Who exactly are these buyers spending 100k plus on PSA 10 Lv. X etc?

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I think most of us are now used to opening IG and seeing the newest sale of a Lv. X or ex era reverse holo selling for above $100k shoved in our face. I have a friend whos more of a specialist in gem stones and high end MTG, and he told me that while it’s an easy knee jerk reaction to say ‘it’s a pyramid scheme, it’s tax fraud, it’s a pump and dump’ etc, it’s necessary to look at exactly who the buyers are to know more if its really a short term scheme or organic. For instance, to the ultra wealthy, $100k might just be a weekly dividend payment (and he sees them often in the gem market).

So I was kind of curious, most of these high sales are in opaque auctions where the buyers can’t be seen. Who exactly are they? Is it emblematic of a short term bubble - e.g. Crypto bros looking to flip higher? Or could it be that maybe the ultra-wealthy are fundamentally making a shift to Pokemon collecting? (e.g. some Dubai Emirati’s kid whos trying to beat out his friends)? And if so how long does that last?

I’d be really curious to hear everyone’s opinion, as I don’t know much besides that ‘things are going up’, which isn’t necessarily a good reason to invest, lol.

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Efour Digest - Daily summary of activity
Efour Digest - Daily summary of activity
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Be me
Buy low pop lvl x cards over the months to hoard supply for a few hundred or grand
Shillbid one myself to 900k
Wowzers look everyone
Now put some up for real auction for 80-100k
Everyone fomos
Et voila, you multiplied your investment

Low pop holos nobody really wanted are ripe for this kind of playbook

Pretty sure there are plenty discord groups of crypto/sneaker kids organising these or similar schemes on a daily basis. One of their latest attempts are zenith mews shillbidding every single ebay auction to 3k while they are available for bins for 1k lmao so it happens across all levels. They managed to pump it 3x, these were 300$ cards

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As ive spent more time in the space ive quickly realized there are levels to this shit, people with deeper pockets and more passionate and more eager to have the best and rarest things

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Id say a lot of comps are group buyers running up prices who have a couple copies of the same card, and they are supported by the virtual rip/gambling companies.

The gambling companies want to charge $$$ for packs (often over $25-50k) they need to have big chases and those chases better have public “comps”.

You may get a sprinkling of legit buyers here and there…but the “billionaires are buying” narrative is so low IQ.

Becoming a billionaire doesn’t mean you just spunk money away willy nilly. Most ultra wealthy I know are super picky on what they spend.

They don’t want to be the “greater fool”.

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Most of these cards have not been popular for decades. There is no reason for that to change now.

These cards will absolutely dump.

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Thats a good point I didn’t think of that. But also, with cards like Van gogh being 2.5k with population of 53k+ in 10, that’s a lot of money flowing around. Lots of Pokemon has become a dick measuring contest to have the rarer or lower pop card, and with that much money in the space it’s kind of insane to think that super low pop (and sometimes popular) cards will remain in that <10-20k range.

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Charizardespana in 2016: Pokemon cards have not been popular for decades. There is no reason for that to change now. These cards will absolutely dump.

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Hopefully they stick around, whoever they are.

:money_mouth_face::money_mouth_face::money_mouth_face:

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My aged boomer grandpa asked me what Pokemans are good and now he and his friends in the retirement home are going a little crazy.

Im sorry

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It’s me, I am personally buying every high-end card so that I can sell them to buy more Maractus cards. Sorry about that /j

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Biiiig difference between cards that have traditionally preformed well before and through 2016 than lvl x Garchomp

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And shill my BGS 9.5 slabs

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Lots of good replies from everyone here, and plenty of things I agree with. I will just comment on two things that I find interesting. I could be wildly wrong and acknowledge it! Feel free to disagree.

Regarding the Lv. X dumping on marketplaces like Alt, I’d be very willing to believe there is an element of pumping to it. As others mentioned they are not even the rarest cards in their own sets and some sales seem exuberant. Few of these sales are on eBay. Does that market collapse maybe 5 or 10x once these bros move on and someone is left holding the bag? Sure I can see it!

Whatever the origin of this insane wave, the practical effect has been to incite and inflate most of the mid era market (I refer to RS and DP era mostly for the below analysis).

All boats rise with the tide, as others here have pointed out. I have cards like reverse holo Pikachu Holon Phantoms PSA 9, that were not even $100 before the current boom, now pushing $7k in auction. I could see at least some of this being sticky even in a few years, owing to collectors fundamentally shifting to realizing value and rarity of these cards, many of which have pops that are not much higher than WotC era.

It is also possible for people’s tastes to fundamentally change over time. Legendary Collection was reviled for years before being worshipped today. I sold ex era reverses for $5-7 in my binder at card shows for years but I doubt that time will return. (I think DP and BW are next on this list btw).

The crypto and sneaker bros referenced in this thread correctly deduced that for anything with small supply, pushing the demand lever even a bit can cause wild price inflation. Even if they go away, I think it’s possible that just by drawing people’s attention to these cards, they will fundamentally change the bottom price of this market. We’ve seen this several times since 2019, first with wotc vintage, then subsequent sets.

Where will this go in a few years? We’re in wild mass guess territory. I think that there’s a nonzero risk of market collapse, owing mostly to macro factors like AI speculation bubble burst, stock market slowdown, PSA experiencing some huge crisis of confidence etc. Personally I am very skeptical that 100 or even 90% of the huge mass of people interested in Pokemon now will still be so in 10 years. But even for the ones that are left, I still don’t think we’ll get to $80 PSA 9 reverse holon phantoms Pikachu again. Sorry for the long ramble, that’s my thoughts so far :sweat_smile:

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Probably a combination of extremely wealthy individuals (I’ve heard rumors of at least one of them), institutions that want to “invest in pokemon”, gambling websites trying to create a chase item for their mystery packs and groups (discords) of individuals trying to take advantage of all of the noise.

So basically a lot of money and very little sentiment about the specific cards that are being bought outside of them being PSA 10 and relatively low pop.

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D. All of the above

My personal perspective has adjusted due to these prices. Bought a $29K Master Scroll in PSA 9 because I thought it was “underpriced,” but obviously didn’t think that a year ago when I could have easily grabbed one under 1/2 that price.

Nobody knows what is ahead, and when it crashes I’m sure many will focus on their previous points to prove they were smart. At the same time, they’ll have missed many opportunities and never talk about them.

I’ve given up on guessing the reasons and enjoying going with the flow :grin:

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Didn’t take very long

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“billionaires”

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is someone rich enough to afford a 25k “mystery pack” also dum enough to buy one tho :thinking:

nevermind i found someone who would buy a 100k “mystery pack” :rofl:

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Yeah for sure.

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If institutions are buying these cards to build full-blown asset class positions then the 10s of obscure or low population cards are just the start. This isn’t a question of whether they have the capital, but purely a question of ease of acquisition. The only thing standing in the way is unwavering collectors. Even if their goal is limited to top grades in a pre-defined selection of cards, the removal of those from the market will continue to have consequences for the next-highest grades that are actually still available. Coinbase’s movements within the digital-to-physical space are only reinforcing the expectation that a part of this new ‘big buyer’ class is teeing a move toward the tokenized collectibles market and some of what we’re seeing now is due to the safe-housing of the underlying asset. Logan Paul was a little ahead of time when he attempted a similar fractionalization of the Illustrator but it was poorly executed and so inevitably failed. It’s no wonder people are feeling as though the magic’s disappeared.

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