20 Ways to Make Money with Sports Cards in 2026

Sports cards could absolutely make you money. But in 2026, the old playbook has changed. Grading is more expensive and harder to access, breaking is more competitive, and some flips that looked easy a year ago no longer make sense. At the same time, new opportunities are opening up in collection buying, trade arbitrage, live selling and services that solve real problems for collectors. So whether you're trying to fund your collection, build a side hustle or or create a full time business, today I'll break down 20 real ways to make money with sports cards right now. Including what still works, what has changed, and where the biggest opportunities may be hiding. The Jeff Wilson show is brought to you by Arena Club, the official home of Slab packs. Now available every day, Slab packs offer an exciting way to collect graded cards with confidence. Plus, every pack comes with an instant offer to buy your slab. Don't miss out. Explore the latest Slab packs and more by downloading the Arena Club app. Just search Arena Club in the App Store and use promo code SCI for 20% off your first purchase. Hello, and here we go from the Arena Club studio Inside Cards hq. Let's talk about how to make money with sports cards. And I'm going to tell you something right off the bat and you're going to hear this theme throughout the episode. It takes work. There is no free money to be made in this industry. It is no different than other industries. It takes work. And those who put in the time and the grind and the hustle and the and they're willing to do the research and they're willing to do what it takes and be patient and grind it out. Those are the people who are going to consistently make money over the long run. So if you're looking for some quick get rich quick scheme, this isn't it. But if you're looking to actually go about some sustainable ways of grinding out profit in this industry, then hopefully this video will help you a lot. And let's start with my first one for today's list. Buy entire collections and piece them out. This is nothing new. In fact, there are many big card shop owners and dealers that have used this exact strategy to build the majority of the profit that they have made over the course of decades. This has been going on for decades and it is as successful today as it was 20 or 30 years ago. And what this means is basically the philosophy here is you are trading the seller of the collection potential value for speed and convenience. You are going to do the hard work of parsing out their collection and and selling the pieces individually. Maybe Some of the pieces you grade, selling the pieces across different marketplaces, doing what it takes to maximize the value. They are going to give up potential value by selling you a big collection at a bulk price, but they're willing to give up value for the speed and convenience of getting paid right away. If you're willing to do that trade, if you're willing to trade your time, you can get good profit and return by buying big collections off people. The money is made here when you buy, you have to buy a big collection at a good bulk deal. Here's how I suggest you approach it, as many professionals do. And by the way, you can source these types of collections. There's a lot of way to source these collections. Facebook marketplace can be a good way to, to source people with big sports card collections. Craigslist. Look, look for those kind of in person opportunities. You can sometimes find people at trade nights or people who show up at card shows and say, I've got, you know, I got, you know, 8,000 cards, you know, back in my storage unit. I don't know what to do. You know what to do with all of them, right? There's ways you can find and source collections like that. And then once you get your hands on a collection, you want to separate out the stars from the bulk. That's the first thing you should do. The cards that individually have significant value, let's say, you know, cards that individually are maybe more than $20 or $50, pull those out and do individual pricing of those cards. Then the rest of it either have them throw in for free or put a really low, you know, per card price on the rest of it, like $0.50 per card on the rest of it. By the way, $0.50 per card would be too high. If the rest of it includes a lot of comments. If it includes a lot of comments, they should be throwing the bulk in for free. You'll pay for the stars and you get all the bulk for free. And maybe you're buying those star cards at maybe like 80% of market, right? So let's say hypothetically you encounter somebody who's got a 1990s basketball card collection of, you know, 2,000 cards. You thumb through it, you pull out the Kobe Bryant rookies, you pull out the 90s inserts that have some value. You pull out the Vince Carter rookies, you pull out anything else from that era. The Tim Duncan rookies, right? The Allen Iverson rookies. You're looking for the cards that are going to have some individual value, maybe above 20 or above $50, you pull all of those out. You then use an app like Market Movers. You go through, you price those cards out individually and then you got the rest of it. And maybe you get a rough estimate of like ah, there's a lot of comments here. These are worth very little or there's some decent cards here. Maybe the average price for the rest of it is 2 bucks or something like that. So what you would do is maybe say hey, I'm going to give you 80% of the fair market value for these star cards here, your Kobe rookies, your Allen Iverson rookies, that type of thing. And then I'm going to pay you a flat 100 bucks for the rest of it or I'm going to pay you 50 cents a card for the rest of it or you're going to throw