while this thread is getting a little off topic here, I just want to point out it’s hard to say he’s making bad financial decisions while he has tremendous gains. If 5 years ago someone made thread on reddit saying they are 25 with X salary and just dropped 30k into Nvidia stock, it’s easy to say bro thats too much of your net worth thats not financially sound
but then a year passes and his investment literally doubles and he’s laughing to the bank. How can we be the ones to say thats a bad decision?
just assess your risk tolerance and be careful. And if this is more about investment and less about hobby, be prepared to sell when the time calls for it dont be left holding the bag
The problem is risk and opportunity cost, not outcome. It’s much easier to look back on things years later (or months later in a boom) and retroactively claim you made good decisions when in reality you may have just gotten lucky, or missed out on better opportunities because you spent too much on children’s trading cards. If I’m honest, I have spent an inadvisable and frankly dangerous amount of money on cards over the course of my time in the hobby. It’s worked out because (a) I learned the game and developed skills during a much lower-stakes era, (b) we’ve had multiple booms, and (c) I’ve been lucky. Would I advise someone today to do the hobby as I did? Absolutely not, even though I’m coming out very well ahead as a result of my involvement.
For every person buying gold stars or BW/XY in 2020-2023 (I was one of them) you can also have people buying 6k PSA 9 unlimited Base Charizards or Metazoo. You also could have thrown all your money into stocks and probably outperform everything. Because Pokemon/TCGs are such volatile and hype-driven markets, taking them as “investments” brings in a lot more questions and problems than if you’re just buying for yourself.
If you have disposable income, by all means, pay whatever price you want for cards and spend as much of that disposable income as you desire. But once you bring “investment” into it, and using your expectation that cards will always go up to justify massive purchases, that’s very dangerous and the exact mentality that got a lot of people in trouble in 2020-21.
yes of course but this IS a scenario of him making out as a winner. At least according to him he has purchased these gold stars a year ago. Meaning he could be up 2x, 3x, ext.
If someone just now said they are going to dip their toes for the first time in gold star pokemon investments and were buying with too large % of their salary I would say slow down there. but this is more of a guy who has already won (unrealized gains) and people are pilling in as saying it was a bad thing to do. But it was a great thing for him in reality so how can we say it was a dumb decision
Congrats! You’re sitting pretty right now . I bought my raw copy in January too. $150 + $25 to grade and sold for $765 in June. I thought that was pretty nuts. This seems borderline insane to me. I have another copy I’m probably going to auction if this continues. Something about life giving lemons and making lemonade right?
The funny thing is that these “custom made fan art” Gengar are actually massively printed fakes coming from AliExpress.
They cost 0,50-1$, so people are literally purchasing them in the dumbest way possible, enriching these professional garbage flippers.
I basically agree with everything you (and plenty of others) said here but I just want to add something to this statement. As someone who has witnessed the 2008 financial crisis I find it crazy as well that plenty people (mainly Gen Z but even some Millenials and older) really think that every asset (doesn’t matter whether it’s stocks, gold, cypto or collectibles) is guaranteed to go up all the time.
When the tariffs were announced in the beginning of April and global stock markets went down rapidly there were many people having a complete meltdown. On platforms like reddit and other forums there were so many people (mainly aged 25 or younger) completely desperate begging for advice what to do (and plenty of them panic selling everything at a loss). We know now that the markets bounced back up very quickly but I really don’t know how those people would react if we have another situation like in 2000 or 2008, where markets go down for a couple of years and don’t recover that quickly. Hope nobody understands this wrong, I invest in stocks since I am 18 and have a monthly savings plan because I believe in them, but it’s not guaranteed that they will go up every single month.
Sorry for getting off topic, back to Pokemon: There is the saying that everybody is an expert in a bull market, but even over the last 5 years we saw two major hype phases (WOTC/some modern in 2020/21 and the Japanese Waifu boom in 2023) were prices are lower today (even though almost everything skyrocketed in price over the last few months) compared to their peaks. And especially when stuff rises in price that quickly I always act with caution.
Does this mean that everything will certainly go down in the near future? No. But it’s also not guaranteed that it will continue to go up or keep it’s value. Nobody really knows actually.
I would never tell anybody what to do with their money, everybody can do with it what they want. But I agree with the statement that putting 10-20% of ones income as a 25 year old in Pokemon cards would have been crazy to me (even if one has a high paying job and a low-cost of living). There are plenty of other things that I would prioritize first (housing, stocks, …).
. I bought my raw copy in January too. $150 + $25 to grade and sold for $765 in June. I thought that was pretty nuts. This seems borderline insane to me. I have another copy I’m probably going to auction if this continues. Something about life giving lemons and making lemonade right?
literally just had this conversation with a friend
