The Giant English Market Thread

[needszeebs]

@shinycards

@eeveeteam

@neoashuri , everybody and their mother are sitting on sealed modern as an “investment” right now.
Hard to see it do much of anything long term that couldn’t be outdone by a normal stock market investment. Having to store sealed product and risk of damage due to shipping 10 years from now doesn’t sound fun to me.

There’s definitely way more people doing it now than 3 years ago but I disagree that it would be easier to pick a stock with less risk/more reward. Who’d have thought Facebook stocks would have dropped like 30% since 1 year ago? I doubt you will see any decent sealed Pokemon product drop that much from RRP.

Agree on your point about storage/insurance although it is highly unlikely, there is a chance you can lose it all if you don’t take precautions (which is admittedly more problematic for bulky items like booster cases).

If you watch Alpha Invesments Youtube he’s been going through the same cycle over and over for years with MTG and now Pokemon cards. He gets hundreds of comments saying things are too overprinted to be a good investment yet continuously proves them all wrong year-after-year. The appreciation of modern sealed products for a popular hobby is pretty universal.

Eventually those printers have to move onto new sets so the supply is finite, whilst the demand is always going to be there in our lifetime. Lots of people just can’t stop themselves from opening packs so patience and being able to fight that urge is where the money is made. Naturally those boxes are going to increase in value over time, it’s just a matter of how long that could be.

We are already seeing 1-2 year old sets creeping up from $80-100 to $120-140 a box which is typical. In the best case that could continue to $200, $300, $500 etc which in the stock market is a great % return (even after shipping and fees). In the worst case a set may not increase in value by much over 5 years and then all of a sudden explode like Generations and Evolutions did.

So yes I agree that because more people are doing it, it could take longer to see the same gains this time around but just look at Crimson Invasion and Steam Siege box prices and ask yourself how realistic it is that Evolving Skies booster boxes will still be $100 5 years after they stop printing them?

However I think your point totally applies to things like Charizard V Champions Path Promo which currently has a PSA population of 26k sooo many people have graded it that surely all the undercutting will mean everyone that sells it anytime soon are going to lose out on the raw cost + grading fee.

Nothing in life is guaranteed and different Pokemon items perform differently over time but in the current situation inflation is getting worse so sealed products of a super popular hobby is almost certainly a worthwhile bet

A lot of Pokemon items have dropped by over 30% since a year or two ago. I think AlphaInvestments is a very different situation, the scale at which he buys product, and the price he’s able to get product at, allows him to make those moves in a way that works for him. We’ve also yet to see how the increased production will impact the market down the road. I feel like using what worked before as a metric of comparison isn’t valid because modern post 2020 is unlike anything we’ve seen previously. I also think Evolutions is a perfect storm situation and required pretty exceptional circumstances to occur, it isn’t a given with every set (also, Generations didn’t rly explode, if Hidden Fates hadn’t been reprinted, it’d probably be outpacing Generations, as it was already creeping up to $500 for ETBs and it’s 3 years newer).

Assuming the demand for these sets is always gonna be there is what a lot of people who are squatting on product are doing right now. I think the biggest thing is opportunity cost. Yea, you could buy some booster boxes and sit on them for 5 or 6 years and wait for them to go up. But it’s a lot of space and money tied up for a long time. Now that millions of sealed products are likely being stored away as “investments,” the already massive supply of them is much larger. There’s gonna have to be some pretty hefty demand for these boxes to push them. Imo, there’s literally everything else in the hobby that is a better investment than English modern rn. Exceptional outcomes require exceptional circumstances and I feel like it worked before because people didn’t have the insight of knowing things would turn out the way they did; it wasn’t as “easy” of a thing as it is now. If everyone knew sealed would increase the way it did, everyone would’ve held onto it and then it wouldn’t have done what it did. Low effort = low reward. I think the idea of modern booster boxes being a virtually no risk, high reward scenario is gonna burn the shit out of many people. I also think investing in the S&P500 is a much better option than modern Pokemon boxes, that’s about as good as it gets in terms of low risk, high reward imo.

This is just my opinion tho, who knows, modern could stonk and I could be totally wrong. I personally feel like there is many other items that require a bit more effort that are gonna run circles around modern booster boxes in 5 or 6 years.