the rest of it in for free because there's not a lot of value there. And I'm buying your star cards at 80%. That's how the deal gets done. And then once you acquire all of it, now you need to figure out the best way to maximize your profit. That means grading some of the cards. Potentially that means thinking about different ways in which you are going to sell the cards. Some cards may be better suited for singles listings on ebay or on com C. Some cards if they're higher end, maybe they go to a fanatics collect or a marketplace like that which is going to sell a higher end card for you. You gotta find the right way to move the cards individually. Maybe if you're a dealer you can you know, sell some at card shows or sell a big bulk lot, you know, set up dollar bins at a card show you go to, you know, for people to parse through. It takes work but this is one of the most sure fire ways to make money in the sports card market. Keep in mind though, everything I'm describing you're probably not going to want to do with like junk wax era cards. Buying a big collection of like 1980s baseball, you're gonna really struggle to get any money back out of that. Buying a big collection of you know, ultra modern football or 1990s basketball or cards from the 1960s and 1970s. Now we're talking now there's some opportunity for you to make money if you're gonna put in the time and effort method number two, buy from underperforming auctions or motivated sellers and sell them on the right marketplace. So this is a little bit of like marketplace arbitrage and as I'm looking at the data in market movers, I see this play out in real time, all the time. Vintage cards on fanatics collect sometimes struggle because that marketplace tends to orient more towards ultra modern. Vintage cards tend to do better on heritage or golden. Conversely, high end cards on ebay, those can sometimes struggle on ebay. You know, oftentimes high ends, you know, people are going to a fanatics collect or an alt low end cards though on a golden or fanatics collect or a heritage or an alt low end cards there can often struggle. They'd be much better suited for ebay. Sometimes. If you're scouring all of these sites, sometimes you'll find cards that are at auction that are selling for well below they should, where they should, simply because the marketplace wasn't the right fit for that particular card. And if you look across all the marketplaces routinely, you will sometimes find deals where something is just low in the auction. It wasn't the right marketplace or it wasn't the right timing and you can snipe, take the card and then maybe you turn around and flip it on another marketplace where it's better suited. Or maybe you know a buyer who would be particularly well suited for that card. Professional car dealers do this often. I know a lot of car dealers who set up at card shows or even card shop owners that will be consistently monitoring the online marketplaces to look for deals. And it isn't just buying from online marketplaces. It's actually better if you can buy off of an individual and then sell at the right online marketplace. Especially when you find an individual who needs to get rid of cards quickly because they just, they need liquidity and they don't want to wait to send them off to an auction house and have to wait, you know, weeks for the auction to end and to get paid and all that type of thing. Or conversely, maybe you know, a buyer who loves collecting a certain player or a certain type of card and you see one of those cards selling for pretty cheap below where it should. And at an online marketplace, if you have a seller who's who you know wants to get out, or you have a buyer who you know you can work with, then it makes that ability to either buy or sell in one of these online marketplaces even better. Now keep in mind, of course, whenever you resell on an online marketplace, you are going to encounter fees. So take fees into the equation. It does make the arbitrage more difficult when you consider, hey, if I buy from this marketplace and then I'm going to sell on this marketplace, it may sell for More. But is it going to sell for enough more to cover your fees? You've got to factor fees into the equation. Tip number three, Buy raw cards to grade or slabs to crack and cross. Now, this strategy is nothing new. In fact, I would have had this as the number one strategy on my list for making money in cards if it wasn't 2026. Because the problem now is that the grading math has changed dramatically with PSA pausing all of their value levels. The cheapest way to submit a card to PSA for grading, it's now 80 bucks. So this changes the math considerably. This was a really good method before to go to card shows, to go to trade nights, occasionally card shops if they don't grade their own cards, and to find raw cards that are worthy of grading. This was a sure fire way to make money if you developed a really good eye for being able to evaluate cards in your hand to see what's gradable and what's not gradable. It used to work with cards at a lot of different value levels. Today you have to be a lot more picky and you have to look at higher value level cards to do this with. You know, previously I would have said if you went to a Collecticon, for example, and look for Pokemon cards you could buy, you could be buying Pokemon cards for 40 or $50 raw. Send them in a PSA, grade them, PSA 10 might be 200 bucks on those cards and you would be doing really well if you had a reasonable gem rate, a reasonable percentage of your cards that ended up with a PSA 10. But today you can't be buying 40 or $50 cards to do that with anymore because with grading costing $80, the grading fee is taking up too much of your potential profit. You can do it if