This is a very cool thread. Blows my mind that PSA 10 base machop is the only card not at a loss.
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Weâre literally in agreement.
Not sure if youâd call it vintage but I think these are harder to find mint than their psa 9 price tag suggests. Plus, its a cool card, part of a mini set and its an umbreon. 10/10
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While the form is tongue-in-cheek, I fundamentally believe what Iâve said.
The existence of growth in some niche cards in no way undermines the immense and obvious trend that the exponential potential of popular, lower-cost, accessible cards runs planet-sized circles around niche alternatives.
On a risk-adjusted basis, grabbing a rare and attractive Charizard is phenomenal advice for someone uncertain about how to get upside in the hobby.
If anything, rare might be too tight of a category. I sincerely, 100%, cross my heart and hope to die would choose 1,000 copies of any modern Charizard drop with unique artwork over a Pikachu Illustrator, even, if I had a gun to my head and was told to get the best 10-year return on a percentage basis.
Believe me, Iâm the king of niche as a collector. Iâve spent millions on cards I believe are legitimately bad investments. But I think that a lot of times, when we as collectors dabble in investing, we pretend that the principles that make us love things map the investment fundamentals perfectly. And Iâm not convinced that is true.
Pokemon investing works because of the worldâs best customer acquisition funnel.
My Pokemon collection works because Iâm autistic.
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I think both can be true. Similar to when someone suggests to invest in the s&p 500 = charizard. Where perhaps if you are more seasoned you can go after individual stocks = niche.
A great recent example is this 2015 event organizer festa Pikachu. Extremely niche item, was selling for around $500-1,000 5 years ago, and recently sold for 20k+. However the risk with niche items is they may never stop being the niche guy in the corner at the party. Where charizard will always be hot.
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The problem I have with the market today is that nothing truly feels undervalued. In 2019 and prior, there were so many things I could point to that seemed so obviously under-recognized or sold at prices that were not long-term sustainable at low prices.
Today itâs the opposite. There are obviously still things that are under-recognized (especially for vintage Japanese promos) but the difference is that I donât expect them to one day become popular. Likewise, I still see prices that are not long-term sustainable but itâs in the opposite direction where the highs canât be sustained.
Like in 2018 paid under $5 for 224/SM-P (x50) and $30 for Scream Pikachus (x10) because they felt like no brainers. The whole Pokemon card market went up a significant amount but it was much easier to speculate on specific cards like these that beat the overall Pokemon market.
Today, if these cards were released today, they would actually start ABOVE the price equilibrium. In other words, a PSA 10 224/SM-P is ~$120 today but if it was released in August 2024, the raw price would probably be over $120 and over time would cool off.
Thatâs the difficulty of the market today. You need to have some extreme advantage to really make it. Whether itâs access to new product below market, ancient inventory, grading discounts, a large amount of capital, a lot of patience and time. Itâs far less casual speculation and far more calculated risk analysis and multiplication of small margins.
In my opinion, what this hobby needs is actually more hobbyists. Less about what $500 card you can make $50 off of and more about what card feels like a good purchase at $500 for you. If youâre going to be stuck with a card indefinitely, waiting for it to increase in price, youâll be better off itâs a card you actually like.
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This is one of the best investment/market posts on all of e4.
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To piggyback on this: I think that it is difficult when you have a long time horizon of exposure to grow comfortable with the impacts of price growth over time and then translate that into spotting opportunity.
We settle into a certain comfort zone for the types of investments we want to make. But if opportunity in a competitive environment shouldnât exist and is a price inefficiency that corrects over time, the reality is that the opportunity should, hypothetically, look entirely different than it did in the past. The old inefficiencies should close and the new ones open up based on where there is turbulence in the underlying market fundamentals.
The market today is entirely different. The customer acquisition funnel hasnât stopped. So what is different? Where should we look?
People definitely havenât stopped making money. The market isnât perfect and solved. While some things have made it harder, such as the prevalence of Japanese sellers accessing Western markets directly or through low-cost intermediaries, others have brought huge opportunity like the massive funnel of live sales consumers and their relative price elasticity.
It is 100% true that a 2019 perspective on identifying value buys is not helpful in a 2024 market. That perspective is going to feel starved.
I agree completely with everything you said. There will always be opportunities. But just to reiterate my main point, the opportunity is harder to find today than it used to be. It has to be much more intentional and calculated which probably works well for people who can invest 100% of their time into the business side of Pokemon but makes it way more challenging for people like myself that have a full time job outside of this hobby. My personal advantage is that my time horizon seems to be way larger than the average Pokemon LLC so I have an edge there. But overall, casual speculation seems to be more a roll of the dice than anything you can really predict with any confidence.
All this is to say, the âwhat is the best thing I can buy for $500â question is a bit obsolete. I could give you multiple answers in 2019 but in 2024 itâs far less about what youâre buying and more about how youâre buying and selling it. The real advantage today goes to the people who invest the time in optimizing how they source product and how they sell it.
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