Hello all I’m really just getting into the sealed investment side of collecting…just wondering which sets you think have the best 5 year return moving forward, anything from black and white or xy have potential? I have roughly a 2k spending limit to invest in and just looking for some advice thanks!
Pretty much everything will slowly increase over time. Flashfire is probably your best bet right now if you’re looking at BW/XY.
Every set will move up, its just how long will it take. Smpratte talked about it in one of his videos about how many people invested blindly into Evolutions off the get go. Sets are not just printed once and when that first set of sales are done, they will print again and again. People bought cases and cases of Evolutions only to have the price fluctuate between 85-90$ a box when most of the time they paid a little higher as they don’t secure distributor pricing. Prices on in print items will not fluctuate high as they are continuously printing into oblivion. The thing that will possibly increase is the singles prices but that is a mess for a 2k investment.
When I invest in my items I usually pick up items on their last print run or right when they go out of print. If you can do it right, you can pick up items that were the same price as when they first released, but now since they are out of print and supply begins to go down, thats when prices pick up. The latest pick for that was Ancient origins which back in november december time was at release prices and now is sitting handsomely at around $115.
What I would suggest is begin studying the market and figuring out when that bubble will burst and things will begin to move. For myself I hopped on the generations train last year and went super deep with the red and blue collection boxes. They ship very light, not much overhead, just space and being the greatest pull rate set of all time, Id look towards that option. 2016 was a massive year for generations.
My main piece of advice is do not go hard on a set that just releases as you will have plenty and plenty and plenty of options to buy it during its printing lifecycle. Opportunity cost wise, its very foolish to hold up funds on something that will not begin to move for years.
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Thank you so much for this I have been watching and I saw exactly what you meant with Ancient origins spiking, I’m just worried that B&W and XY sets won’t hold in value over the long term because of a lack of strong connection a la gen 1 and 2 sets. But thank you so much!
I would say invest in Base Set, even unlimited. a box of unlimited in ten years will still be worth more than a couple of BW XY boses.
Pokemon will never have the spike it did in the beginning again, kids who grew up in XY/BW dont have that same connection as we did with WOTC stuff. They care more about the video games.
I think Fossil Unlimited boosters are good boxes to invest in. You can get some in the $500-$550 range currently. I think the chances of it reaching or surpassing $1,000 in the next 2-3 years are better than any equivalent currently in that same price range. The reason is twofold, both dealing with PSA 10’s - first, since getting 10’s in this set is so difficult - in a few years some collectors will probably say screw it and just go in the route of collecting sealed product; whereas on the other hand, there will always be people who think they can get 10’s straight from sealed boxes no matter how many times they have been told otherwise, and those people will continue to buy sealed boxes to bust.
You can buy two FlashFire boxes for the same price as an Unlimited Fossil. I would still take Fossil, because part of the success in investing is FlashFire would be getting them early, and that would have meant snagging a sealed case for $500 back when they released.
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The main issue with this, is if you were to have $1500 to invest, you could pick up $15 $100 boxes or one base set unlimited, in general terms. Even if base set goes up to $2000, $500 it would be years and years, the market still has so many. In boxes that are going out of print, everything will move up. It always does. Picking up those boxes and having them go up $50, which most always do within 3 of out of print. Example being xy base set for instance. That’s an easy $750, compared to trying to find someone to dump a base set box.
The best investments aren’t always the most obvious ones. Alot of people stashed away Evolutions and Flashfire boxes for obvious reasons, so that’s kind of a “no brainer” if you ask what to invest in. But look at sets like Expedition and Team Rocket Returns. Not many people probably thought those would be good investments at the time, but now both boxes sell for at least $1k (TRR closer to 2k). Same with Legendary Collection and other EX series sets. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the currently unpopular XY or BW sets ends up being really profitable 5-10 years from now.
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So I’ve tried to track booster box prices, please note i never bought any of them, so I don’t have the experience, its based off ebay sold listings.
Anyway, I would wait at least a month before buying anything recent, because if phantom forces (the set right before primal clash) has any announcement of reprint/rerelease, it could cause short problems for box investing. Sure we saw limited prints, but I think it will still be at least another 2-3 years before ROS can get back to 250+
here is the link to prices:
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WmOlp4mFN3qDA1oTiAutJccz3tms7m2WgdGFUKHN-4Y/edit
The best investments were before Pokemon GO/20th.