you're buying cards that are 300 bucks or 400 bucks or 500 bucks or more. That's where your opportunity is if you're going to use psa. And PSA is the grading company that ultimately returns the most value. So they're the ones that I normally recommend using in a raw to gray type scenario. But be careful because dealers and card owners are are much more likely to have looked at their higher value cards carefully and evaluated them for grading than maybe they would have with their $40 cards. Right? So if somebody has a $500 raw card, the chances that that card has some damage and is not gradable, maybe it doesn't have good centering or it's got a surface scratch. The chances of that are higher with the higher value cards because the math, you know, the person who owns the card would be, would have been more likely to evaluate it for grading on their own. So you really have to be careful about evaluating the condition of cards if you're going to try this strategy. And now if you're going to do it with higher end cards than what you would have done before. So you know, definitely, definitely be careful. One tip is that sometimes with brand new sets, that presents your best opportunity. Because for example, if you come to a trade night here at Cards hq, you will walk around and you will find people looking to trade or sell cards that in some cases maybe they just pulled from a box that same day. It happens here all the time. We'll see customers come in and they'll buy a box of the brand new baseball release or the brand new football release. The they'll rip it open in the store, they'll hit a cool card that's maybe worth a few hundred bucks and then they'll be at our trade night that night and they'll have it out on their case at trade night. That could be a good opportunity because that's a brand new, fresh out of the pack card that the person maybe had not yet really evaluated for grading. So look for brand new to market sets as probably your best opportunity to get this strategy to work. Another thing you can try to do is crack and cross. Meaning if you see an SGC 10 that you think could be a PSA 10 or a CGC 10 that you think could be A PSA 10 or a BGS 95 true gem that you think could be a Psa 10, there's opportunity sometimes there or even a Psa 9 that you think could be a BGS 9. 5. There's opportunity to crack and cross. But once again, with grading fees now being higher than ever before, you got to be more careful about that. And it doesn't always work. If you can develop a really good eye for grading, that's when you can take advantage of this method. All right, the number four way to make money from sports cards. Buy vintage cards with a superior eye appeal. This is a, this is a tip that allows you to use comps in your favor. Comps can be your friend here because when you're looking at vintage cards, if you look at the sales history of vintage cards, you will see that cards, the same card in the same grade can sometimes sell for very different prices. Not every 1953 Topps Mickey Mantle PSA4 is the same. You'll see a Quite a swing. Sometimes thousands of dollars, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. Difference between two of the same card in the same grade. And the difference was eye appeal. And what that means is that one of the copies had really good centering, really good color and really good registration, really good focus. Right. Another copy, same grade, was not centered very well, was a little bit faded, and was slightly out of focus. Well, why did they grade the same? Well, possibly because the copy with a really good centering, the really good color and the really good registration had an issue on the back. Maybe it had a mark on the back or maybe it has a crease and you can only see the crease on the back of the card. The front of the card looks really clean, whereas then you see the same, same card, same grade, but another copy where the defects on the front of the card, such as the centering being off, are a lot more noticeable. The better copy of the card will often sell for more, sometimes significantly more. The better looking copy of the card, the card with the more eye appeal. So you can use this to your advantage. You can look at recent comps and you can say, you know, hey, this card in this grade, you know, recently sold for $3,000, the last few sales. But you realize that that dealer you're doing business with or that person at trade night, their copy looks really exceptionally good from an eye appeal standpoint. So you can try to buy it based off recent comps, but get some arbitrage value because. Because then when you go to resell yours, you can demand a higher price because of the superior eye appeal. And oftentimes collectors will pay that higher price. Strategy 5 profit from seasonality and market timing. This is one that you probably know. Buy during the quiet part of a player or sports calendar and then sell into the anticipation. This is buying football cards in March and then selling them in August. This is buying baseball cards in December and then selling them during spring training. Or this is buying a baseball, a baseball, a baseball prospects card in December that you are fairly certain is going to get called up to the majors that next season and holding it, and then the day they get called up to the majors, putting it out for sale. Or this is buying a player's card before they win MVP or before they get announced into the hall of Fame. Because oftentimes those types of major announcements will often temporarily, if not permanently boost a player's card market. There's always timing opportunities in the sports card world. And if you're disciplined and you get ahead of it, the old adage of, you know, buy when people aren't paying attention and sell