My (unsolicited) opinion is that there are two main reasons why the market appears to be “stagnating:”
- Collectors still in the market are working on very specific goals. Back in 2020/21, there were many market participants who would just buy anything that was a “good” deal. Now, those participants seem to have exited (or at least significantly narrowed their collecting interests).
I suspect this is why there is a huge glut in the supply of the sorts of cards that PFM observed at the card show, but not a glut for the sorts of items that are both (1) very scarce and that (2) serious collectors actually want. For example, EX boxes and mint gold stars are at or near all time high prices, and at or near all time lows in terms of market supply.
- Way too many cards have been graded. I and others observed during the 2020 mania that this would happen. It was obvious that the continuous, unyielding conversion of raw cards into graded cards would eventually result in a supply glut of graded cards + a supply dearth of raw cards.
This has become true to an even more extreme extent than I anticipated. Back when I was building raw EX sets in 2020, I was able to buy most cards in NM/M raw (though I did crack a good number of 8s and 9s for the higher tier cards). Now, if I was to build the same sets in the same condition, I’d instead be cracking PSA 9s for pretty much any card worth more than $10 raw. That would literally be the most cost-efficient way to build those raw sets in that condition. This fact is clear evidence for the proposition that too many cards have been graded. I’m seeing PSA and CGC 9 exs and 1st Ed WotC holos selling for (in many instances) less than NM/M raw prices.
Basically, there were never enough graded collectors in the first place to sustain the sort of raw → graded conversion that happened (and continues to happen, to an extent). The graded premium on most cards has dissipated significantly for that reason. A lot of the perceived “stagnation” is effectively a combination of a supply/demand mismatch + reluctance by vendors to abandon sunk grading costs. As such, there’s a lot of dead inventory.