im pretty sure there are like ~100,000 stamp promos printed right? im genuinely not sure of the scream promo numbers, but there were other pieces, like the rocket box 20th anniversary, that were made to order and still are like $10k today. i think ease of access also plays a role in the situation; you can buy and open packs and pull alt-arts, if you didnt get a stamp box, there’s no other way to get them (other than secondhand).
anyway, i feel like this convo is about to get modded on for being in the wrong thread lol im a japanese collector in my heart
I think it might sell beyond retail price - I emailed baccarat right after the announcement and it was sold out already
Think it’s a great piece for home deco. Unfortunately they are selling on Goldin which is horrific for international buyers (or maybe just me? I’m able to bid low to mid six figures on heritage, pwcc, sothebys etc. but Goldin is only willing to give $15k limit or something before I gave up with their customer rep)
Yep, I seem to have an unlimited limit with Heritage and PWCC but Goldin has been a huge hassle with emails back and forth before I got “approved” to have a 15k limit.
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.
Seems crazy that I am typing up a response to this, but I saw what I think are some misconceptions.
The risk for buying a physical item and storing it is almost always going to be higher than the risk of buying a stock. There is so much more that can go wrong from product being damaged, stolen, lost, and faked. Stocks don’t have this extra risk and it’s hard to quantify the extra risk that comes with collectibles. This is one of the many reasons why it’s not really possible to compare pokemon products to the stock market like you did with facebook. Liquidity and fungibility also come to mind as things that make it impossible to compare the two.
Then you talk about demand always being there in our lifetime which is just a baseless claim. You also say the worst case scenario is a set exploding like generations or evolutions when you detailed above that it’s possible to literally lose your entire collection. It happened to someone here after FedEx lost a box with hundreds of thousands worth of cards at the time that were sent to PWCC without insurance.
Lastly, you talk about inflation getting worse (increasing). When inflation increases, interest rates typically increase as well. When this happens people usually stop buying things. Especially non-essential items. Pokemon cards are a luxury good. It would be one of the first things people stop buying if they are struggling to buy essentials due to increased inflation.
Regarding the current modern “investment” discussion, Hot Wheels went through a similar boom in the late '90s. There were many people that hoarded hundreds and thousands of cars at the time thinking they would be good investment pieces. To this day, many of those pieces are still essentially worthless. Bulk dealers might pay you $0.25-$0.50 per car for lots. You might be able to get $1-3 per car trying to sell them individually, but even then the less desirable ones might not ever sell.
The big difference is that you open a pack of cards. So, will there be enough people wanting to open S&S sets 20 years from now to keep sealed prices high? That’s the question, isn’t it. If things level out long-term, I would guess not.
Good to see the naysayers are still proving that history will repeat itself yet again.
“Pokemon is the worst investment ever!”
“There isn’t gonna be any demand for the biggest media franchise and most popular childhood craze in the future!”
“The stock market is 100% safe and better risk:reward!”
“Evolving Skies booster boxes aren’t gonna be any more than RRP in 5-10 years time!”
“FedEx could lose your investment!”
“Pokemon can drop by 30%!”
“Modern sealed is a bad investment! Rebel Clash ONLY went up 100% in 2 years!”
If it wasn’t for them my sealed products wouldn’t have increased by 1000-2000% in the last 5 years
It’s not just Hot Wheels that experienced that – it’s the vast majority ofcollectibles released in the 80s and 90s. Wall Street started speculating on collectibles (coins, primarily) in the 1980s after third-party grading became a thing. Coins, vintage sports cards, etc. rose in value meteorically, and the general public began to view collectibles as an investment (or, at a minimum, an inflation hedge). Comics, sports cards, action figures, coins, you name it – if it was released in the mid-late 80s-90s, it was probably heavily inflated by speculation.
And those bubbles popped. Nearly all late 80s-90s comics, sports cards, and action figures are worthless. Too many people hoarded them, kept them sealed, and/or preserved them in pristine condition. Now it’s been decades since that bubble and most of the current participants in the market aren’t aware of or haven’t internalized that history. Anything being released today is being released into very similar collectibles market conditions as were present in the mid-late 80s-90s. I pretty much won’t touch anything released in the 2010s/20s for precisely this reason.
I still think there are way more people that can’t help themselves from opening products than those willing to hold long-term, of course some of those paper hands will probably get burnt by that Fire Blast if they are forced to sell in the short-term (like if Celebrations gets printed for as long as Evolutions was).
So supply can’t go up (TPC unlikely to reprint because it’s less profitable for everyone involved, and can upset some relations). We can’t underestimate future demand and remember, a lot of the supply taken by Wailords like Rudy is going to be off the market for 10-20 years so that effectively doesn’t exist to those trying to get a set that’s been out of print in 5 years time.
Also card EV becomes less relevant to sealed products as time goes on (look at Steam Siege/Crimson Invasion booster box prices, or even better B&W sets)
All of this is pretty universal to popular card hobbies if you compare it to MTG which is a few years more mature than Pokemon
The thing is, we can make good inferences for what sealed does in the future based on print runs. We never know print runs exactly but we know production of cards was ramped up significantly in the past couple of years because of demand. Lets look at a fossil unl booster pack compared to a technically newer set but with far less print, a skyridge pack. One is under 200 bucks, the other over 1000. Demand can outweigh this at times like with base unl or evolutions. But if you buy 1000 bucks worth of modern sealed rn vs 1000 of vintage sealed or honestly probably anything vintage, the vintage will increase far more than modern. So for people saying “lets see how much modern is worth in 20 years”, it’ll be a fraction of the value of equivalent vintage purchased at the same time right now. So yea, your rebel clash will go up in value over the years, but it was still a terrible thing to ‘invest’ in.
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.
