Time to buy a PSA 10 Picasso? Lessons from Spring Art Sale

ndleo

I read an article in the WSJ about the recent spring art auction in NY. Some interesting parallels can be drawn to our hobby. Last spring the sale totaled $2.3 billion. This year's auction did $1.0 billion. While no one in the art business wants to say that the market is in decline (why would they? hurts business), they are saying that buyers are being more cautious. Here are a couple points to consider:

1. Art collectors are trading pieces at a regular clip like other investments.

The trophy pieces are coming to market more often instead of sitting in collections for decades. There is no more mystique premium when they come up for sale.

I think this has already happened in our hobby. The recent prices seemed to have encourage many high quality cards to come to market. While it's not a trophy pieces, I have been looking for a 1984 Topps Traded Tiffany Gooden PSA 10 for several years. Once used to come up every 6 months or longer. I think PWCC has already had 3-4 this year alone.

2. There is more interest in newer pieces.

The bidding activity for the trophy, pedigreed pieces was very slow, some with only one bid. There was much more activity in the contemporary art auctions.

I don't think our hobby has moved to this stage yet. It seems like everyone is chasing the same cards. Except for specific modern cards like 1993 SP Jeter PSA 10, 2000 Contenders Brady Auto RC, or key Harper/Trout RCs, I don't see the broad spike in the modern market.

From a football point of view, I can see key RCs of Aaron Rodgers, Ben Roethlisberger, and maybe Adrian Peterson being the next "spike" candidates. I don't consider 2010-2016 RCs part of this discussion since their values are driven by speculation more than collector factors.
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New Asian money is driving prices for specific pieces, which has already happened in the basketball card market.

Just food for thought. At least we are not alone when it comes to dealing with high prices in a hobby!

JoeBanzai

Don't see much of a parallel. Cards are a LOT cheaper than art and your examples are not the best. Look at the guys like Mantle, Aaron, Clemente ant most of the HOFers in high grade from 1950-1970. I would bet they are trending upward in almost every single case. Even the "lesser" HOFers are going through the roof in PSA 9 or 10. IF I had a million dollars, I would buy as many mint cards as I could instead of one piece of art.

People were (are?) spending insane amounts for the new autographed, one perbox/case material, harder for that to go up in value as fast as the cards that were reasonable to begin with.

While there are "key" cards out there, people are not all chasing the same cards. Football has always been a lesser demand than baseball. Marino went nuts for a while, as did Favre, now they have leveled off.

Dpeck100

I think this is a tough comparison. In the article you reference the amount of dollar volume declined by 56.5%. If you were to take PWCC and use them as a comparison their auctions used to have a little over 3,200 listings and in recent months have ballooned to over 6,200 and the prices of many of the cards auctioned off have skyrocketed. While it remains difficult to predict pricing the amount of interest in higher end cards has increased significantly and because the market for cards offers options for all budgets it really doesn't correlate to high end art. A few years ago I started a thread that discussed conspicuous consumption as it relates to trading cards and that theory is alive and well and you certainly can draw comparisons to high end art when looking at the market from that viewpoint. The bragging rights pieces continue to move up in an aggressive fashion and if the recent surge of higher end participants continues there is no telling how high they will push prices. One market is in contraction and the other is on fire. If we fast forward a few years and you see lots of these high end pieces sitting on EBAY as buy it now listings with little activity then that would be a more appropriate comparison.

Beck6

There was an article last year regarding art and the difficulty they are having cultivating new buyers. The auction houses have tried some very unique marketing campaigns targeting higher net worth first time buyers. This could be the reason you are seeing a spike in newer pieces, as first time buyers are younger and might migrate to lower cost pieces. The hope is that as new collectors are brought to market and they learn more they will work their way backwards and keep the valuable pieces prices high.

This probably parallels the card market with younger collectors going after modern rookies and parallels. With the spike in vintage card prices this could be exactly what is happening as collectors look backwards to older issues.