In theory, why stop with the 10’s? If someone had the millions to spare it should be possible to pick up every single Charizard of lower grades as well as they pop up for sale. A 9 is about 10 times as cheap, so the entire pop of 9’s would be cheaper than all the 10’s at recent sale prices. I have no idea about how many 1st Charizard exists, but if PSA 1 to 9 quality cards are in the range of 1000-6000 USD, the accumulated price of all copies would likely not be out of reach for some rich guy, even if they increased substantially, if he decided to buy all available Charizards over several years.
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If you buy 16% equity in each one then it will only cost $768,000 which is much more affordable and you technically own them all 
I agree with this 100%.
However, $40k for one card is a lot more to have as discretionary spend vs $10k for one card.
A lot of the purchasers at $10k might not have as much money as the purchasers at $40k, so I was thinking those purchasers would be more open to sell because $100k would make more of a difference for them.
The market is still small enough to enable something like that to theoretically happen. It’d be fun to hear about the previous buyout attempts and what dollars amounts were offered.
@admiral77, I agree that offering more than double market value would draw out people to sell their card. However, the more expensive the item is, the more likely that the owner has the ability to hold it and doesn’t need the funds. You’re also talking about an end-goal item. This is the #1 card in English and people simply want to own it for its historical purpose. This applies even more so for trophy cards. Acquiring the card is extremely difficult and often not repeatable.
Buyout takes time. As Scott mentioned, look at Rudy. His position on graded and ungraded Alpha cards took more 15 years to build and only owns ‘around 2-5% the entire surviving population of Alpha’, from one of his older videos.
If you have $5m to spend, and started buying every single Charizard from today onwards, you will probably get that number (2-5%) if you pinch pennies but I think you can get around the 10-20% mark if you are more aggressive, buying available copies (4 on eBay) and putting up public offers on every social media site. However, it will take time. There is no question about it. It WILL take time. Look at anyone with a sizable position on certain cards, Scott, Gary, Rudy, they took more than 10 years to be where they are today.
To buyout the entire population of a card is impossible in my opinion, but you will be able to own a significant position (>20%) over time by buying them aggressively.
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Nah… there’s no chance of that happening. If I were to ever sell it would only be to a friend who would NEVER sell;)
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They have already been “bought out”… by collectors who love them. Besides, many collectors would rather have their copies than have $40,000, which is evident since there are only a couple for sale. So as long as there are none on the market, what are they really worth in that case?
I own many items that I would not sell at 5x “market value”. Most of my collection in fact.
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I don’t know how many cards you have, but you are saying you would turn down $5 million dollars for your entire collection? Cash money. If no to $5, still no to $10 million ?
Didn’t Smpratte have his trophy cards for sale for $2 million?
Edit. I get where you are coming from with sentimentality. I have some real estate I wouldn’t sell at 2x market value. But at a certain offer, I would probably sell.
For everything in my collection? Not just the Charizards? It would be easy for me to say yes or no. If that type of an offer ever came in, I’m not sure what I’d do. I’d have to dig into it and come up with a true value…which I’ve never done.
Buy all the PSA 10 copies in the world. Destroy all but one and send the labels back to PSA to remove from the pop report. You now have a pop 1 1st edition base Charizard PSA 10. Or you could just beg Gary to sell one of his amazing BGS Pristine 10’s and you can share in the pop 2 and not destroy anything. lol. My whole comment is a joke…
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