What the market is doing
Near their 12-month highs
Trading close to their best price of the past year. In this market that has been a better sign than a deep discount.
1,205 cards answer this today
Why ask this
The contrarian version of this — buy the deep discounts — is one of the founding assumptions of this platform that measured backwards. Cards trading near their 12-month peak have gone on to outperform cards trading far below it, consistently enough that the signal kept its weight after the belief behind it was discarded.
How to read the figure
The figure is how far below its own 12-month peak the card is trading. Smaller is nearer the top.
Shown on every row: Off its peak
How well it has measured
Near its high: Consistent. Across 38 test dates, each scored using only what was knowable that day, cards it ranked in the top tenth beat its bottom tenth by about 3% over the next 60 days on average (rank correlation +0.118). The windows overlap, so that is closer to 13 independent readings than 38, all from one rising market.
Where it can be wrong
This is a finding about one bull market. A rule that rewards buying near the highs is the rule most obviously exposed if that ends, and nothing in this history has seen it end.