Has anyone attempted a rough market cap calculation of the Pokémon market?
Obviously it would be super rough but I’m just curious how big it has gotten. My gut feeling is we’re in the hundred of billions at this point but haven’t tried to do any calc.
202.5 Billion, if I was gonna throw a number out there
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I know this isn’t exactly what you’re looking for, but maybe it can put be a useful starting place for getting a sense of the scale of the market. I have a spreadsheet for specific cards in mint grades. On the several dozen cards I’m tracking, the total market cap in PSA/CGC 9 and higher is like $250m. I last updated it in May, so numbers are going to be higher now, though.
A few reference points:
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1st Ed Base Charizard has a total mint market cap of ~$70m
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Gold star Rayquaza has a total mint market cap of ~$10m
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Grey felt hat Pikachu has a total mint market cap of ~$60m
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Sandstorm Gardevoir ex has a total mint market cap of roughly $100k (aka $.1m)
I’d be surprised if your statement that “we’re in the hundreds of billions” is correct, but perhaps the market is broad enough (especially if you include other languages) that you’re right.
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Yeah I was thinking of doing PSA 10 count * PSA 10 price and then doing some kind of multiplier using the estimate of % of copies graded and maybe using raw copy price for anything under a 10. So moonbteon for example, has ~ 54M in PSA 10 another 11M in 9s or under, and let’s say for modern 1/3 of copies are graded. Then that card alone is looking at nearly 200M. I can see sword and shield alt arts be worth 3-5 billion by its self
Seems like the type of thing chat gpt could get done pretty fast
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Why is the market cap of specific cards or the market as a whole useful to know?
Tcgfish has some market cap data
IMO, it’s one of the most useful metrics for cards. It’s just population-adjusted pricing. It’s much more useful than only comparing prices because prices aren’t adjusted for population.
If you look only at prices, grey felt Pikachu might look like a steal. You can buy roughly 60 PSA 9 copies of that Pikachu for the price of a single PSA 9 gold star Rayquaza! But if you compare market caps, you’ll see that because of how common the Pikachu is, its current value actually places its market cap at 6x higher than Rayquaza’s.
Rather than comparing a $400 grey felt Pikachu to a $25,000 Ray, it’s better (IMO) to compare the market caps of $60m vs $10m, which takes into account the supply of the card.
The big downside, of course, is that some cards are graded more often than others (i.e., bc the incentives to grade differ), which inflates the relative market cap of more desirable cards. So the true relative market cap of the Pikachu is actually more than just 6x Ray’s.
As far as how the market cap of the total market could be useful, I’m not sure.
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it would be too difficult to calculate even semi accurately
there are so many cards that arnt worth that much but have ridiculous pops. For instance, Charizard V champions path. 16,247 psa10s with a market price of around $400. So a card thats under the radar that you probably are not even considering has a psa10 market cap of 6.5 million. Thats just 1 card, and not even a big one. And your ignoring all the singles, all the psa9s, all the cgcs and BGS graded copies ext. And they are not trival either. There are thousands of psa9s and they still have a market price close to $200 a pop. So this singular card that i almost forget even exists has a market cap of over 10million, ignoring the entirety of the rest of the set. Also ignoring sealed boxes
I can imagine the total market cap of all cards is pretty insane. It would rival many fortune 500 companies
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Other notible chatgpt bullets
Broader Market Scale
- The overall collectibles market exceeded $600 billion in 2024, with trading cards—graded included—valued at over $15 billion
Key Market Size Estimates
- Overall trading cards market (inclusive of sports and TCGs) was estimated at $21.4 billion in 2024, expected to rise to $58.2 billion by 2034
Rough “Market Cap” Ballpark
- If we treat the TCG market (~$7B) as the comparable “market cap,” and Pokémon comprises, say, 40–60% of that (a reasonable range given its dominance):
- That implies a Pokémon TCG-related market size of approximately $3–4 billion in 2024.
- If you zoom out to the entire trading cards industry (~$21 billion), Pokémon’s share would still likely fall in a similar
$3–5 billionrange.
Yeah, ChatGPT cites this forum (and others, as well as Reddit) constantly. This forum is by far the best resource for the Pokemon TCG on the internet, but even then it’s still pretty funny that it cites E4 posts as authoritative.
As a warning: when I ask it about niche subjects I know really well, I find that the info it gives me is often wrong (typically in subtle, but often important, ways). I would strongly suggest that people don’t rely on it as a source of info about any niche topic. Especially because if you don’t know the subject very well already, you won’t be able to determine which parts of its answer are true and which are BS (everything it gives you will sound perfectly plausible).
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As an FYI: this answer is a pretty good example of what I mentioned in my previous comment :). It’s talking about market size (i.e., what transacts in a given year), not market cap (i.e., the value of all cards that exist, whether or not they transact). These are two totally different concepts, but it’s treating them as interchangeable.
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I honestly just want a pulse on much money is in this hobby. I’m thinking it’s more than the average person believes. I’ll prob follow up on this with some calls when I get the the time. I honestly could see a trillion dollars including sealed and everything. I could totally be off but just a gut feeling
If you wanted to use Chat GPT for it, the easiest way would be to vibe code something that gets a list of pokemon sets, crawls price charting for each set, then for each card looks up pop report and multiplies the PSA 10 pop by latest sale
Yeah that’s a good idea. Might be a bit until I get some time to try
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I looked at the population using gemrate and price using price charting. Just looking at the top 50 most graded, and I assumed 30% of all cards was graded. This is probably too high but just what I used. I assumed anything under a 10 was raw price(valid for modern, not for vintage, but most of the market cap of these 50 are modern).I have the market cap of 10’s being 350M, graded non 10’s at 137M and non graded at 646M. A total of 1.138B. In reality these are the top 49 plus moonbreon just cause I was curious. Van Gogh Pikachu has the highest market cap at $165M. This took abkut 30 minutes to put together,and there’s prob a quicker way to set this up. Price charting has an API that’s 50$ a month. I don’t care enough to pay for it, but overall, I think it’s safe to assume the card market it self is under 100B. Even if 5% of all cards are graded, which I think it too low, that increases the top 50 to $6B. I don’t think there are enough moonbreons and Van Gogh Pikachu to really make a dent. Sealed product, I just did a back of the napkin math assuming the same #of boxes are sealed per set in an era and multiplied by the average price of a box from that era. SV and SWSH 50K, SM 10K, XY 5K, BW 3K, HG/Plat 2K, DP 1K, EX 500, e series 1K, Neo 2.5K, WOTC 5K are my guesses of sealed boxes left per set per era. Really just pulled this out of no where. Just wanted to see what the number would be. The total would be ~5B. So overall, my guess is total is between 50-100B$. In line with the market cap of Home Depot or Boeing. The whole reason I did this was to get a pulse on how big the Pokémon market has gotten. So much money has flowed into the hobby that it kinda scared me. Taking a step back, and seeing a meme like dogecoin at 35B$, I think the overall market cap being around 50B$ makes me feel a bit better. I was starting to think it was getting closer to a trillion which would be actually insane. Anyway, there are a ton of assumptions made here, so feel free to completely ignore this. Just wanted to share just in case anyone had any interest since I did some work
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This took me about 30 minutes to read
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My bad lol