PSA/DNA Certified 89% of These. Here's Who Got the Rest.

If you have bought a certified autograph in the last decade you probably assumed PSA/DNA was the default, and the numbers here say you were right. Across everything this index is currently tracking, PSA/DNA accounts for 89.4% of listings. JSA has 6.9%, Beckett 2.1%, CGC 1.6%.

Eleven of our eighteen signer categories are 99% or more PSA. Seven of them - music, racing, golf, wrestling, hockey, tennis and film - are literally 100%. Not one listing certified by anybody else.

So the question worth asking is not who leads. It is where the exceptions are, because there are six of them and they are not random. Here are eleven corners of this market and what certifies them.

The Team of 11

1. Baseball - 4,206 listings, 97.4% PSA/DNA. The biggest category on the index and the least surprising. JSA has 109 listings here. Beckett has one. This is the heartland and it is not contested.
2. Star Trek - 12.2% PSA/DNA. The complete inversion. JSA holds 641 of 730 listings in this category, which is the single most lopsided result on the whole index and it runs the opposite way to everything else.
3. William Shatner - 598 JSA, 33 PSA/DNA. And here is why. Shatner alone is most of Star Trek, and his 476 JSA-certified photographs are the largest non-PSA holding of anything by anyone on this site. One prolific signer with a long-running signing arrangement can tilt an entire category, and this is what that looks like in the data.
4. Comics - CGC 59.4%. The one category where a specialist beats the generalist outright. CGC grades the comic book itself and slabs the signature with it, which is a different product from authenticating a signature on its own, and comic buyers clearly want the book graded.
5. Jim Lee - 77 CGC, 10 PSA/DNA. The cleanest illustration of that. Nearly eight to one for the comics-first authenticator.
6. Stan Lee - 141 CGC, 120 PSA/DNA. And the exception to the exception. The most-listed signer on this index splits almost down the middle, because his signature turns up on comics and on everything else - photos, posters, figures - and the thing being signed decides who certifies it.
7. Soccer - Beckett 51.7%. The only sport PSA does not lead. Beckett has 215 listings to PSA's 186.
8. Cristiano Ronaldo - 82 Beckett, 9 PSA/DNA, against Pelé at 84 PSA/DNA, 32 Beckett. Same sport, opposite answers. Ronaldo's material is modern and mostly authenticated where modern soccer memorabilia gets authenticated; Pelé's has been circulating for decades and was certified under different conditions.
9. Horror - 40% PSA, 38% Beckett, 22% JSA. The only genuinely three-way category on the index, with no authenticator holding even half. If you collect horror you are already used to reading three different labels.
10. Cards 97.3% PSA. Photos 75.4%. Forget the sport for a moment: the format predicts the certifier better than the category does. A signed card is a graded-card product and goes where graded cards go. A signed photograph is a different market with more competition in it.
11. SGC - one listing. Out of 13,998. A single Nolan Ryan card, asking $3,999. On an index this size that is not a market share, it is a rounding error.

The pattern nobody set out to create

Look at the non-PSA concentrations and the same shape keeps appearing: they cluster around signers who did a lot of organised in-person signing, and around items where a rival authenticator does something PSA does not.

The living-versus-gone split shows up inside categories, which is the detail we did not expect. In horror, Vincent Price (died 1993) runs JSA 15, Beckett 12, PSA 7, and Christopher Lee (died 2015) is much the same. But Jamie Lee Curtis, still very much working, is PSA 24 out of 25.

Same again in Batman. Adam West signed for years at conventions and comes in at JSA 56, PSA 38. Cesar Romero, who died in 1994 and signed nothing at a modern convention, is 16 out of 16 PSA.

And in Star Wars, Mark Hamill is JSA 39 to PSA 30 while Harrison Ford, who has signed comparatively little in public, is PSA 39 of 41.

We should be careful here. This index counts what is listed; it does not know why a seller chose one authenticator over another. The in-person-signing explanation fits the pattern well and it is the one the hobby would give you, but it is an explanation of the numbers rather than something the numbers prove on their own.

What this is worth knowing for

Two practical things fall out of it.

If you are shopping in one of the eleven near-total categories, filtering for PSA/DNA costs you almost nothing, because there is almost nothing else. If you are shopping horror, soccer, comics, Star Trek, Star Wars or Batman and you filter that way, you are hiding somewhere between 40% and 88% of what is available.

And a non-PSA label in one of those corners is not a warning sign. The whole Star Trek category being JSA does not make Star Trek autographs suspect - it makes JSA the normal label there, and a collector who has learned "PSA or nothing" from the baseball market will misread it.

Every figure here comes from what this index was tracking when the piece was written. You can check any of it: the signer pages break down what is listed and what has sold, and how the index works explains where the numbers come from. Signers who also appear on vintage trading cards link across to NonSportCardIndex.