20 sellers produced the same price change — but only one of them is evidence you should trust.
Why this changes what you do
A high-evidence move without a plan is still just information. A low-evidence move is not necessarily wrong, either — it is a reason to wait for the next observation window rather than to treat the current one as final.
The habit worth building: read the evidence quality figure before the price change, not after. It reframes "should I act on this?" into "is there enough here to act on?" — a smaller, more answerable question.
The takeaway
Price tells you what happened. Evidence quality tells you how much to trust that it will keep happening. Treat them as two separate numbers, because they answer two separate questions.
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