when the hype is the highest. It absolutely works in sports cards. All right, strategy number six, prospect on young players and upcoming catalysts. This one is high risk, high reward, and this is nothing new. This is what people do all the time in the sports card market. This is your quick flip strategy. It is by the player who you think is going to get hot before they get hot, and then when they get hot, sell the card. Sell the card as they're getting hot. I mean, maybe no greater example of this in the last, you know, several months than both Victor Wembanyama and Jalen Brunson. Both of those guys with their incredible playoff runs, their cards went absolutely berserk during those playoff runs. Victor Wembanyama, to me, that one was fairly obvious. I was saying all season long and going back into the offseason, before this season started, I said on Sports Card Investor a bunch of times in a bunch of different shows, I'm buying a lot of Wemby. Why am I buying a lot of Wemby? Because I think this guy is going to have a great season and I think the spurs are going to be a lot better and I think they're primed for a deep playoff run. So I bought a lot of Wemby. I was really happy. I did because a lot of those Wemby cards, you know, doubled or tripled by the time we got to the NBA Finals. I did not buy Jalen Brunson. I didn't think the Knicks were prime for the run that they had. But. But that was an opportunity too. Certainly right now, of course, this is high risk, high reward, because it's easy to buy the wrong guys. And I've done that plenty of times before. I've been wrong many times about my predictions of whatever guy is going to have the breakout season or whatever team is going to go on and, you know, get to the championship and their players card values will rise along with them. So it's high risk, high reward, but if you pick the players right, it works every time. Strategy seven, create value through trades and trade ups. This is not paid enough attention to. This is a tricky way of creating value. A lot of people, when they think about how do I make money in sports cards, how do I flip cards for profit? A lot of people are really thinking about the buying and selling, but it's actually trading that can sometimes present you with the best opportunities. There's many collectors out there that don't care as much about how much their cards are worth or how much your cards are worth. They care more about being able to get the cards they want for their collection, and they're willing to give up a little bit of financial value if it enables them to get a card they really want. So use this to your advantage. If you've got players or cards that a certain collector really wants, they'll probably give you better financial value in return via a trade. If they've got cards in their collection that they're not really emotionally tied to, but they really want your card, that's a great opportunity to trade your card and get more financial value in return via their cards. Trading is trading is an underappreciated way to be able to have successful flips in the sports card market. And of course, you know, I do a show every month with veriswap, right? And we have veriswap. We recommend veriswap as a way to do trading online. So obviously, trading at trade nights, trading at card shows, excellent way to do what I'm just describing. But if you don't have a trade night or a card show near you soon, download the Veriswap app, please. Promo code SCI Registration code SCI. When you register on the Veriswap app or veriswap.com gets you $15 in free trade credit and you can start trading on Veriswap. And there is absolutely good deals to be found on there with collectors if you have the cards that they want. Strategy number eight Buy and sell sealed wax. When people think about flipping or making money or investing in cards, they often think about individual cards. Not enough people think about sealed wax, sealed products, sealed boxes. Oftentimes the boxes will go up more from a percentage basis than the cards themselves. Why? Well, because every time a box is opened, the cards become more common. There are more of them and the boxes become less common, there are less of them. So your supply of boxes from a particular set go down and down and down over time, whereas your supply of cards from a particular set increase over time as those boxes are opened. So generally, buying sealed boxes can be a pretty good strategy for price appreciation over time. It's almost like a mutual fund. It also gives you a little bit of protection. You know, if you bought a box of 20, 2018 baseball, you had the opportunity for Shohei Ohtani. You also had the opportunity for Ronald Acuna Jr. You also had the opportunity for Juan Soto. You had a loaded rookie class actually in 2018, and you had multiple opportunities to get really good cards. Now let's say you thought Juan Soto was going to be the next best, most incredible sports card investment. If you had bought all Juan Soto singles, you would probably be kicking yourself right now that you didn't put some of that money into Shohei Ohtani instead. Because, of course, Shohei Ohtani has. His cards have done way better than Juan Soto's over the course of time. But conversely, if you had bought sealed boxes from 2018 and left them sealed, you would have benefited from the rise of Shohei Ohtani's market as well as if Juan Soto has a spike in the future, If Ronald Acuna Jr. Has a spike in the future, you're going to benefit from all of their markets increasing. So sealed product can be a good way to kind of ride the sports card market and a little bit of, a little bit of a more diversified manner and in a manner that really leans into what you have becoming more scarce over time. Strategy