ACE Grading Market Report: August 2026 Recorded UK Sales

The August snapshot contains 12,056 eligible recorded observations across 3,416 catalogue identities. The median recorded amount was £46.39. These figures describe the records retained and matched by this tracker at extraction, not the size of the entire ACE market.

This is the report for 1–31 August 2026, compared with 1–31 July using the same present-day filters. The snapshot was captured on 2026-09-05. Later discoveries or corrections can change the live archive without silently changing the tables in this article.

August at a glance

The mean amount was £104.80, higher than the median. The largest eligible August observation was £5,182.00, while the smallest was £0.99. This spread is why one overall average should not be applied to a particular card or grade.

There is at least one qualifying record on every calendar day in the month. That does not demonstrate complete daily coverage. It tells us that the report is not based on observations from only a handful of days; it says nothing about listings the collection process missed.

What changed from July?

The observed record count is +188.0% higher and the mixed-cohort median is +3.1% higher. Neither percentage is a measured growth rate for the whole market. Changes in ingestion coverage, catalogue matching, newly released identities and the mix of grades can all affect these totals.

The sum of amounts is also not verified marketplace turnover or seller profit. The source does not independently confirm final payment, accepted-offer settlement, return status or consistent postage treatment. Summing the observations is useful for describing this extract, provided that distinction travels with the number.

A proper price index would need a defined, comparable basket and a documented treatment of missing observations. This report does not relabel a changing group of listings as that kind of index.

Grade and game mix

The grade distribution describes what reached this filtered sales archive. It cannot tell a submitter the probability of receiving a 10. Owners decide what to grade, retain and sell, while the tracker sees only part of the resulting marketplace activity.

Pokemon dominates the observed sample. That should not be interpreted as a measured share of all ACE submissions or all trading-card sales. Smaller game totals can reflect less collection coverage or fewer confidently matched identities as well as differences in recorded activity.

Which identities appeared most frequently?

The following eight identities have the largest numbers of eligible August observations in this extract. Counts include different grades and can include titles without a declared language. They are a way to find active research pages, not a ranking of investment potential or a measure of how quickly an individual slab will sell.

Two identities sharing a character or expansion can have very different price histories. Follow the exact collector number and check the distribution by grade. A higher observation count is useful because it gives a reader more records to inspect, but it does not establish that every record is an equally strong comparable.

Why this edition does not publish a biggest-movers leaderboard

We required the same catalogue identity and ACE grade, explicit-English titles, and at least five eligible observations in each month before comparing medians. In this snapshot, 0 series met that rule. There is therefore no supported leaderboard under the stated method.

Relaxing the threshold after seeing the result would make it easier to produce a dramatic table, but would change what the comparison measures. A card seen once in July and several times in August can show an apparent jump because of a single atypical observation. Mixing languages or grades introduces another explanation for the difference.

The three-month grade-comparison study asks a different question and openly uses a smaller minimum sample. It can support carefully described examples without supplying a month-to-month movers ranking.

Coverage, exclusions and reproducibility

The extract includes positive finite GBP amounts, valid stored dates, integer grades from 1 to 10 and required public fields. Identity matches need the confidence threshold or a reviewed manual override. Test records and obvious multi-card titles are excluded; item IDs are deduplicated.

The saved observation ledger contains public listing IDs, dates, catalogue IDs, game labels, grades, amounts and the explicit-English title flag. Its accompanying definitions explain the filters and aggregation. Medians are calculated from the qualifying observations and amounts are reported to the penny, rounding half a penny upwards. The snapshot download below allows those summaries to be checked without treating today's changing card pages as a frozen dataset.

For a collector making a decision, start with the exact-card valuation workflow. For context at the expensive end, explore the largest retained observations. Both keep individual identity and source evidence visible alongside the headline amount.

Frequently asked questions