Your extensive use of Market cap in your analyses lends to the necessity for accuracy of this figure. However, I don't think your definition of market cap is very accurate. Sometimes when you apply the same definition (such as market cap) broadly across a population, you can expect the resulting data comparisons to be relatively accurate, but not necessarily absolutely accurate. However, when you take the product of the lowest for sale price and the moment population, the resulting market cap can swing wildly intraday as the lowest for sale price changes. There are many reasons for why a seller would pick a low price, or try to get a higher price, but your market cap definition does not attempt to account for minimum sales price inconsistencies or variations in seller motivation. Generally, the market cap is equal to the product of the share price and the number of outstanding shares. In the stock market it's easy because all the shares have the same value. It seems as though you use this simple definition incorrectly in Top Shots since each share price (i.e. moment) does not have equal value (lower serial numbers generally have higher value, as you've noted). Thus the true market cap is the sum of what each moment would sell for in the open market. Of course, this cannot be calculated without taking liberal assumptions (since not all serial numbers are for sale for a given moment), but we can employ other statistical methodologies to approximate the market value of the moments given those that are for sale. Perhaps taking the simple mean (or median) for sale price multiplied by the total number of serial numbers is a better approximation of market cap. Or perhaps you can apply your "Better Value Strategy" to remove the outlier for sale prices, and then apply an averaging methodology to find the better market cap? I'm not a statistician, so I'm sure there are many more elegant ways to model the data to improve the accuracy of the market cap metric for the purposes of your analyses.
Amazing article. Love the scientific method to the research.
Your extensive use of Market cap in your analyses lends to the necessity for accuracy of this figure. However, I don't think your definition of market cap is very accurate. Sometimes when you apply the same definition (such as market cap) broadly across a population, you can expect the resulting data comparisons to be relatively accurate, but not necessarily absolutely accurate. However, when you take the product of the lowest for sale price and the moment population, the resulting market cap can swing wildly intraday as the lowest for sale price changes. There are many reasons for why a seller would pick a low price, or try to get a higher price, but your market cap definition does not attempt to account for minimum sales price inconsistencies or variations in seller motivation. Generally, the market cap is equal to the product of the share price and the number of outstanding shares. In the stock market it's easy because all the shares have the same value. It seems as though you use this simple definition incorrectly in Top Shots since each share price (i.e. moment) does not have equal value (lower serial numbers generally have higher value, as you've noted). Thus the true market cap is the sum of what each moment would sell for in the open market. Of course, this cannot be calculated without taking liberal assumptions (since not all serial numbers are for sale for a given moment), but we can employ other statistical methodologies to approximate the market value of the moments given those that are for sale. Perhaps taking the simple mean (or median) for sale price multiplied by the total number of serial numbers is a better approximation of market cap. Or perhaps you can apply your "Better Value Strategy" to remove the outlier for sale prices, and then apply an averaging methodology to find the better market cap? I'm not a statistician, so I'm sure there are many more elegant ways to model the data to improve the accuracy of the market cap metric for the purposes of your analyses.