@Dpeck100 said:
This is an interesting topic because there are a lot of issues that could be driving this. First its hard to know if manipulation is the cause because clearly that was an issue in 2021 and many cards got driven to the moon only to quickly collapse. I personally think we are seeing a bull market in cards and I look to the 1986 Fleer Michael Jordan in a PSA 9 and the 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. in a PSA 10 to see what the largest modern market cap cards are doing and they have been going up. In 21 when a Jr. hit $2,000 that seemed pretty steep and for a time it was and it fell back but has since surged to $4,000. You need some serious demand for a card to support that price when there are 4,223 PSA 10's and a large number of other copies in other TPG holders. You also have to look at how many high valued cards Griffey has and that same situation doesn't exist for Tony Gwynn. The 1983 Topps set has always been a favorite amongst collectors and with the pop at 747 it isn't really that high with how many collectors exist and how few important issues Gwynn has.
The folks referencing the stock market playing a role are accurate. There are many who if you asked them to pony up and pay top dollar in April with stocks at lows and a historic correction under way with extreme uncertainty they would have passed. I know I would have. I found myself very aggressively positioned in stocks and had very large on paper losses and was concerned about the direction of the market. I held on and got more aggressive as the market began to rally and find myself in a position currently with the most financial assets I have ever had and this naturally would impact my willingness to spend on discretionary items. You are seeing countless posts on Twitter with investors showing their price performance of their portfolios and there are parts of the stock market pumping up and creating huge amounts of liquidity in the system. The crypto market has been very strong and there is a clear correlation between digital assets and discretionary spending. The wealth gap has been a focus of many for quite sometime and it is just getting wider and if you had financial assets or certain hard assets you have had a clear hedge against the enormous inflation we have seen and you could also argue the increase in these assets prices has fueled inflation too. The NASDAQ 100 ETF is almost 30X it's 2001 low and if you look at a chart of the longer term the 80% decline that took place looks like a blip on the radar. This amount of wealth creation has made its way into every aspect of our lives.
In 2021 I sold some cards privately and in one scenario it was to DJ Steve Aoki. I woke up one morning and saw an Instagram direct message and it said something like 'Will you hook me up with some of your Dimes". I cleared the sleep from my eyes and was like WTF it is a message from Steve Aoki. I have long been a fan of electronic music and had just heard him that prior day on BPM on Sirius. We went back and forth and talked a few times on the phone for a few hours as I educated him that many of the best wrestling cards there weren't PSA 10's. He only wanted 10's. The new wealthy buyers that have entered the market want the highest graded possible. Over the years it has been debated on here if 10's are worth it and there will never be a consensus on this issue but from a market driven investment standpoint this is what people want. You have seen a waive of investment dollars enter the card market over the past five years and they don't have an interest in owning a PSA 8 Gwynn and in many cases a 9. They want a 10. The 10 is the ego card and there is a reason there is a scale of 1 to 10 and it resonates with humans. To the best of my knowledge he was the buyer of the two sets of the 1982 Wrestling All Stars Series A and B I recently auctioned off in Heritage at a combined price of $196,420. There are records for high grade cards being achieved in many genres. Many years ago the term bubble was used over and over on here about wrestling and the Hogan was probably 150 X those posts or more.
This sale may be an outlier but the trend on key HOF Rookie cards is up and we are seeing loads of new hobby participants willing to spend bigger money on cards. I was the person for many years willing to pay the most in my segment and now I am the cheap one and there are people coming in with piles of cash to collectibles and not afraid to drop big money. Is it for investment? Is it because they simply have a lot more money? Is it the spread between the halves and have nots? Is it a classic bubble across asset classes? I don't know but we have seen a cultural shift towards trading cards and the number of hobby participants is easily at an all time high. The access to the market has never been more wide and when you see the number of cards being graded by PSA that is literally six times pre pandemic levels and the average price per card to grade has skyrocketed and it isn't driving away collectors in mass you know there has been a demand shift in the market. I personally think predicting card prices is very tough and if you told me I would sell my 82 A set for 34 times what I had in the cards I wouldn't have believed it but it is real and the current prices aren't scaring buyers off and are actually attracting more.