number nine, build and monetize a sports card audience. So here we're going away from, you know, just how do I flip cards or flip boxes or that type of thing? And now we're getting into some of the, maybe a little more business aspects of the sports card hobby. How can you make money in other ways? And here we're talking about making money through content creation. Obviously, we do a lot of it here at SportsCard Investor, but you don't have to build a huge audience with 500,000 subscribers to make money, but you do have to build some audience. So you're not gonna be able to monetize right away. But if you find a niche for yourself in the sports card hobby, there will be companies that want to sponsor you. And getting sponsors is key for making money here because the platforms themselves, they don't pay out very well, especially in niches where your total view counts aren't going to be that high, you're not going to get rich, or you're honestly not even going to make very much money at all off YouTube ad revenue or off, of, you know, bonuses that Instagram or TikTok give you. That more so helps wide, wide creators that are reaching, you know, millions or tens of millions of people. When you're in more of a niche space like sports cards are you really, in order to make money from content creation, you really have to get some sponsors on board. But the good news is there's a lot of companies in the sports card hobby that are looking for exposure. There's a lot of new apps that, that have come along and have started or a Lot of new trading platforms or a lot of new marketplaces or grading companies. There's a lot of different companies that are trying to do entrepreneurial things. Supplies. There's a lot of companies creating all kinds of different supplies. These are all good targets for you to sell some content sponsorship to, and it's potentially a good way to build up a side revenue stream. You do, though, have to start by first getting the audience. If you only have 200 people following you, you're probably not going to get anybody to pay you money to monetize your channel. But if you get 20,000 people following you, then you definitely have that opportunity and you might somewhere in between as well. This is a long road. It's a long journey. Building audience takes time and it takes a lot of commitment and a lot of repetition. So if you want to go this route, you got to be in the game for a while and you got to be disciplined and you got to do it every day. And you got to realize you're probably not going to see results for a while and you're certainly not going to monetize what you're doing for a while. But if you're committed, can be a really good source of monetization in the long run. All right, strategy number 10, source, broker and manage collections for clients. This is an emerging opportunity. There are more and more wealthy investors who are interested in cards. More and more people with money who want to get collections started, but they may not have the knowledge to really know what to buy or how to know that they're getting a good price. Or maybe they have the knowledge, but they simply don't have the time. There's opportunity to connect with wealthy people who want to put money into the space, who want to diversify their personal investment portfolio. Or maybe they just think cards are fun and they'd like to own a couple. There's opportunity to connect with them and to charge a sourcing fee or a retainer or a transaction percentage to help them get cards that are going to be theoretically good investments or good cards for their collection. Now, of course, never guarantee that a card will appreciate in value because none of us know, you know, what cards are going to do in the long run. But if you know cards, you can provide a lot of value to people who don't know cards as well as you but are looking to get into the market. Strategy number 11, offer consignment services. So this is helping collectors who want to sell cards. And this is. This could be you taking cards from a collector and listing them all for sale on ebay and selling them all on ebay for them and then, and then keeping a percentage and giving them the rest of the money. Or this could be you taking cards from a collector and then setting up at a local card show and selling, you know, at your dealer table, trying to move that collector's cards and then keeping a percentage and giving them the rest of the money. You could do it through lives, you know, through live selling as well. Right. There's multiple ways that you can sell cards for people who either don't have the time or don't maybe have the expertise or maybe they just can't be bothered with it. You know, this is you, if you have card knowledge and if you have desire to put in the time and to hustle and I said that at the beginning of the video. There's a lot of ways that you can make money offering services to people who don't have the time or don't have the desire but want to transact, either buy or sell with carts. And so this is just another way of doing it. Make people's lives easier, help them, in this case, help them sell their cards and you can be rewarded by taking a percentage. Strategy 12 Sell singles through live commerce so we all know how popular whatnot has become and a lot of people go onto whatnot to break. But there's a lot of people on whatnot having success selling singles. Now keep in mind this can be tough while you're building your channel's following. Once you build your channel's following, then this can become a very profitable way of selling cards. People love single sales on live selling platforms, particularly whatnot. Obviously ebay live is growing in this direction as well, so those are definitely platforms to keep a look to keep an