The HoodCar Card Index (HCI) is a daily benchmark that tracks the price of graded PSA 10 trading cards by category, computed from verified sold listings in HoodCar's ledger. This document is the official rulebook: it defines what the HCI measures, how it is calculated, how often it updates, and how it is governed. It is written to align, on a proportionate basis, with the IOSCO Principles for Financial Benchmarks.
The HCI measures the central tendency of realized sale prices for top-grade (PSA 10) graded cards within defined collecting categories. It is designed to answer one question consistently over time: what does the typical PSA 10 card in this category actually sell for today? The HCI is a price benchmark, not an investable product, and HoodCar does not offer any security, fund, or derivative based on it.
The HCI is published as five category sub-indices and one composite. Symbols are HoodCar conventions for display and citation; they are not exchange tickers.
| Symbol | Index | Coverage |
|---|---|---|
HCI | HCI Composite | Equal-weighted blend of the five category sub-indices |
HCI-PKMN | HCI Pokémon | Graded Pokémon / TCG |
HCI-BKB | HCI Basketball | Graded basketball |
HCI-BB | HCI Baseball | Graded baseball |
HCI-FB | HCI Football | Graded football |
HCI-SOC | HCI Soccer | Graded soccer (broad graded basket until dedicated coverage) |
A sale is eligible for an HCI category on a given day if it meets all of the following:
$200 and $50,000. This excludes penny-auction noise and one-off ultra-high-end sales that would distort a daily median.The HCI is computed exclusively from HoodCar's sold_ledger — an append-only record of verified completed sales captured from public marketplaces. The ledger only grows forward; prior values are never back-filled, so the index has a continuous, auditable history that deepens each day. Raw transaction rows are proprietary; only the aggregated index is published.
For each category and each calendar day, the HCI value is the median realized PSA 10 price of all eligible sales in a rolling 45-day trailing window:
The median is used rather than the mean because it is robust to outliers — a single $40,000 sale does not move the benchmark the way it would move an average. The published headline value is denominated in U.S. dollars, which keeps it directly legible (the typical PSA 10 sells for $X).
For users who prefer a conventional index level, each series can be expressed relative to its base date:
Base date: June 3, 2026. Base level: 1000.00. The HCI composite is the equal-weighted average of the five category levels.
Because sold_ledger is append-only, normal daily updates are additive and do not restate history. A correction is issued only if a data-integrity error is found (e.g., a mis-graded or duplicate sale). Corrections are applied prospectively from the date identified, logged with a timestamp and reason, and material corrections are noted on the index page. The HCI is never silently revised.
Hood Intelligence Corp. is the Administrator of the HCI and is responsible for the methodology, calculation, and publication. Governance follows the IOSCO principles on a proportionate basis appropriate to a collectibles benchmark:
The HCI tracks an illiquid, collector-driven market with thin daily volume in some categories; values can be volatile and a category's median can move on a small number of sales. The HCI is provided for informational purposes only and is not investment, financial, or purchasing advice, and is not a recommendation to buy or sell any item. HoodCar is not a registered investment adviser or benchmark administrator under any regulatory regime, and the HCI is not currently used as a benchmark in any regulated financial instrument. Past index levels do not predict future values.
The HCI is published free for viewing and citation:
https://data.hoodcar.com/api/hci-indexWhen citing the HCI, please attribute it as "HoodCar Card Index (HCI), Hood Intelligence Corp." and link to this methodology.