I think any rational person can't understand some of the things we have seen lately. The Messi going from 334k to 1.5 million is one. When a copy popped up and smashed the record at over 800K and then weeks later a copy goes for nearly double that isn't natural price movement. That said the apex items in all hard asset markets have been prone to wild price advances and I drafted a thread years ago about conspicuous consumption as it relates to cards and this is a clear example of it. The higher the price goes the more bragging rights associated with it and with a low supply you don't need a huge increase in demand to have massive price expansion. Cards have become an asset class and when big dollars are simply buying for price appreciation that will cause an environment where unexplainable things occur.
To me being an aggressive buyer of cards at today's prices is hard and I think you just have to navigate the areas you collect and do the best you can and realize it is a different environment than most are used to and do the best you can. There has been doom and gloom on this board since when I first posted in 2010. A 6k 93 Jeter SP was too much. A 25k Henderson was insane. The Dmitri Young SCP buyers were idiots and people laughed at the buyer of the Aaron 10 and Clemente 10 and those cards are probably 20X those idiotic buy prices.
We will see what happens but don't expect this euphoric environment to go away over night.
@Dpeck100 said:
This is an interesting topic because there are a lot of issues that could be driving this. First its hard to know if manipulation is the cause because clearly that was an issue in 2021 and many cards got driven to the moon only to quickly collapse. I personally think we are seeing a bull market in cards and I look to the 1986 Fleer Michael Jordan in a PSA 9 and the 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. in a PSA 10 to see what the largest modern market cap cards are doing and they have been going up. In 21 when a Jr. hit $2,000 that seemed pretty steep and for a time it was and it fell back but has since surged to $4,000. You need some serious demand for a card to support that price when there are 4,223 PSA 10's and a large number of other copies in other TPG holders. You also have to look at how many high valued cards Griffey has and that same situation doesn't exist for Tony Gwynn. The 1983 Topps set has always been a favorite amongst collectors and with the pop at 747 it isn't really that high with how many collectors exist and how few important issues Gwynn has.
The folks referencing the stock market playing a role are accurate. There are many who if you asked them to pony up and pay top dollar in April with stocks at lows and a historic correction under way with extreme uncertainty they would have passed. I know I would have. I found myself very aggressively positioned in stocks and had very large on paper losses and was concerned about the direction of the market. I held on and got more aggressive as the market began to rally and find myself in a position currently with the most financial assets I have ever had and this naturally would impact my willingness to spend on discretionary items. You are seeing countless posts on Twitter with investors showing their price performance of their portfolios and there are parts of the stock market pumping up and creating huge amounts of liquidity in the system. The crypto market has been very strong and there is a clear correlation between digital assets and discretionary spending. The wealth gap has been a focus of many for quite sometime and it is just getting wider and if you had financial assets or certain hard assets you have had a clear hedge against the enormous inflation we have seen and you could also argue the increase in these assets prices has fueled inflation too. The NASDAQ 100 ETF is almost 30X it's 2001 low and if you look at a chart of the longer term the 80% decline that took place looks like a blip on the radar. This amount of wealth creation has made its way into every aspect of our lives.
In 2021 I sold some cards privately and in one scenario it was to DJ Steve Aoki. I woke up one morning and saw an Instagram direct message and it said something like 'Will you hook me up with some of your Dimes". I cleared the sleep from my eyes and was like WTF it is a message from Steve Aoki. I have long been a fan of electronic music and had just heard him that prior day on BPM on Sirius. We went back and forth and talked a few times on the phone for a few hours as I educated him that many of the best wrestling cards there weren't PSA 10's. He only wanted 10's. The new wealthy buyers that have entered the market want the highest graded possible. Over the years it has been debated on here if 10's are worth it and there will never be a consensus on this issue but from a market driven investment standpoint this is what people want. You have seen a waive of investment dollars enter the card market over the past five years and they don't have an interest in owning a PSA 8 Gwynn and in many cases a 9. They want a 10. The 10 is the ego card and there is a reason there is a scale of 1 to 10 and it resonates with humans. To the best of my knowledge he was the buyer of the two sets of the 1982 Wrestling All Stars Series A and B I recently auctioned off in Heritage at a combined price of $196,420. There are records for high grade cards being achieved in many genres. Many years ago the term bubble was used over and over on here about wrestling and the Hogan was probably 150 X those posts or more.
