There are 3 types of cards in the hobby: 1. GOAT cards that the masses will always gravitate to no matter how long they’ve been retired. Ruth, Mantle, Jordan, Gretzky, Brady, etc. 2. Hall of Fame players that are not considered GOATS but they will always appeal to a certain group of collectors who grew up when they played. Hakeem, Gwynn, Marino, Jagr, etc. 3. The rest of the player cards will eventually be worthless and will lose demand as each player retires. Remember when everyone wanted a Todd Van Poppel rookie in 1991? We could be talking about Zion in those terms in 10 years.
@@RainStryke Yeah, but that's short-term. Nobody knows what the future holds for that stuff or that particular player. Vintage HOF, on the other hand, can maintain and increase in value, because they are proven players who can be considered an investment. It's the difference in investing and speculating.
Collecting for 30 years - top 10 in my collection - Emmitt Smith, Tim Duncan, Shaquille O'Neal, Michael Jordan, Nolan Ryan, Tom Brady, Mickey Mantle, Joe Montana, Wayne Gretzky and Larry Bird
I've been telling people for the last 2-3 years that we're going to hit a junk slab market because people grade everything and expect it to jump in value 10x just because its been slabbed. The only people making out when you grade the cards is the grading companies. We're also going to repeat the junk wax era with all these patch/autos/paralells being added to products every year to drive up the cost of boxes. Remember when a 1/1 meant there was only 1? now you have up to 8 or 9 1/1's of the same player in some of these products. Prime example would be Prizm, you have like 4 or 5 from the base set, then you have the spin offs like no huddle, asia tmall, ect that have their own 1/1's.. Save your money now and wait for the next collapse and then just buy everything for pennies on the dollar like you can 90's wax.
Many of us are in the grading game because of all of the low-life scumbags in the hobby who have trimmed and altered cards. Most all of us have been burned by, seemingly, nice dealers. Yes, i know some altered cards slip by grading companies, but without the grading companies the trimming, doctoring and counterfeiting would be beyond-rampant. Blame the scumbag pieces of shit who brought us to this point...
@@basdfef4775 that is the dumbest statement i ever heard in my life... you are literally giving an excuse to print more 1/1's which takes away from it being a 1/1.
The question I would like to know and I think we should be allowed to know is total print runs? If you are buying stocks in a company, you would want to know how many total shares there are. Stock splits (doubling the number of shares) lowers the value of a stock. We will never have true value understanding until we have print run numbers.
If only I could short these cards like I could short a stock.... One day, in the not too distant futute we'll be seeing slabs of Zion, JA, RJ, Lamelo, Ant Man, etc. in the $1 box. The real winner here is PSA.
So everything that everyone said about the overprinting was right all along. A lot of folks been saying this a year ago. Only serial numbered stuff are what will be worth going forward. This is why you just collect without always worrying about monetary value. Not everything will be gaining super value.
@tradingcardsimmortal3893 There's a good chance of that. For anything to at least maintain value and potentially be worth anything, demand has to be strong enough to outweigh supply.
@tradingcardsimmortal3893Commons, graded or not, will be held down by supply, yes. Serial numbered and variations will be what are unique to own where there will be growth potential.
@@thomasc1753 Depends on how modern the cards are and who the player is. Most numbered cards produced nowadays won't likely amount to much, considering they now mostly even overprint numbered cards with every variation imaginable. I do think 90s numbered cards of HOF players and upcoming surefire HOF players will maintain and increase in value.
@@dox42o I’m talking rookies or rarer inserts. Especially if I a player is a legend or accomplished something. Again it doesn’t have to be worth that much, not everything has to be worth thousands.
Great video. A lot of good points. The one thing that I wonder about is how many of those graded cards were cracked and sent back trying to get grade bumps. Unless it's serial numbered it's really hard for a grading company to tell how many times that happens. That's why unless a very rare insert or serial numbered card, the pop count I think is hard to navigate. For me personally I would like most of my cards graded just for preservation purposes.
For your last sentence, same. When I saw Rare Edition at the Chantilly show, I was really impressed and I think you would like them. They give you an option to label the slab as 'PC', the slabs are very secure, and they look good and have QR codes/NFC tech to easily view grading information with your phone.
It’s not necessarily about the players performance as it is about their fame. Just look at the Geoff Wilson RC for $150. He’s never going to win a championship. There are way more people interested in Luka than in Wayde and that’ll be true for a long time, and therefore will prop up his value relative to others. Once a players popularity fades for various reasons then absolutely the prices will fall, and the more cards out there the harder it’ll fall. I have no graded cards in my pc, but I would grade to sell as long as there is premium for raw vs expected grade. Thanks for the data dive and making this video
Always enjoy your videos T-Pot. This was a nice analysis. I'm right with you on all this. Too many parallels, too many slabs. Not enough long term demand to make most of those worth much long term.
Love the analysis T-Pot. My question is going to be more along the lines of "which card will be the iconic card?". The '52 is the iconic baseball card for Mickey Mantle, but he had an extensive career, and at least back in those days, there weren't the exhaustive number of parallels as we have now. Jordan has his iconic Fleer card. So, what makes a card "iconic" and despite all the serial numbered cards, we all have to ask the question...which one will achieve that iconic status?
I pick my top 10 favorite players of all time in each sport, mostly off of my own nostalgia, but also in line with a lot of the greats. That's 80% of my targeted funds. #'d, refractors, RC's, Autos are my stick to. I feel pretty safe with this approach, but I've learned over 30 years of collecting on and off.
Its early, but a full year later the "barbershop" card that he hates has more than doubled. The Startups card that he loves has gone up too, but at a slightly lower rate. If anything, the startups set will be a forgotten set. I already dont remember it
I agree with several of your concerns but IF Fanatics can do what they say they can do and 10x the hobby (or even 5x would be huge) then the demand for these slabs will remain strong and help buoy prices or even raise them slightly
Hoping for a miracle they need awesome hits in lots of boxes and to bring cards to inner city’s and places with issues in America sell cards not drugs!