eye on. TikTok shops been growing in this direction. Fanatics Live has some live single selling on there as well, although they have a smaller list of vetted sellers, so it may be a little harder to break in with them. But if you can build an audience on one of the live selling apps, then you can become very successful potentially doing this. I suggest you start with very inexpensive cards because you will absolutely end up with some cards selling for less than what you paid for them. So you don't want to get burnt, especially in your early sales. But if you can go into it with a mindset of like, hey, I'm going to do this for a while and I recognize I might lose money on the 1st like 6 times I do this, but I'm going to do some giveaways and try to build up following, and then hopefully over time, I can start making money. That's a, that's a good approach. I suggest starting with smaller cards because then if you do lose money, you're losing a little less. And so it's, it's. You can kind of build yourself up to doing bigger stuff down the road. But this can be a successful strategy if you're willing to put in the time and the effort. And if you're understanding that you probably will take some losses in the early stage while you build audience. The success that you have with this ultimately comes down to how well you buy. So going back to my very first tip of the video, if you can buy collections at a good price, then maybe you move some of those collections through live streaming and maybe that combo of those two strategies becomes very successful for you. Strategy number 13 is, is to operate sports card breaks. So we just talked about live selling. Obviously there's breaking as well. Now breaking has become more crowded and breaking. If you show up on whatnot one day and you start a brand new channel and you start trying to rip boxes and break, you can absolutely lose money doing it in the early stages as well. So much like live selling, breaking can be tough. You've also, with breaking, you've got the additional element that it oftentimes can be hard to source sealed product at a good enough price that breaking it is gonna really return profit to you. And don't forget that there's a lot more work associated with breaking than just opening up the box. You then have to sort all the cards, you have to ship all the cards. There's shipping materials involved in the cost of that. You've got customer service. There may be shipping mistakes, there may be damaged shipments, and of course, you have all the platform fees that you have to pay along the way. So breaking is no longer an easy method to make money. But there are some ways to bootstrap it. I've seen some individual collectors become successful with side hustles by doing breaks in discord groups, for example, or doing breaks through Facebook groups. Because there you're not having to pay platform fees. And so there are some ways that you can do breaking maybe in a smaller format to start, build up an audience, build up some customer base, and make a little bit of money along the way. Provide grading, screening and submission services. Grading is a mystery to many people, but they know they need to get their cards graded. There's a lot of people who don't want to go directly to the grading companies, they're intimidated by going to PSA's website or Beckett's website and filling out the grading forms, or they are uncertain about which of their cards are actually worthy of grading and how well they will grade. And once again, that's where you can come in by providing a valuable service to them. You know, I've had Joe Davis from Got Baseball Cards, a local card shop here in Atlanta on this show many times. One of Joe's card shops, big sources of revenue, is doing grading, screening and bulk submission for his customers. That's been a big source of revenue for Joe for decades. People have always needed the help here. There's a lot of people out there that don't want to deal directly with the grading companies or have uncertainty. So they like the middleman in this case, they like Joe Davis helping guide them on what's worthy to grade, what's not worthy to grade, and handling the submission details for them. And of course you should take a fee for doing all of this. Joe charges a per card fee for pre screening cards for people. And then if you do enough submission, you work out, you get yourself set up as a dealer with the various grading companies and you'll get dealer rates which then allow you to make some money on every card that is submitted for grading. Because essentially you're kind of getting a cheaper wholesale rate and you're charging your customer, your grading customer, a retail rate per card. So you can make a little bit of margin there on a per card basis as well. So this is a service that you can start and people will buy into. And by the way, if you want to check out Joe Davis service and what he does with bulk grading submissions and pre screening and everything like that, you can go to our website, sportscardinvestor.com and click Grading in the main menu bar, find out all about it there and even submit your cards through there. All right, strategy 15 set up as a dealer at card shows. Look, if you want to buy cards for good prices and then sell them for good prices, good prices for you, right? If you want to buy cards inexpensively and then sell them for good profit, setting up as a dealer at a card show is one of the best ways to do that. There is a psychological element that when you are behind the dealer table and people approach you to sell their cards, they understand that you're going to be paying them less than what they're actually worth because they perceive you as a dealer, as a business, so they know you're going to pay