Why the sample size matters more than the median

What a small sample does

With four comparable listings, one seller who has priced their item absurdly moves the median by a quarter. With forty, they move it by nothing.

The median is already the robust choice, which is why it is used rather than the average. Robust is not the same as reliable when there is almost nothing to be robust about.

Read the spread as well

Min and Max tell you whether the market agrees with itself.

• Tight spread, decent sample: a real going rate. Price near it and expect to sell.
• Wide spread: condition, model or completeness matters more than you assumed, and the median is an average of things that are not really the same item.
• Tight spread, tiny sample: coincidence. Do not read it as agreement.

Setting the threshold

Min sample size in Settings is the floor below which Flogit declines to answer. Lowering it makes it answer more often; it does not make the answers truer.

Raise it if you sell common items and want only confident numbers. Lower it if you deal in rare things and would rather have a weak signal than none, knowing it is weak.

Rare items are genuinely hard

Some things have no market to read: one of a kind, a niche collectible, a piece nobody else is selling this month. No tool can price those, and one that pretends to is worse than one that admits it.

For those, your own past sales are the better signal. They appear in the Market block as real sold prices rather than asking prices.

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