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Right. Much like in the stock market/cryptos, the speculators who came into the market the past couple years are by far the most impacted by all this recession/macro economic stuff going on. Like even in the vintage market, if someone bought in when Logan showed up and paid some of those crazy prices, that’s all on them if they took out a loan and can’t pay it back or whatever else. I definitely can see some people being caught up in that type of situation with rising rates and these other things going on.

Modern of course has a lot of similarities where some people were legit buying pallets of product and people were becoming a ‘business’ overnight selling cards or booster boxes, but that type of liquidity and demand has definitely been drying up now.

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I just want the supply of near mint+ singles to increase. Where have all the tag team alt arts gone? SM wasn’t as printed as SWSH but certainly not so low as to not have consistent supply.

Maybe they’ve moved off eBay. To be fair, I mainly buy cards from local Facebook groups as well, but eBay isn’t big at all here.

I’m just surprised at where all the supply goes, because as time goes by, even common EX cards etc just disappear. Maybe people don’t think it’s worth selling, but there was an oversupply once.

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They’ve all moved into PSA slabs

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104

The effects from higher interest rates won’t come into play until 2023. Companies already budgeted their projects for 2022 and already have contractors actively working on jobs that were bid on a year ago. You won’t see a slowdown until a year later. How does this relate to Pokémon cards? Well, that is above my pay grade.

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I think it’s already come into play for a lot of people who were/are over-leveraged and who were betting on low rates ‘forever’. These are the type of people who are getting hit the hardest in this market overall. I also feel a lot of it has been priced in at this point, given the overall price declines in various assets.

What’s been interesting to me is Pokemon & collectibles specifically have held on pretty well depending where you look. Some are making new highs in sales, others have gone flat/negative. So I think collectibles are attached to the interest rates in some way, but not as drastically as the stock markets or other assets like real estate.

Personally, I have rarely used leverage for collectibles. Maybe a couple of times when I came across a deal that was too good to pass up. However, I would also have it paid off soon enough that increasingly rising rates wouldn’t really put me in a terrible position financially. So I think it really comes down to individual responsibility in how all this could impact someone.

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TBH, ive been tracking those since years ago (since they were released).

Those cards are pretty hard to pull, i do not know if the pullrates could be comparable to ultra modern alt arts (doubt so) but they are pretty hard to pull. Considering they printed much less than what they are currently doing atm (even more in older S&M) and in fact, some of those arts are incredible plus people looking in retrospective that those were the “first” alt arts.

Also, the growth if you ask me has been pretty organic, most of those have been growing slowly in price, it has been like 1-2 years that they maybe accelerated a bit but still it is a smooth growing curve, no weird random spikes or lows.

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I’ve never used debt (outside of my credit cards that I treat as if they were debit) to purchase cards.

Is going into debt for cards that common?

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108

Neither have I. It just doesn’t seem like it’s worth it

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I’m sure some people do. Pretty sure I heard somewhere that Rudy leveraged debt at one point in his career to get started with MTG but that could be rumors. In my opinion it’s not the smartest thing to do for many reasons.

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My point on interest rates isn’t that people won’t buy cards now because interest rates are higher. I meant businesses will slow down investing in new machines, new factories, expansions, renovations, etc. This has down stream effects on employment, profits, etc. That leads to fewer people having disposable income to spend on luxury goods, or in the case of Pokémon cards, life necessity :wink:

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I would say it’s not as common in collectibles as other investments. 99% of the time I would just pay off my CC in time when buying cards. I’m sure though that at times people have bought up a lot more than normal because of speculation or other things. In general with any type of leverage, you really need to know what you’re doing to make the most of it. For example, I used a lot during March 2020 stock market dump, but in general I would not recommend doing this unless you have the risk aptitude for it and some understanding of how to use it effectively.

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Poor mans take on the very low end .
Been watching and buying since '20. Did hundreds of hours of “market research”. Before establishing buy in margins and planning when to sell. Plan was to buy , grade ,sell , repeat.
Everything went opposite of what i thought due to very little history in market /not willing to take smaller margins than planned and just holding. Plan was to make 20-30% margins on each buy in for quick turnaround of capitol. Didnt work. Made few sales but began planning for longer holds. Market kept dropping , and still is , maybe not weekly but monthly definitely. Kept buying , always under market. Worse hit ive take is about 40% on some graded cards (that i thought were bond level risk) nope. All in all ive probably spent roughly 6k for maybe 8k worth of cmv(maybe more being very conservative). Its been fun “investing”, but really collecting in a very odd way. The intention is to sell everything, eventually.i keep buying weekly/monthly .
Watch max (400) listings on ebay as well as have 90+ items in cart " saved for later" as well as longshot bid 100s of auctions weekly. I win maybe 1-2% of my bids…
All this to say, i keep buying at the bottom, and the bottom keeps dropping. In the last year i have moved nearly completely away from raw (due to risks/ chance of actual nm) vs cost of 7s/8s/9s being less than or equal to cost of card raw nm+ grading fees. The replacement cost of these cards will never be lower unless the entire market tanks. In which case everyone loses.

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Sounds like you are putting in hundreds of hours of work for marginal gains.

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Its a hobby. That may or may not = monetary compensation. The risk reward for 20% from stocks (no knowledge base) vs this seems more appealing to me. Did put in, no longer looking for quick in /out , waiting more for next big upswing 5-10 yrs out. Count it all as loss at this point. Maybe that will reverse. Maybe it wont.

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Umbreon…. Sooo hot this season (Zoolander voice)

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116

Looking at recent sales for Alt Arts on TCGPlayer, and many either experienced buyouts or are suddenly being FOMO bought

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they are the hottest modern cards that everyone wants and it is almost holiday season. It was a pretty obvious thing to see coming

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I’m not as disciplined as you with always buying under market, but I am sure this will pay off down the road.

Truly appreciate how open you were and going into detail. I had a lot of the same plans in 2020, made some money, and basically never sell now since it’s crap margins, or I believe the upside will be much larger than 20%-50% growth.

Know a ton of us are here with you :wink:

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119

What do you collect primarily, and why do you keep buying now if you believe it will go down next year?

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Raw Eeveelutions is what I collect. I only have a couple of cards left to get, so I don’t really care what happens to card prices. Just sharing my opinion.

Some people think an interest rate increase will have an affect overnight on Pokémon cards. It doesn’t. The effect is the long term challenges for some industries to keep employment up when the work starts to slow down.

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