Fanatics wants to 10x their revenue. Not the amount of people in the hobby. They could care less if it grows just as long as people spend more money on their products. That they will also print more of.
As a real investor for a living who was out of cards for about 20yrs until 2020, it took me about 5mins to figure out what you said in this video. It's very obviously true
The real question here is not if, but when and how much will the market continue to drop. There just simply aren't enough collectors to meet the supply. My guess is we have another 60-80% to drop.
Grades are totally inconsistent and every company has had major, major problems with corruption, grading of altered or fake cards, and favoritism in grade distribution to preferred customers. Unfortunately, because 95% of the people in this hobby are incredibly dense, the con artists continue to profit and erode the hobby. There is so much corruption it’s hard to know where to start. So even aside from market factors, there’s the issue of slabbed cards carrying no true integrity as to the condition or even authenticity of the card.
When everything’s premium, nothing is premium. Base cards, un-numbered parallel colors, 1/1, 1/10, 1/25, 1/50, 1/100, 1/250, 1/500 all of the exact same card means there are literally many thousands of the same card produced and immediately slabbed every year. Will people 60 years from now who aren’t opening packs find these gimmicks as enticing as you do when you break a box or will they just see them as junk? Compare that to base cards of icons that there are literally single digit numbers of in a PSA 9-10 because they weren’t seen as investments in the 60s.
It's humorous how some folks I guess keep bashing themselves in the head over the basics of general market dynamics....buy the good stocks in the stock market ~try to minimize the bad ones.The better the stock the brighter the future. The evidence shows prices being paid continuously for specific players and issues in high end auctions each and every month.... stay the course with that strata. I always enjoy your earnest efforts T-pot... thank u.
Hey Teapot I have been collecting sports cards for 45 years basically I started in the junk wax era and I have come to the conclusion that this new era of card collecting. In other words this era is just as over produced as the junk wax era was! Just go in every major retail store and the shelves are stacked plum full of Cards all the time! I don't have to check ✔️ the Data because it's right in front of my eyes and everyone's eyes!
you’re not a collector if you’re in it to make money, you’re a business person. i believe these people don’t know what they’re doing, because they only know what’s hot at the time and not the actual art of collecting. so, i’m glad a lot of these cards are worthless now. gives me like me who like to actually collect get them for way cheap. HOW IT SHOULD BE.
I know myself I like to have a diverse collection but about 40% is marvel/DC cards and 40% is a mix between basketball, football & baseball. The last 20% are a eclectic mix of wrestling boxing golf racing stickers military cartoons etc lol but I also have a small comic book collection mainly 1st 5 issues of punisher cgc and the 1st 7 or 8 of second series cgc. And probably up to 80 or so of punisher bagged and boarded. As far as slabs go I probably have about 1500 or so in my personal collection and a few hundred in penny sleeves inside of top loaders. I got some great cards all across the board. I usually check pop count on a card before I buy it. I like to find odd cards that are super low pops as well as most of your common cards that have higher pop counts
As online sales rise, grading is going to become even more necessary. Buying cards is too much fun to be stopped. Just like you can put a warning on a cigarette box, or explain the proper odds in picking football games, people are going to do what they want if they are having fun, money be damned.
Gambling is always fun when you are winning. This hobby attracts the dumbest people from society, so it may take some time before people realize they are no longer winning.
How about the fact that when grading is all automated and the subjectivity removed, these current grades may become irrelevant and require grading under the "new" universal system. Who knows how some cards will regrade. That's when we'll REALLY look at this as the junk slab era in my opinion😬
I began collecting cards in the 90s. It was fun back then and even kids did it. I remember scoring high-dollar Michael Jordan's and having the joy of the card shop offer me anything in the store for them. The market has changed. It's kind of a joke now. It's no longer a collect market. It's become more of a buy and flip market. Too many scams going on. I miss the days of being able to open a regular pack of cards and get something special. I won't spend any more money on sports cards. I've recently sold off valuable items in my collection and put it into a savings account. I'd much rather have it there where it's actually gaining interest then losing value sitting at home.
BCCG really added to the junk slab era. Which started 20 years or so ago. Anything and everything seemed to be graaded when Beckett offered that junk level. Either way, Check the PSA pop 1982 ripken base vs 2020 luis robert. Same amount graded, but the gem rate is 544 ripken 18000 robert.
The person at Beckett who thought it was a good idea to have a confusing alphabet salad of BGS, BVG and BCCG should have been taken behind the shed. Especially for the BCCG product...
Brock Purdy graded cards are SURGING!!!!! Mahomes Cracked ice contenders is up 20% from its crash bottom low too! Graded cards to the moon! Why in the hell are the card industry cheerleaders talking shit on the industry?
My Rule # 1. Spend what you can afford to lose in the sports card market. Never buy If you think your gonna get rich from collecting cards. Collect to collect as a hobby with your friends kid’s family etc. and enjoy it for your personal gratification. Big names and attention has destroyed the hobby for some to make it unobtainable for people as it has become elite and very high dollar. Then also there is plenty of great people who brought it back to life for young and old. Also If some UA-camr or social media influencer in 10-20yrs Says whatever fad/craze was so great back then it becomes hot again. People that could not buy them can now get that feeling and get the nostalgia factor and that impacts the market and it skyrockets from demand. You said it perfectly the demand for certain players will disappear and the new players will keep the cycle going.