them less than what it's actually worth. And they're fine with that. They expect that. It's different psychologically. If you're attending a card show and you go up to a dealer and, and you offer the dealer to buy their cards for less than what they're worth, a lot of dealers will say no. But if you're the dealer, you can buy people's cards for less than what they're worth. It's just a psychological thing. Conversely, if you're selling cards, if you're a dealer, people are assuming you're selling cards at or above comps and you're making extra margin on those cards. Whereas if you're a, you know, if you're, if you're trying to sell cards just as an attendee, you're, you're going to be probably not successful at all selling cards above comps. Whereas dealers can oftentimes get away selling with selling cards a little bit above comps. There's something psychologically about being a dealer. And so if you're serious about trying to buy and sell for profit, I highly recommend paying to be a dealer at card shows. It will be worth your while for sure. And many card shows always, you know, want to get new dealers. So they're, they're often, you know, have dealer applications open. You can buy tables at a lot of card shows without much hassle at all. Tables can often be pretty inexpensive. If you go to a very small local show, like a one day small local show tables might be 50 bucks, not a lot of money required to get started there. If you go to more of a larger regional show, you might be paying a few hundred dollars for a table for a couple of days. But it's not that much money in the grand scheme of things when you consider what you're able to get by doing some really good buys and doing some good selling at that show. Now do keep in mind that there can be other costs associated with being a dealer at a card show as well. Certainly if you have to travel now, you're getting into a lot more cost, right hotels and plane tickets and all that type of thing. But if you can cut down on travel, find shows near you, this is dealer tables at shows can be a great way to really start to make money with sports cards. All right, we got a few more here. Strategy number 16, create transparent and ethical repacks. Look, repacks are very popular. Repacks and mystery bags are very popular. But the problem that the repack and mystery bag market has, has always had is a reputation problem. Where a lot of times those mystery bags that random dealers put together at card shows, they're not fair. You don't know if there's actually any big hits in there. You don't know what the checklist was, you don't know what the floor, what the low value cards that could come out of those packs are. They're not really transparent, they're not really fair and oftentimes they're very much tilted in the dealer's favor. So as a customer, be careful. So how do you combat this? Well, if you want to create a repack product, consider, consider doing it in a more ethical way here at Cards hq. Obviously you probably have heard like, you know from me talking about it in the past. We went several steps forward with this by actually partnering with PSA to have PSA third party verify our repacks to ensure that they are randomized. PSA actually packs them for us and does the randomization and they ensure that all the cards that we say are in the checklist was actually packed in one of the boxes. Now we have to pay PSA a pretty significant fee for doing this for us, but for us it's worth it because we wanted to have a very trustworthy, a very fair, a very honest repack offering and I think it's resonated with our customers. You don't necessarily have to go to that length of working with PSA if you're simply going to be like selling some of your own repacks at a card show, but having some form of, of third party verification, some form, like a complete published checklist, some form of fairness to what you're putting together for the end customer. There's opportunity there. Strategy number 17, provide services that card sellers hate doing. So we've already talked about the fact that you can, you know, do a consignment service and help people sell their cards. There's other things you can do related to that that don't necessarily involve the whole end to end process of selling a card. There was this service that I saw pop up a number of years ago where somebody was offering simply to organize cards for people who had big unorganized card collections. And they got some customers by doing that. They also offered to go in and photograph or scan cards, cards for, you know, for, for collectors who needed that so that they could have digitals should they want to sell their cards in the future or just keep them, you know, just keep them categorized and cataloged as to what they had for insurance purposes or just to keep track of their Collection. There are a lot of collectors out there with a lot of cards who have money, but they maybe don't have the time or the interest. And in dealing with the cards, and they sure would love somebody to come in and organize them for them or photograph them for them, or catalog them for them, or maybe even tell them what the current market value is of all of the cards, research the pricing for them, appraise their collection so that they know what it's worth, or maybe it's for insurance purposes or so that they just simply could sell it if they wanted to in the future and know what would be reasonable. There are services you can provide as somebody who knows cards and has the desire to put time in that people will pay for. Strategy 18 run card shows, trade nights or hobby events. People who run card shows and run them well could actually make a lot of money running card shows. Now, it's not easy. You've got to rent a room. There's