Has the MCU's Wonder Man announcement sparked a turnaround for Avengers #9 or is this just a dead cat bounce? A dead cat bounce is a sharp, but short-lived upward bounce in value for a stock that is generally considered to be of low-value. The dead cat bounce happens to stocks that have weak underlying fundamentals and are unlikely to recover long-term even if the overall market improves. It's hard to know if it's a dead cat bounce at the moment it happens and we're only going to know in hindsight.
The Silver Age CPI has nearly 20% of its value since late 2022.
Right now, key issues from the Silver Age have been stuck in a long-running bear market. GoCollect's Silver Age Collectible Price Index has lost nearly 20% of its value since September 2022 meeting the definition of a bear market (a bear market exists when a market index falls by 20% or more from its most recent high).
Avengers #9 reached all-time highs in June 2022.
Although not valuable enough to be included in the Silver Age CPI, Avengers #9 has also been steadily declining over the past few years. For example, if you take a closer look at the most common grade on the CGC Census for Avengers #9 (a 4.0), you can see that that a 4.0 reached an all-time high of $428 in June 2022 near the height of the "comic boom."
You could purchase a CGC 4.0 for less than $99 in September 2024.
Since then, the value of a 4.0 has declined precipitously reaching a five-year low on September 18th with the 4.0 below selling on Hake's Auctions for just $93 after receiving 12 bids:
And then a week later, on September 25th, another 4.0 sold on eBay for just $93 after receiving 15 bids:
I think these two buyers got great deals. While Avengers #9 isn't a top-tier Silver Age key, this is still a single digit Avengers issue and does contain the first appearance of a significant character who is about to receive his own Disney+ series.
Since then, however, we see evidence of a bounce. Because graded copies of Avengers #9 are relatively rare (there are only 1,897 universal blue label copies on the CGC Census), there isn't a lot of sales data to evaluate recent trends; however, from the data that we do have from GoCollect, we can observe a bounce in Avengers #9 recent weeks. On October 30th, a 4.0 sold for $219:
Furthermore, the 30-day average for a 4.0 ($184) is significantly higher than the 90-day average ($147) or the one-year average ($152).
There's a 20% difference between the 30-day and 90-day average (again, I acknowledge we have very few data points) here. Similarly, the 30-day average for a CGC 6.0 is $360; the 90-day average for 6.0 is only $280 or a 23% difference.
Only time will tell if this leap in value is a dead cat's bounce; it could very well be a fleeting boost from the Disney+ announcement. On the other hand, this is still a great Silver Age key issue, and, if you're looking to hold onto this book for the long-term, you'll most likely get a great ROI.