Everything you say is true. To me, the most sobering things you did was compare Luka to Dwayne and Blake to Zion (those are spot on comps). Dwayne and Blake were charismatic in their day, but apparently the nostalgia has not held (which is kind of your point). Junk slab is an interesting take. But the one stat that I never really digested is that there are 100k basketball cards graded each month. There are simply too many people in the hobby for the whole thing to go up in smoke. Brilliant analysis T-pot!
People, myself included started grading lower end rookies because not everyone can afford a $856 Prizm ruby Doncic but would love to own a PSA 10 of his so they'll spend $110 for his NBA Hoops card. I grade for myself and to sell so if they're all worthless in the end it's still been fun collecting, That's what the hobby was intended to do in the first place, me and my father bonded over sports cards so many times and I was starting to with my son until many started buying all the stock at Target/Walmart, talk about no future... Who are the young kids buying sports cards? There is no future without the new collectors/young collectors and greed has been killing the hobby since the pandemic.
I feel no cards under $50 raw should ever be graded. The card’s scarcity and player should be able to stand on its own first. . . Period! The grade should never overtake the card itself. All this junk wax grading of $2-5 cards is a joke where shortly thereafter for many they are selling for less than the grading cost to begin with! For example, let’s say I pay $15 to grade a $3 card. . . And it sells eventually for $10. Does that mean that the raw card is now worth NEGATIVE $8? Raw cards will never be worth a negative value!
For pure collecting, grade and collect who you want. That's collecting. However, if you want to collect AND keep value/investing in mind, buy only highest grade HOF rookies for modern and ultra modern (~1983+) and buy mid to high grade rookies for vintage (pre-1980) and pre-war (pre-1948). Simple.
I suggest buying non-sport Garbage Paul kids and Wacky packages which have a finite market maker that has existed for a super long time. Demand and popularity has done nothing but go up in the in the modern era for new production cards. Fun and easy to collect. Stop thinking you’re retiring on your collection…..”fool’s gold”.
Yeah, there is no card scarcity anymore. Even a 1/1 of your favorite player, how many 1/1 does he have now? How many this year? How many will he have. People spending 5 and 6 figures (or 7) for any modern card are crazy. I saw the prices for all of the, what I consider very average, NFL young QBs the last few years…unless people are just speculating how are they ever supposed to justify that price? Anyway, I collect a single sport (soccer), I only collect 10s and if I buy something as a single it’s going to have an auto. In my collection I’ve purchased exactly 2 cards…A Messi auto grade 10, a CR7 auto grade 10. Both under 1k and it’s not an investment. I like having them, looking at them, showing them off. For the millionth time, sports cards are not an investment.
Geoff Wilson needs to watch this a couple times and have a serious think. Then take action to protect himself, and warn his followers, before the ultra-modern market collapses under its own weight.
If the rate PSA was charging around the Covid Card Boom (somewhere around 100$ a card) wasn’t an indicator of what was coming down the line then the obvious was simply being ignored.
This is along the lines of things I have been thinking about. I started collecting in the "junk wax" era of the late 80s - so called because they printed millions of each card. But is today all that much different with the printing of so many different sets and so many parallels in each set.?
Will this include vintage like early 70s or further back? I wouldn't mind if prices lowered as I've dreamed of doing 1971 (PSA 7 HOFers and the rest raw in binder/pages)!
When the baby boomers retired, you saw massive collections of raw cards. When the millennials retire, your going to need a warehouse to store your new collection of plastic.
Maybe I could get some vintage hall of famers graded. IF .People would stop sending in complete worthless garbage to be graded and backing up the services.
It would be interesting to try to figure out how many cards are in PSA Set Registry. I have 2360 graded cards in my graded collection (99% not for sale)-but only 19 produced since 2014. For those of you holding psa 10 Prizm Luka’s I look forward to buying one of them in 5-10 years for $10.
That way you never have to worry about pop count. And if you’re looking to hold value better only buy from the top sets. My purchases are only Prizm, optic, and obsidian-along with any very high end product like NT. Everything else is dorky.
I believe that all cards in all sports, between the late end of 2019 through the early months of 2021, should not be counted in the sale value. The sale value for cards during that time frame is WAY over value. That also includes non-sports cards as well.
In the long term the value of the actual card takes over rather than the slab. The discussion you had on slab demand on the other hand is tricky. Although the average collect might want 100 to 200 slabs, some collectors want 1000 slabs which skews averages compared to the other end of the normal distribution which would be collectors whom want zero.
Great video and commentary! In my opinion, if you buy the types of cards of current players you referenced today, you should do so either because you want to own that card forever as a part of your PC or because you want to speculate with the understanding that the card could end up in the bargain bin. Otherwise, you are setting yourself up for disappointment.
Thanks for putting all this info together. I knew the numbers were big but seeing put into this kind of context is really valuable. Really puts things into perspective. Really love these videos every Saturday.
Spprt card investing is not simple at all, and there are many lessons and pitfalls along way... Volatility and speculation are 2 big ones, but anre important lesson for any type of investing. Have fun, but don't go in debt doing it, have some patience.
I'm staying away from pretty much everything modern. That Luka Prizm PSA 10 I could honestly see being a $25 card. There's just way too many of em, same with all the parallels, many of which are ugly anyways.
I watched some guy open a package of 100 plus psa submissions all of Trout Select 2013 and other base cards. I couldn’t understand the reasoning and this was when PSA prices were through the roof. Can’t be good for the hobby overall.
FYI-You're Wade refractor sale for $70 is incorrect-the description lists the card as a PSA 10 when it is actually a PSA 9-Wanted to clear this up for everyone watching,thanks.
Imagine buying Melo Ball cards for an investment. He will never be anything close to D Wade and Wade sells for 1/20 of LeBron. Ball’s cards will worth less than Ray Allen and he sells for like 1/50 Lebron.