This sale may be an outlier but the trend on key HOF Rookie cards is up and we are seeing loads of new hobby participants willing to spend bigger money on cards. I was the person for many years willing to pay the most in my segment and now I am the cheap one and there are people coming in with piles of cash to collectibles and not afraid to drop big money. Is it for investment? Is it because they simply have a lot more money? Is it the spread between the halves and have nots? Is it a classic bubble across asset classes? I don't know but we have seen a cultural shift towards trading cards and the number of hobby participants is easily at an all time high. The access to the market has never been more wide and when you see the number of cards being graded by PSA that is literally six times pre pandemic levels and the average price per card to grade has skyrocketed and it isn't driving away collectors in mass you know there has been a demand shift in the market. I personally think predicting card prices is very tough and if you told me I would sell my 82 A set for 34 times what I had in the cards I wouldn't have believed it but it is real and the current prices aren't scaring buyers off and are actually attracting more.
I think any rational person can't understand some of the things we have seen lately. The Messi going from 334k to 1.5 million is one. When a copy popped up and smashed the record at over 800K and then weeks later a copy goes for nearly double that isn't natural price movement. That said the apex items in all hard asset markets have been prone to wild price advances and I drafted a thread years ago about conspicuous consumption as it relates to cards and this is a clear example of it. The higher the price goes the more bragging rights associated with it and with a low supply you don't need a huge increase in demand to have massive price expansion. Cards have become an asset class and when big dollars are simply buying for price appreciation that will cause an environment where unexplainable things occur.
To me being an aggressive buyer of cards at today's prices is hard and I think you just have to navigate the areas you collect and do the best you can and realize it is a different environment than most are used to and do the best you can. There has been doom and gloom on this board since when I first posted in 2010. A 6k 93 Jeter SP was too much. A 25k Henderson was insane. The Dmitri Young SCP buyers were idiots and people laughed at the buyer of the Aaron 10 and Clemente 10 and those cards are probably 20X those idiotic buy prices.
We will see what happens but don't expect this euphoric environment to go away over night.
Very glad you chimed in Dpeck. Thanks for taking the time to write this out.
Final gavel price on the Probstein Gwynn was $4,850.
And agree, appreciate you sharing your thoughts Dpeck. Agree with most all of it.
The talk of the early wrestling sets has me remembering going to Capital Center at maybe age 7 to watch Bob Backlund and The Magnificent Muraco fight and the match going the full hour and having it be a draw. Also have a vague memory of going to see Hulk Hogan fight Tony Atlas when Hogan was managed by Freddy Blassie and was a heel for a bit so I was wanting Atlas to win. Looks as if it might be on Youtube so I'll check it out later. Cool to recall that stuff.
Comments
PSA BOARD DOESN'T LET ME POST THIS. I HAVE BEEN WARNED TWICE, SO I HAVE TO BE CRYPTIC. ULYSSES AND DPECK PRETTY MUCH SUMMED IT UP.
They don’t want us to know that excitement is almost here. PSA stands for Fun Police!
You can put a muzzle on a cannon, but it's still a cannon.
Damn good post.
1,2…5…10 card sales don’t indicate anything. I’m not on the bandwagon until it surpasses 200 proven sales.
Very glad you chimed in Dpeck. Thanks for taking the time to write this out.
HOF SIGNED FOOTBALL RCS
Final gavel price on the Probstein Gwynn was $4,850.
And agree, appreciate you sharing your thoughts Dpeck. Agree with most all of it.
The talk of the early wrestling sets has me remembering going to Capital Center at maybe age 7 to watch Bob Backlund and The Magnificent Muraco fight and the match going the full hour and having it be a draw. Also have a vague memory of going to see Hulk Hogan fight Tony Atlas when Hogan was managed by Freddy Blassie and was a heel for a bit so I was wanting Atlas to win. Looks as if it might be on Youtube so I'll check it out later. Cool to recall that stuff.