When Rudy is saying invest in Pokemon that should have you worried. The reason he is investing in Pokemon is because MTG isn’t a sure thing anymore unless you are getting the limited release sets like Modern Masters.
Check out eBay for Innistrad and Return to Ravnica. They are both great sets and only a year apart, 2011/2012. One set you are making decent money, the next you are lucky to break even.
Pokemon is probably at a peak so investing in new sealed product is probably a bad idea. Older product, while not 100% is a lot safer.
Going back to MTG, Return to Ravnica was kinda like CP6/Evolutions for MTG. Probably the most popular set was revisited and there are a ton of card that are Modern playable. Add to that the draft experience is pretty good. The year before Innistrad boxes when sold out doubled in price quickly, so everyone was like, no brainer, buy RTR. Everyone and their brother, mother, father, grandmother and 3rd cousin of their 5th cousin did and you can still easily buy boxes at competitive eBay retail prices after 4.5 years, and yes, that means as a retail investor you would be minus the eBay/PayPal fees if you tried to get out now, because 4.5 years isn’t long enough to make money on a very popular set.
Honestly, if you have to ask what to buy, I would pass with the current market.
I would just buy graded base set Charizards. Think of them as the index investing of Pokemon. They are liquid, you don’t have to worry about condition (as they are graded), and they represent the Pokemon market overall vs waiting for a spike to try to move your boxes.
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While its very easy to compare Pokemon to MTG, in my opinion its very non opportunistic to do so. MTG is based so much off playability where as Pokemon has much more of a collectors appeal for a large group of the population. This is why Pokemon boxes continue on the same path for the low end sets let alone the high end sets, (Flashfire) that have not at all any playable cards but are jumping in prices. Like I mentioned above, XY Base is now sitting around the $150’s and Ancient Origins fresh out of print in the mid $115’s. While there are plenty of other options outside pokemon to make better gains over two years than this, its a very safe investment as when was the last time a pokemon booster box the opened at the normal $85-$90 price gone down? To my recollection never. Sure we might not have a crazy 2,000% jump on our hands but its a very safe investment for the long haul, as more and more collectors flood the market, in years from now boxes will continue to be opened rapidly and we should see some nice gains. The only issue in the current market is we have much more new investors than previous years, which could delay growth, however when the stamp of out of print comes up, its almost a for sure jump to over $100 prices and profits begin to be realized.
However, the thing that many new investors do not realize is you don’t have to buy all that product at the start. There is no point in sending off all your investment capital to buy into a set that you will have the opportunity to buy into 2 years down the road. I know of a great deal of AO investors that bought in right before the out of print, and within that month turned a very nice profit as the inevitable jump ensued.
The Charizard market is way to stable in my opinion to be invested into. Booster boxes when opened, lower the total amount still in existence that are sealed, which drives the market price point higher and higher. However when a card is PSA’d, the number only goes up unless some is able to contact PSA saying the destroyed their card and there is actually less of the population. Investing in a product that has been at stable prices, with population counts that can only rise, especially the higher prices that cut off a large section of the market, provides a very high hold on investing capital for years. While its the staple image, the appeal PSA cards have only are marketable to certain factors. I do not believe the are liquid in any ways as especially at the price point you buy in at, it could be a nightmare trying to find someone else looking to buy that card at your cost point.
Pokemon has a set market flow, almost to the point that it challenges mass consumer markets, its very large. Buying in at certain price points will guarantee profits as long as you can hold out down the road, the market has proven this time and time again. Collector and Nostalgic value are powerful tools that pokemon uses. There are lots of things I find very inflated and very undervalued, especially the Southern Islands set, but just finding that small undervalued market is why people who picked up those WOTC boxes back in the day are sitting pretty with crazy profit margins. The biggest piece of advice, find pretty much anything sealed straight from the Pokemon Company, put it in a protective case, and forget about it for years.
How do you know when a set is going out of production?
Anyone buying from a distributor can get a list of what the distributor can buy from the Pokemon warehouses. Other than that, I do not think formal announcements ever really happen.
@pieterpie Might you be able to track the VS Series Boxes on your list 
Those are always rising and lowering in value.
I haven’t got to Japanese Boxes yet, mainly as I’m not a large buyer and I have never seen a large portion of them on the open market, which is all the more reason to start tracking them soon. I was also hoping it would catch on (people would join in, to help) because many people are in the market for these products and/or know the value much better.