Has new collectors continue to come into the hobby rated cards are just going to get bigger and more popular. They've been around for a while. Yes, but I feel they've only started to really show where you're going to be in the future
I’m not sure how accurate those numbers are with median number of slabs, and average for people who “collect” basketball. It kinda skews it. I’m a collector, never been to national, and I have over 1300 slabs, and some people collect multiple sports. So it’s apples to oranges. I bet a lot of collectors have over 200 slabs.
Saw this coming for years. It felt like 1989 all over again. That's why I've been exclusively buying Nikola Jokic Rookie PSA 10's for the last 4 years. The Joker has been basically the only buy in the hobby.
The only problem with Jokic RC's is that they don't grade well because PSA is COMPLETELY BIASED about thick cards which IS ridiculous. It seems as if PSA starts at a PSA 8 on them and it goes down from there. SMH Almost all rare, high value Jokic RC's have thick cover stock. More people need to understand this before his cards skyrocket. He WILL continue to do the same things he has been doing for 5 years now. I ABSOLUTELY AGREE with you though. He is still a buy, even right now during the Championship honeymoon period.
PSA has created this Junk slab era by giving 10's like candies to a fat kid. When i look at my cards raw, i cannot see more than 5% of them who would get a real 10 (BGS) and no more than 0,1% a black label.
eventually you'll own those slabs in the form of an NFT and they'll be stored somewhere in a vault and you'll have the digital token to represent ownership - own as many slabs as you want and no storage needed
id be super curious about a similar analysis around baseball. baseball is such a regional sport that there are more players collected than basketball or football. its a lower cost of entry, generally.
The baseball stats are similar. I just used basketball to make it simpler and not a 45 minute video, but the same ideas would apply. Thanks for watching!
Fantastic analysis! Very hard to argue with any of the points you presented here. We are absolutely in a junk slab era right now (which is very different than the junk wax era, and I always disagree with people who say we’re in a junk wax era). I still like grading cards, and lately most of my subs to PSA have been 50% cards for my PC and 50% cards to flip, and if you look at the cards in subbing, the PC cards vs the flip cards couldn’t be more different. All my PC cards that I grade are things like Gold Refractors, Flair Showcase Legacy parallels, valuable rookies, and rare inserts. The ones to flip are mostly ultra modern shiny retail parallels of the top vets and rookies. When those come back from grading, they are immediately sold 100% of the time. The chances of any of those cards increasing or even holding value long term is so low, that it always makes sense to take the immediate profit and put that back into more cards for my PC.
@@michaelmazziano7 So using an emoji while writing a sentence is grammatically correct? You also forgot to use a period at the end of “your” and capitalize the word “The” to start the next sentence Mr Perfect.
Zion is the equivalent of othani. Watch what happens if and when he gets traded and forget it if he goes on a run. So many people spent so much money and were so excited about him that it won't take much for him to get hype and skyrocket
T-Pott, I made a card from your hair, and I slabbed it. I use your cologne to spray on it (don’t ask how I acquired it!)for sniffing purposes. I hope this doesn’t seem weird.
This is why I've only collected rare japanese baseball card's because the population is so low on high grades my last sub i got 4 10s all pop 1s limited edition or numbered and 1- 9 pop 1 all mlb players currently.
You're absolutely correct, the junk-slab era is here and The Sports Card Investor helped usher it in. Well done fellas!
sports card investor is so bad for cards
The biggest problem is everyone moves on to the next shiny upcoming prospect instead of putting money into tried and true tested veterans.
There are 3 types of cards in the hobby:
1. GOAT cards that the masses will always gravitate to no matter how long they’ve been retired. Ruth, Mantle, Jordan, Gretzky, Brady, etc.
2. Hall of Fame players that are not considered GOATS but they will always appeal to a certain group of collectors who grew up when they played. Hakeem, Gwynn, Marino, Jagr, etc.
3. The rest of the player cards will eventually be worthless and will lose demand as each player retires. Remember when everyone wanted a Todd Van Poppel rookie in 1991? We could be talking about Zion in those terms in 10 years.
We all vote with our wallet. For me, it's undoubtedly GOATS, but I also enjoy parking money in other HOF players.
Case hits keep some value, I mean... just look at the value of Henry Ruggs Downtowns.
@@RainStryke Yeah, but that's short-term. Nobody knows what the future holds for that stuff or that particular player. Vintage HOF, on the other hand, can maintain and increase in value, because they are proven players who can be considered an investment. It's the difference in investing and speculating.
@@RainStrykeCase hit inserts like Downtowns are exceptions because a lot of people collect the seys
@@RainStrykehow it's up ? Isn't he locked up in a cell 🤔
Collecting for 30 years - top 10 in my collection - Emmitt Smith, Tim Duncan, Shaquille O'Neal, Michael Jordan, Nolan Ryan, Tom Brady, Mickey Mantle, Joe Montana, Wayne Gretzky and Larry Bird
I've been telling people for the last 2-3 years that we're going to hit a junk slab market because people grade everything and expect it to jump in value 10x just because its been slabbed. The only people making out when you grade the cards is the grading companies. We're also going to repeat the junk wax era with all these patch/autos/paralells being added to products every year to drive up the cost of boxes. Remember when a 1/1 meant there was only 1? now you have up to 8 or 9 1/1's of the same player in some of these products. Prime example would be Prizm, you have like 4 or 5 from the base set, then you have the spin offs like no huddle, asia tmall, ect that have their own 1/1's.. Save your money now and wait for the next collapse and then just buy everything for pennies on the dollar like you can 90's wax.
i graded over 8,000 cards. its easy money.
Prizm true 1/1 is still worth more than two of those combined
Many of us are in the grading game because of all of the low-life scumbags in the hobby who have trimmed and altered cards. Most all of us have been burned by, seemingly, nice dealers. Yes, i know some altered cards slip by grading companies, but without the grading companies the trimming, doctoring and counterfeiting would be beyond-rampant. Blame the scumbag pieces of shit who brought us to this point...
