The Daily Data - 4/7/21 - RAT Function
Viewing the Seeing Stars set through the lens of the Compare Commons tool
Welcome to the first edition of The Daily Data! This morning, I am going to walk everyone through one of my favorite tools “Compare Commons”. This will be an example of how I present data in an actionable way to help you make decisions. Of course, I am not your financial advisor so please use this for informational purposes only.
If you have never checked out the Compare Commons tab, I must warn you that there is A LOT of information and A LOT of nuance is required to effectively use it. I am going to show some examples of this as I review the current state of the Seeing Stars Common Set (Series 2). Before we dive in, it’s important to understand what the RAT number represents:
At its core, RAT analyzes implied market cap (based on lowest ask) and looks for inefficiencies among players. Currently RAT is only relative to a specific player’s other moments. In order to remove outliers, I have excluded all “Top Shot Debut” badges from this tool since we know that those carry a built-in premium. Now that we have laid the groundwork, here is a version of the chart for all Seeing Stars moments.
When reviewing players on Compare Commons, it’s best to look for moments that are greater than 1 in all applicable boxes. Some players like Lebron James have a lot of RAT boxes because they have a lot of common moments, while others like Paul George, only have one moment to compare against. Before you just go buy up the greenest box, I want you to make sure you consider that there will not always be upward movement for moments to track closer to 1. In other words, the larger serial moment will not always move up to meet the smaller serial, it may be the opposite.
Now, let’s talk about some of the nuance that I spoke about above. By using colored cells in the Compare Commons tool, I have indicated a lot of different categories that a player’s moment may fall into. Oftentimes these categories directly correlate to the highest or lowest numbers on the sheet, so it’s important to remove these from consideration when reviewing.
The first example of nuance when reviewing the Seeing Stars list is the S1 moments that Top Shot did not get to properly release prior to the start of Series 2. These created a “reserve” stockpile that is held in still TS and is artificially inflating some of the prices. The best example of the group is the S1 Kawhi Leonard /1000 which has more than 800 still in reserve. For that reason, the lowest ask of $2900 is inflated due to the lack of supply. For purposes of this analysis, we will remove any RATs associated with these moments (Jaylen Brown and Lebron James also have a moment like this).
Next, we need to account for moments that are currently part of challenges. As we know, challenges increase a moment’s utility and therefore are priced at a premium. In the case of Luka Doncic, he is the bottleneck for the Cool Cats Master Challenge since he was the CC1 reward. It wouldn’t be fair to compare that moment to his Seeing Star. I went ahead and removed all the Cool Cats from the chart (Davis, Booker, Sabonis, and Randle). I also removed the Donovan Mitchell moment from The Gift set, since that has gained steam in the last week as people try and plan for a potential “Completed Set” requirement.
Lastly, I felt it was important to remove all the S2 /35000 moments in this comparison. By the time, the 35k set is fully distributed, almost all of these players will have a moment. At this time, it’s about half and half on who has one in circulation or not, but that’s not the reason I chose to remove them. These 35k moments are all still an open circulating count so the “+” at the end of 35000 means Top Shot could elect to make these 50000 or 100000 or more before they move them to LE. Since the RAT calculation assumes a closed serial number, I don’t want that false assumption for the 35k moments factoring into our decisions.
Now that we have removed all the outliers, here is a new chart for the Seeing Stars set:
You will notice that I listed the players by lowest ask this time. Since the Seeing Stars challenges have both ended and we are now outside of the massive sell-off window, I am inclined to think that these players have started to settle into their natural spots in the market. Since all moments are out of 10k serial (except the rewards), sorting by lowest ask is a quick way to compare players to others in their Top Shot tier.
With the outliers eliminated, let’s talk through some ways to use this data. Lebron, Luka, Harden, and Davis are the only players who have a green box in all remaining RATs. This indicates that there is value in their Seeing Stars moment compared to the rest of their common moments (if we assume that everything moves towards 1 in the long run). On the flip side, Vucevic and Beal have all RATs less than 1, so if you want to invest in these players, it may be wise to look at some of their other options.
You will notice that I moved Mike Conley down near the bottom of the chart, since that aligns better with the TS tier that he typically resides in. His Seeing Stars narration is an interesting one to assess, since it is currently a one-of-a-kind moment on Top Shot. We can probably expect to see more of these in the future, but we do not know how many and when this could happen. Luckily, we have an example of another one-of-a-kind moment to compare against! RJ Barrett’s S1 /2882 common is the only Rookie Triple Badge in all of Series 1. Compared to his next lowest serial common, Barrett’s Triple Badge has a RAT of 0.19 which seems to imply that the Conley narration is trading at a reasonable premium right now.
Be wary of players with only a few moments as that may be skewing their average RAT. A good example of this is reviewing Lillard, Booker and Jokic. While he is the frontrunner for MVP, Jokic also has a lot of outlier comparables right now, so while his RAT of 1.2 is healthy, seeing Lillard with a RAT higher than this in three different moments is a more positive sign. Booker has the larger avg. RAT of the three, but this is skewed by comparing against his SI /2681 which is a game-winner from the bubble and carries that extra value.
Let’s take a look at the three All-Stars from the title-favorite Brooklyn Nets: Durant, Harden, and Irving. All three have a nice RAT, but Kyrie comes in a touch higher. If you want to have some exposure to a team making a long playoff run, it might make sense to grab the Irving SS and look for other moments for Harden & Durant.
This has already run a lot longer than I ever anticipate these daily emails to be, but I want to use this first week or so to really introduce a lot of the tools and get everyone comfortable using them!
Mind... Blown...