upfront money involved because you've got to obviously rent a facility. You've got to do marketing to get people at the show. You've really got to put in hustle and work to build up a buzz for the show. But if you do it and you do it well and you do it repeatedly and you build a card show over time, that can be a very successful line of business. And there's plenty of card show operators that have built big, big businesses by running card shows and doing a really, really good job at them. On a smaller scale, you could try running trade nights or you could try running other types of hobby events that have some type of monetization aspect, whether you're selling table space or whether you're charging an admission fee or whether you're selling sponsorships. Maybe it's a free event, free trade night, but you're selling sponsorships. Or maybe you're bringing an autograph guest and charging for autographs and keeping a portion of the autograph, the autograph fee. Or maybe you're setting up a VIP experience. Whatever it may be, there are opportunities to monetize through events if you put in the time and effort to set up really good events in the sports card space. Strategy number 19 build sports card software or a marketplace. You hear me talk all the time on this channel about market Movers, right? We have a lot of paid subscribers to Market Movers. It generates a lot of revenue, millions and millions of dollars a year. There's the potential to build something like that. Now, I will warn you, there's also a lot of upfront cost. Software development is not cheaper, easy, it's becoming cheaper now with AI coding. But it, it still requires expertise, it requires money most of the time, you know, if you don't know how to develop yourself especially, that can be a really difficult road to go down trying to hire very, very cost heavy. So be careful. But there is opportunity. So whether you're trying to build an app, whether you're trying to build a software product, whether you're trying to build your own marketplace, that's a tough road to go down. Because in order to have a successful marketplace, you gotta have a lot of buyers and a lot of sellers. It's hard to get something like that off the ground when you're competing with the likes of ebay, that has millions of buyers and sellers on their platform every single day. So how do you get your marketplace noticed? How does it get traction? It's not easy, but there are some opportunities here. People have found niches. There's niche auction houses that have popped up that have become successful. There are ways there are opportunities in this space. Just be aware what you're getting into can be costly, can be difficult. The chance of success is low. But if you got the right idea, if you got the right niche, and if you have the expertise to pursue it, building sports card software or a marketplace can be a successful strategy. And finally, strategy number 20, create hobby supplies and accessories. I'm seeing an increasing number of entrepreneurs who are doing a really good job of creating unique hobby supplies that they think the market needs. I've seen a lot of entrepreneurs who have created really cool display stands, lighted, you know, lighted car displays. I've seen a lot of really cool display cases, seen a lot of really cool card holders and card protectors. A lot of really neat spins that people have put on the, the accessory game. In fact, we had, not too long ago we had Brian who created those, you know, the miniverse, the, those really cool, you know, card cases. High, super, super, super high end. But he was just a collector who had a really creative idea for creating a really high end card case and he wanted to do something really special. And now he's got his own hobby supply in a sense, right, that he's out there selling. There's many entrepreneurs in this space and some have done it very successfully. So I would. This is an area to explore for sure if you've got an idea for something really unique. But do keep in mind, creating any type of physical product requires money up front. Manufacturing can be a challenge. You're probably getting that done overseas, most likely, or Maybe through some 3D printing in the US but dealing with manufacturers, dealing with international shipping tariffs, customs, all those types of things. Ensuring the product is created at the quality level you would like. And then once you actually get your product, how do you market it? That's the whole challenge as well. There's a lot of people that create supplies, but how do you get marketing and distribution? That can be quite a bit harder than you think, since there's so many entrepreneurs in this category, but some have done it very successfully. Recently I've gotten to know the leadership team at Graded Guard that creates the, you know, the SLAB protectors. Of course. Previously I invested in Slab Strong, which was now being distributed by BCW Supplies, which is another type of graded card Protector. Very successful products. There's the opportunity for you to create something very successful here if you're willing to to face the challenges of doing so. All right, that was the list. 20 we just went through 20 different strategies for making money in the sports card hobby. Are there any strategies that you like that you think that I missed? Or what was your favorite strategy? Let me know in the YouTube comments. I look forward to hearing from you. And don't forget the full length episode of this show. The Jeff Wilson show is available not just on YouTube but also on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify under the Jeff Wilson Show. So make sure you're subscribed everywhere. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in my next one. Take care of.