@@basdfef4775 that is the dumbest statement i ever heard in my life... you are literally giving an excuse to print more 1/1's which takes away from it being a 1/1.
Wander Franco and Julio Rodriguez alone, along with people blowing thousands of dollars on unproven rookies who are ranked like 30th lol
The question I would like to know and I think we should be allowed to know is total print runs? If you are buying stocks in a company, you would want to know how many total shares there are. Stock splits (doubling the number of shares) lowers the value of a stock. We will never have true value understanding until we have print run numbers.
If only I could short these cards like I could short a stock....
One day, in the not too distant futute we'll be seeing slabs of Zion, JA, RJ, Lamelo, Ant Man, etc. in the $1 box.
The real winner here is PSA.
Thanks for actually doing the grunt work to show what so many of us knew and so many more choose to ignore. Time will prove you are totally correct.
We will be burying junk slabs in the desert like we did Nintendo cartridges back in the day.
So everything that everyone said about the overprinting was right all along. A lot of folks been saying this a year ago. Only serial numbered stuff are what will be worth going forward. This is why you just collect without always worrying about monetary value. Not everything will be gaining super value.
@tradingcardsimmortal3893 There's a good chance of that. For anything to at least maintain value and potentially be worth anything, demand has to be strong enough to outweigh supply.
@tradingcardsimmortal3893Commons, graded or not, will be held down by supply, yes.
Serial numbered and variations will be what are unique to own where there will be growth potential.
Being numbered means nothing, 90s wax had numbered cards and most are in dollar bins at card shows
@@thomasc1753 Depends on how modern the cards are and who the player is. Most numbered cards produced nowadays won't likely amount to much, considering they now mostly even overprint numbered cards with every variation imaginable. I do think 90s numbered cards of HOF players and upcoming surefire HOF players will maintain and increase in value.
@@dox42o I’m talking rookies or rarer inserts. Especially if I a player is a legend or accomplished something. Again it doesn’t have to be worth that much, not everything has to be worth thousands.
Great video. A lot of good points. The one thing that I wonder about is how many of those graded cards were cracked and sent back trying to get grade bumps. Unless it's serial numbered it's really hard for a grading company to tell how many times that happens. That's why unless a very rare insert or serial numbered card, the pop count I think is hard to navigate. For me personally I would like most of my cards graded just for preservation purposes.
For your last sentence, same. When I saw Rare Edition at the Chantilly show, I was really impressed and I think you would like them. They give you an option to label the slab as 'PC', the slabs are very secure, and they look good and have QR codes/NFC tech to easily view grading information with your phone.
Well, thanks for this frightening and sobering message, early on a Saturday morning. Gotdamn TeePot! I haven't even had my morning coffee!! Lol.
It’s not necessarily about the players performance as it is about their fame. Just look at the Geoff Wilson RC for $150. He’s never going to win a championship. There are way more people interested in Luka than in Wayde and that’ll be true for a long time, and therefore will prop up his value relative to others. Once a players popularity fades for various reasons then absolutely the prices will fall, and the more cards out there the harder it’ll fall. I have no graded cards in my pc, but I would grade to sell as long as there is premium for raw vs expected grade. Thanks for the data dive and making this video
Always enjoy your videos T-Pot. This was a nice analysis. I'm right with you on all this. Too many parallels, too many slabs. Not enough long term demand to make most of those worth much long term.
Love the analysis T-Pot. My question is going to be more along the lines of "which card will be the iconic card?". The '52 is the iconic baseball card for Mickey Mantle, but he had an extensive career, and at least back in those days, there weren't the exhaustive number of parallels as we have now. Jordan has his iconic Fleer card. So, what makes a card "iconic" and despite all the serial numbered cards, we all have to ask the question...which one will achieve that iconic status?
Love how u always think outside the box!! Numbers dont lie and not everyone puts them into perspective keep up the "outside the box perspective"!!
I pick my top 10 favorite players of all time in each sport, mostly off of my own nostalgia, but also in line with a lot of the greats. That's 80% of my targeted funds. #'d, refractors, RC's, Autos are my stick to. I feel pretty safe with this approach, but I've learned over 30 years of collecting on and off.
I said it a year or so ago that the junk slab era was on the horizon. 2020/21 people were grading EVERYTHING and multiple of the same ones.
Its early, but a full year later the "barbershop" card that he hates has more than doubled. The Startups card that he loves has gone up too, but at a slightly lower rate. If anything, the startups set will be a forgotten set. I already dont remember it
I agree with several of your concerns but IF Fanatics can do what they say they can do and 10x the hobby (or even 5x would be huge) then the demand for these slabs will remain strong and help buoy prices or even raise them slightly
Hoping for a miracle they need awesome hits in lots of boxes and to bring cards to inner city’s and places with issues in America sell cards not drugs!
Fanatics wants to 10x their revenue. Not the amount of people in the hobby. They could care less if it grows just as long as people spend more money on their products. That they will also print more of.
I’m not sure they’ll 10x the hobby. They will 10x their share , including profits, by monopolizing certain aspects.
Fanatics is dreaming. They won't even 2x the hobby.
Hobby is only getting smaller since Fanatics took over.
@@KingKuba1313 Smaller? How so?
As a real investor for a living who was out of cards for about 20yrs until 2020, it took me about 5mins to figure out what you said in this video. It's very obviously true
The real question here is not if, but when and how much will the market continue to drop. There just simply aren't enough collectors to meet the supply.
My guess is we have another 60-80% to drop.
For basketball probably not that much more since most are already worthless.
But let me know when mcdavid yg base cards psa 10s are $1....
