How the TickerMint indexes are built

On each rebalance day, a card qualifies when all of these hold:

• It is a single (it has a collector number). Booster boxes, ETBs and other sealed product never count.
• It is not a World Championship deck replica (marked not tournament legal), a jumbo or an oversized card.
• Its set was published on TCGplayer at least 30 days before. New sets trade on presale asks and first-week swings that settle within weeks.
• It had a TCGplayer market price on at least 80% of the game's price days in the 30 days before, and a price on the rebalance day itself.
• It trades. Its market price changed on at least 6 of those days. TCGplayer's market price moves when copies sell, so a price that never moves belongs to a card that is not changing hands. We have no sales counts for the whole record; this is the closest measure of trading we can apply the same way to every day since February 2024.
• Its cheapest listing that day is no more than 3x its market price (a higher ask is a placeholder or troll listing, the same test our card pages use), and its price is at least $5.

A card listed in more than one printing (Holofoil and Reverse Holofoil, 1st Edition and Unlimited) enters once, on its priciest qualifying printing. For Yu-Gi-Oh, Unlimited stays ahead of 1st Edition when both are priced, like our card pages.

Qualifying cards are ranked by price (step 04) and the top ones fill the basket: Pokemon 100, One Piece 100, Lorcana 50, Riftbound 50, Yu-Gi-Oh 100 and Gundam 50. The number is in the name. When fewer cards qualify in a month (a young game), the index holds the ones that do and the page says so; the rules never loosen to fill the count.

The buffer. A card already in the index keeps its seat while it ranks within 1.2 times the index size (the top 120 for a 100-card index) and its price changed on at least 3 days; open seats go to the highest-ranked newcomers, which must meet the full rules. Without it, cards near the cut flip in and out every month (about 3 in 10 on the Pokemon 100); with it, about 1 in 10 changes in a typical month.

Every card weighs the same on the rebalance day. Between rebalances each card's weight drifts with its price, the way a portfolio bought in equal amounts would. On a day t:

level(t) = level(R) × mean of price_i(t) / price_i(R)

R = the month's rebalance day, i = each card

Equal weighting means a $5,000 card cannot move the index alone: the index measures how the typical top card did, not the total dollar value of the market. We do not rebalance daily: re-weighting jumpy card prices every day would make the index drift upward on noise alone.

The index uses the middle (median) of the card's last 3 daily TCGplayer market prices, not the latest one. This hides noise on purpose: one odd sale moves nothing, and a real move shows up a day or two later. The same smoothed price is used to rank cards, to set each card's starting price and to measure every day after.

TCGplayer's market price is TCGplayer's own figure from recent sales of the card in any condition. It is not a single sale and not a quote you can trade at. Prices are raw (ungraded), in US dollars.

The basket is rebuilt on the first price day of each month, using only prices up to that day. That day's level is computed with the old basket; the new basket starts from it, so the line never jumps at a rebalance.

• A card with no price on a day keeps its last price until it prices again or the month ends. A card TCGplayer stops pricing stays in at its last price until the next rebalance, then drops out.
• A day counts as an index day only when at least 90% of the basket was priced that day. Archive gaps and partial nights publish no level; the chart joins the days around them and every change (1-day, 7-day, 30-day, year to date) compares with the last level on or before the start of its window.

Each index starts at 1,000 on its base day: the first price day of the first month that begins at least 21 days after the game's first tracked day (the first basket needs that much record to judge trading).

The history is a backfill. We published the indexes on November 3, 2026 and ran the same rules over our daily record back to each base day. No one saw those levels on those days. The rules only ever look at prices up to the day they are applied to, so the backfill does not use later prices to choose earlier baskets.

Levels of a finished month never change. The current month is recomputed each night, so a price that arrives late can revise this month's levels. Any change to a rule gets a new version number on this page.