Grades are totally inconsistent and every company has had major, major problems with corruption, grading of altered or fake cards, and favoritism in grade distribution to preferred customers. Unfortunately, because 95% of the people in this hobby are incredibly dense, the con artists continue to profit and erode the hobby. There is so much corruption it’s hard to know where to start. So even aside from market factors, there’s the issue of slabbed cards carrying no true integrity as to the condition or even authenticity of the card.
People slabbing base cards or high pop cards is the cause , no one wants that junk
yes. we would need 10,000 more collectors every month. which will not happen. and the amount of fake brady/jordan/shaq cards wont help.
When everything’s premium, nothing is premium. Base cards, un-numbered parallel colors, 1/1, 1/10, 1/25, 1/50, 1/100, 1/250, 1/500 all of the exact same card means there are literally many thousands of the same card produced and immediately slabbed every year. Will people 60 years from now who aren’t opening packs find these gimmicks as enticing as you do when you break a box or will they just see them as junk? Compare that to base cards of icons that there are literally single digit numbers of in a PSA 9-10 because they weren’t seen as investments in the 60s.
Yes this is the real junk wax era and the prices for the junk is unbelievable!
So many people just throwing away money
It's humorous how some folks I guess keep bashing themselves in the head over the basics of general market dynamics....buy the good stocks in the stock market ~try to minimize the bad ones.The better the stock the brighter the future. The evidence shows prices being paid continuously for specific players and issues in high end auctions each and every month.... stay the course with that strata. I always enjoy your earnest efforts T-pot... thank u.
as a comic collector, card collectors should have no worries about storage space lol
Hey Teapot I have been collecting sports cards for 45 years basically I started in the junk wax era and I have come to the conclusion that this new era of card collecting. In other words this era is just as over produced as the junk wax era was! Just go in every major retail store and the shelves are stacked plum full of Cards all the time!
I don't have to check ✔️ the Data because it's right in front of my eyes and everyone's eyes!
Hey T-Pot thanks for another informative episode of Data Dive!
you’re not a collector if you’re in it to make money, you’re a business person. i believe these people don’t know what they’re doing, because they only know what’s hot at the time and not the actual art of collecting. so, i’m glad a lot of these cards are worthless now. gives me like me who like to actually collect get them for way cheap. HOW IT SHOULD BE.
Collector and those seeking to make money - not mutually exclusive. In fact, the vast majority of hobbyists do both.
Needed to hear this, thank you.
I know myself I like to have a diverse collection but about 40% is marvel/DC cards and 40% is a mix between basketball, football & baseball. The last 20% are a eclectic mix of wrestling boxing golf racing stickers military cartoons etc lol but I also have a small comic book collection mainly 1st 5 issues of punisher cgc and the 1st 7 or 8 of second series cgc. And probably up to 80 or so of punisher bagged and boarded. As far as slabs go I probably have about 1500 or so in my personal collection and a few hundred in penny sleeves inside of top loaders. I got some great cards all across the board. I usually check pop count on a card before I buy it. I like to find odd cards that are super low pops as well as most of your common cards that have higher pop counts
As online sales rise, grading is going to become even more necessary. Buying cards is too much fun to be stopped. Just like you can put a warning on a cigarette box, or explain the proper odds in picking football games, people are going to do what they want if they are having fun, money be damned.
Gambling is always fun when you are winning. This hobby attracts the dumbest people from society, so it may take some time before people realize they are no longer winning.
How about the fact that when grading is all automated and the subjectivity removed, these current grades may become irrelevant and require grading under the "new" universal system. Who knows how some cards will regrade. That's when we'll REALLY look at this as the junk slab era in my opinion😬
I began collecting cards in the 90s. It was fun back then and even kids did it. I remember scoring high-dollar Michael Jordan's and having the joy of the card shop offer me anything in the store for them. The market has changed. It's kind of a joke now. It's no longer a collect market. It's become more of a buy and flip market. Too many scams going on. I miss the days of being able to open a regular pack of cards and get something special. I won't spend any more money on sports cards. I've recently sold off valuable items in my collection and put it into a savings account. I'd much rather have it there where it's actually gaining interest then losing value sitting at home.
Simple supply and demand. If the supply is high and demand is even just level, prices must fall to clear the market.
BCCG really added to the junk slab era. Which started 20 years or so ago. Anything and everything seemed to be graaded when Beckett offered that junk level. Either way, Check the PSA pop 1982 ripken base vs 2020 luis robert. Same amount graded, but the gem rate is 544 ripken 18000 robert.
The person at Beckett who thought it was a good idea to have a confusing alphabet salad of BGS, BVG and BCCG should have been taken behind the shed. Especially for the BCCG product...
I liked the red white and blue parallels...
Brock Purdy graded cards are SURGING!!!!! Mahomes Cracked ice contenders is up 20% from its crash bottom low too! Graded cards to the moon!
Why in the hell are the card industry cheerleaders talking shit on the industry?
My Rule # 1. Spend what you can afford to lose in the sports card market. Never buy If you think your gonna get rich from collecting cards. Collect to collect as a hobby with your friends kid’s family etc. and enjoy it for your personal gratification. Big names and attention has destroyed the hobby for some to make it unobtainable for people as it has become elite and very high dollar. Then also there is plenty of great people who brought it back to life for young and old. Also If some UA-camr or social media influencer in 10-20yrs Says whatever fad/craze was so great back then it becomes hot again. People that could not buy them can now get that feeling and get the nostalgia factor and that impacts the market and it skyrockets from demand. You said it perfectly the demand for certain players will disappear and the new players will keep the cycle going.
Everything you say is true. To me, the most sobering things you did was compare Luka to Dwayne and Blake to Zion (those are spot on comps). Dwayne and Blake were charismatic in their day, but apparently the nostalgia has not held (which is kind of your point). Junk slab is an interesting take. But the one stat that I never really digested is that there are 100k basketball cards graded each month. There are simply too many people in the hobby for the whole thing to go up in smoke. Brilliant analysis T-pot!
People, myself included started grading lower end rookies because not everyone can afford a $856 Prizm ruby Doncic but would love to own a PSA 10 of his so they'll spend $110 for his NBA Hoops card. I grade for myself and to sell so if they're all worthless in the end it's still been fun collecting, That's what the hobby was intended to do in the first place, me and my father bonded over sports cards so many times and I was starting to with my son until many started buying all the stock at Target/Walmart, talk about no future... Who are the young kids buying sports cards? There is no future without the new collectors/young collectors and greed has been killing the hobby since the pandemic.
I feel no cards under $50 raw should ever be graded. The card’s scarcity and player should be able to stand on its own first. . . Period! The grade should never overtake the card itself. All this junk wax grading of $2-5 cards is a joke where shortly thereafter for many they are selling for less than the grading cost to begin with! For example, let’s say I pay $15 to grade a $3 card. . . And it sells eventually for $10. Does that mean that the raw card is now worth NEGATIVE $8? Raw cards will never be worth a negative value!
For pure collecting, grade and collect who you want. That's collecting. However, if you want to collect AND keep value/investing in mind, buy only highest grade HOF rookies for modern and ultra modern (~1983+) and buy mid to high grade rookies for vintage (pre-1980) and pre-war (pre-1948). Simple.
I use to enjoy the little hockey card shows. We use to have a lot in my local area but they all died out.
I suggest buying non-sport Garbage Paul kids and Wacky packages which have a finite market maker that has existed for a super long time. Demand and popularity has done nothing but go up in the in the modern era for new production cards. Fun and easy to collect. Stop thinking you’re retiring on your collection…..”fool’s gold”.
Yeah, there is no card scarcity anymore. Even a 1/1 of your favorite player, how many 1/1 does he have now? How many this year? How many will he have.
People spending 5 and 6 figures (or 7) for any modern card are crazy. I saw the prices for all of the, what I consider very average, NFL young QBs the last few years…unless people are just speculating how are they ever supposed to justify that price?
Anyway, I collect a single sport (soccer), I only collect 10s and if I buy something as a single it’s going to have an auto. In my collection I’ve purchased exactly 2 cards…A Messi auto grade 10, a CR7 auto grade 10. Both under 1k and it’s not an investment. I like having them, looking at them, showing them off.
For the millionth time, sports cards are not an investment.
Geoff Wilson needs to watch this a couple times and have a serious think. Then take action to protect himself, and warn his followers, before the ultra-modern market collapses under its own weight.
If you buy you need to sell quickly to make money people only pay good money on the hype
If the rate PSA was charging around the Covid Card Boom (somewhere around 100$ a card) wasn’t an indicator of what was coming down the line then the obvious was simply being ignored.
I have always thought that grading is a Crock of crap period! Most people can't afford it anyway!!!
This is along the lines of things I have been thinking about. I started collecting in the "junk wax" era of the late 80s - so called because they printed millions of each card. But is today all that much different with the printing of so many different sets and so many parallels in each set.?
Will this include vintage like early 70s or further back? I wouldn't mind if prices lowered as I've dreamed of doing 1971 (PSA 7 HOFers and the rest raw in binder/pages)!
When the baby boomers retired, you saw massive collections of raw cards. When the millennials retire, your going to need a warehouse to store your new collection of plastic.
Great info and analysis T-Pot. Always enjoy your market insight videos.
What are the chances of getting some updated background tunes?
I am working with our team for some new options...it's time for a change! The volume was off this time. We'll fix it. Thank you!
Maybe I could get some vintage hall of famers graded. IF .People would stop sending in complete worthless garbage to be graded and backing up the services.
I just collect who I like. Best way to do it. Remember it’s a hobby.
Maybe we’ll have a 10x situation- more collectors and a larger market in the long term?
It would be interesting to try to figure out how many cards are in PSA Set Registry. I have 2360 graded cards in my graded collection (99% not for sale)-but only 19 produced since 2014. For those of you holding psa 10 Prizm Luka’s I look forward to buying one of them in 5-10 years for $10.
Absolutely on Point💯✅
I only buy serial numbered, autos, or SSP cards. Collecting a base card or even a silver seems stupid when it’s not rare and doesn’t look as cool.
That way you never have to worry about pop count. And if you’re looking to hold value better only buy from the top sets.
My purchases are only Prizm, optic, and obsidian-along with any very high end product like NT. Everything else is dorky.
I believe that all cards in all sports, between the late end of 2019 through the early months of 2021, should not be counted in the sale value.
The sale value for cards during that time frame is WAY over value. That also includes non-sports cards as well.
Every bubble eventually pops and slabbed graded sports cards are no different.
In the long term the value of the actual card takes over rather than the slab. The discussion you had on slab demand on the other hand is tricky. Although the average collect might want 100 to 200 slabs, some collectors want 1000 slabs which skews averages compared to the other end of the normal distribution which would be collectors whom want zero.
Great video and commentary! In my opinion, if you buy the types of cards of current players you referenced today, you should do so either because you want to own that card forever as a part of your PC or because you want to speculate with the understanding that the card could end up in the bargain bin. Otherwise, you are setting yourself up for disappointment.
You guys just realized this? Genius.
Thanks for putting all this info together. I knew the numbers were big but seeing put into this kind of context is really valuable. Really puts things into perspective. Really love these videos every Saturday.
Spprt card investing is not simple at all, and there are many lessons and pitfalls along way... Volatility and speculation are 2 big ones, but anre important lesson for any type of investing. Have fun, but don't go in debt doing it, have some patience.
What happened to sports card investing? Changed their now that the market reset.
I'm staying away from pretty much everything modern. That Luka Prizm PSA 10 I could honestly see being a $25 card. There's just way too many of em, same with all the parallels, many of which are ugly anyways.
I watched some guy open a package of 100 plus psa submissions all of Trout Select 2013 and other base cards. I couldn’t understand the reasoning and this was when PSA prices were through the roof. Can’t be good for the hobby overall.
julio rod and kyle lewis rookie cards 😂
Great video. The focus in this video is on BB cards, but same thing happening in baseball and football.
Great work T-Pott 👏
FYI-You're Wade refractor sale for $70 is incorrect-the description lists the card as a PSA 10 when it is actually a PSA 9-Wanted to clear this up for everyone watching,thanks.
Thank you, you're right! They listed it as a 10 but it was actually a 9.
I removed it...appreciate it!
This is why I laugh at Basketball collectors with their Lamelo 1/57 000. Its just like what Baseball and Hockey cards were in the 90s
every 50 or 60 cards graded costs like 1000 bucks to do so
Imagine buying Melo Ball cards for an investment. He will never be anything close to D Wade and Wade sells for 1/20 of LeBron. Ball’s cards will worth less than Ray Allen and he sells for like 1/50 Lebron.
Wade stuff is wild. Esp given they just formally announced his HOF entrance. You think there’d be an upwards movement.
@@basdfef4775 maybe that’s because his daughter is trans? 😂 Had no idea supporting his daughter would make card values dip. Wild world.
This data is incomplete at best. you would need to actually do a year long survey and have a large numbers of participant's( 500K to 1M).
A lot of collectors aren't happy with PSA grading over the last couple years.
I keep asking and no one will tell me...where exactly is the Panini Landfill gonna be located?
Has new collectors continue to come into the hobby rated cards are just going to get bigger and more popular. They've been around for a while. Yes, but I feel they've only started to really show where you're going to be in the future
Slabbing rookies is what I like to call a serious gambling problem
I think it’s good to know about especially as an investor. Where I don’t want to buy cards that have high pop graded
Cards are awful investments nearly all are going down collect and have fun
The Wade for 70 must have been a wrong data point. Either a 9 that was for some reason listed as a 10, or an accidental listing.
Indeed, it was a 9 listed wrongly as a 10, just checked.
I’m not sure how accurate those numbers are with median number of slabs, and average for people who “collect” basketball. It kinda skews it. I’m a collector, never been to national, and I have over 1300 slabs, and some people collect multiple sports. So it’s apples to oranges. I bet a lot of collectors have over 200 slabs.
Saw this coming for years. It felt like 1989 all over again. That's why I've been exclusively buying Nikola Jokic Rookie PSA 10's for the last 4 years. The Joker has been basically the only buy in the hobby.
championship honeymoon period
The only problem with Jokic RC's is that they don't grade well because PSA is COMPLETELY BIASED about thick cards which IS ridiculous. It seems as if PSA starts at a PSA 8 on them and it goes down from there. SMH Almost all rare, high value Jokic RC's have thick cover stock. More people need to understand this before his cards skyrocket. He WILL continue to do the same things he has been doing for 5 years now. I ABSOLUTELY AGREE with you though. He is still a buy, even right now during the Championship honeymoon period.
PSA has created this Junk slab era by giving 10's like candies to a fat kid. When i look at my cards raw, i cannot see more than 5% of them who would get a real 10 (BGS) and no more than 0,1% a black label.
scott9896 I agree .Compare the present value of PSA 10 Topps base cards of Tim Duncan and Shaquille O'Neil to any of the players you mention
eventually you'll own those slabs in the form of an NFT and they'll be stored somewhere in a vault and you'll have the digital token to represent ownership - own as many slabs as you want and no storage needed
Wade trend makes sense. Personally life vs who buys trading cards…
id be super curious about a similar analysis around baseball.
baseball is such a regional sport that there are more players collected than basketball or football. its a lower cost of entry, generally.
The baseball stats are similar. I just used basketball to make it simpler and not a 45 minute video, but the same ideas would apply.
Thanks for watching!
Fantastic analysis! Very hard to argue with any of the points you presented here. We are absolutely in a junk slab era right now (which is very different than the junk wax era, and I always disagree with people who say we’re in a junk wax era). I still like grading cards, and lately most of my subs to PSA have been 50% cards for my PC and 50% cards to flip, and if you look at the cards in subbing, the PC cards vs the flip cards couldn’t be more different. All my PC cards that I grade are things like Gold Refractors, Flair Showcase Legacy parallels, valuable rookies, and rare inserts. The ones to flip are mostly ultra modern shiny retail parallels of the top vets and rookies. When those come back from grading, they are immediately sold 100% of the time. The chances of any of those cards increasing or even holding value long term is so low, that it always makes sense to take the immediate profit and put that back into more cards for my PC.
So what your saying is Blake Griffin is a 4 times better investment than Zion Williamson.
Nice troll lol
@@michaelmazziano7 So using an emoji while writing a sentence is grammatically correct? You also forgot to use a period at the end of “your” and capitalize the word “The” to start the next sentence Mr Perfect.
at a minimum! haha
Zion is the equivalent of othani. Watch what happens if and when he gets traded and forget it if he goes on a run. So many people spent so much money and were so excited about him that it won't take much for him to get hype and skyrocket
@@justdigginit1331don't forget you're instead of your 😂
We better hope fanatics is 10xing the hobby, this is frightening
T-Pott, I made a card from your hair, and I slabbed it. I use your cologne to spray on it (don’t ask how I acquired it!)for sniffing purposes. I hope this doesn’t seem weird.
This is why I've only collected rare japanese baseball card's because the population is so low on high grades my last sub i got 4 10s all pop 1s limited edition or numbered and 1- 9 pop 1 all mlb players currently.
The market is what you guys made it.
Unless it's a PC, pop it and drop it. You can't hold for a 1952 Mickey Mantle return anymore.