THWC 409: Formula 409- Lets Clean Things Up a Bit

What's up, everybody? Hobby with Cage, episode 409. 409 solo episodes. After doing a thousand of these with my partner with Lucas Tags and Bronze. This episode of Hobby with Cage, brought to you by Arena Club, brought to you by Card Ladder. Use code. Cage. Save yourself a couple bucks if you're not using Card Ladder. I don't even know what the hell you're doing. That's what my son would say. And by the Philly show, man, excited today, excited Tuesday the 23rd. Lots of stuff going on in the hobby. Excited to do the news for this week. Haven't done my, my one minute hobby news segment yet, man. Lots of stuff going on, really. But I'm gonna use 409. It's an important number, right? Because I mean, if you live in America and you don't live under a rock, you've heard of formula 409. It's like a, a nice cleaning spray. You know, you spray it and you clean around the house. You know, cleans up grease and grime. I'm gonna, you know, play on numbers, play on that and talk about, you know, cleaning up the space, cleaning up your collection. It'll be a common repetitive theme as I missed out on doing episode 401 talking about a 401k. I will not miss out on 409 being the formula 409 cleaning up a little bit. So. Oh, let's just do a little housekeeping right from the beginning here and, and tell you where I am. Bought a lot of cards yesterday on the Fanatics Buy it now marketplace. Weird, right? I, I bought a bunch in the auction and I noticed that some of the cards that I am interested in buying, they've gone up in price for the last month or two and normally I like to go on the Fanatics Buy it now marketplace and hit recently added to see new stuff that comes in. But what was successful for me yesterday and you know, I like to tell you guys what I'm doing this way maybe you can do it as well. You probably don't buy the exact same cards as me, but with the uptrend in the market and price is going up and I could see it when I look at, you know, a card ladder for a card. I see, you know, a card that was 400 last year and then came into this year at 500, was 600 in March and is 700 now, maybe even 800 with this past week's auctions. You know, that's a card that now I don't do. The most recently Added. I look at all of them. I, I look at, you know, price top down. I look at, you know, ones that have been on there for a while because, you know, someone might have listed a card two months ago and the price has caught up to what they priced it at. You know, they, they put it in there, they put it in the Buy it now marketplace and almost forgot about it, you know, for lack of a better way of saying it. And I was able to pick up quite a few cards yesterday that I think fall into that category because they weren't ones where I sorted by recently added. They weren't ones that came up right away. They weren't ones that were just, you know, recently added at a, you know, at a lower price. They're ones that I have a feeling have been in there for a while and just, you know, when they were listed at 600 bucks and the card was 500, they kind of got overlooked, but they were listed at 600 and the price hasn't changed. And now the price has not only caught up to it, but kind of passed it. And the last couple of sales are 650, 700, and you're able to find it at $600 on the, the Buy it now marketplace. It's just another, another thing I was not expecting to do. But when the market behaves the way that, that it's behaving now and you're seeing prices change the way they are, you can buy cards in the Buy it now for, you know, slightly less, if not significantly less than you were able to buy them for in, you know, in auction this past week. Which, you know, it sounds silly, but I was able to find several cards and, you know, bought them, put them in my collection and just swiped them right over. So that's, that's Number one. Number two, if you didn't listen to yesterday's episode 408, please go back and take a listen. It is the top performing episode of the last 10. I get this little dashboard, you know, on YouTube that tells me which one you guys like the most, which one you guys are listening to, watching the most and commenting on and giving the most little thumbs up. People seem to like that one. And it is kind of where my brain is now on the flip flopping from buyer to seller and back and forth. And, you know, was a story of a card that, you know, I owned and, you know, seeing somebody buy it and then asking them, hey, you know, what do you want for it? I'd add a second one to my collection, you know, Once hearing what they wanted for it, I went from, oh, you think it's worth that? Buy mine and then end up selling mine to the same person. But it's an interesting thing, right? And it's bigger than just my one card. It's the analysis that goes into it, the thought process that goes into it. And you know, sometimes we buy cards because we just want to own them. And I've done that this year and I'm gonna talk about that in a second, sort of a new little collection that I'm doing. But a lot of times we buy cards because we think they are, you know, they, they are something that's of value. You're buying it because you think maybe the player will do well. You know, maybe the card will do well. Maybe it's undervalued at the time. Maybe somebody is, is not looking at that card the way they should be. Maybe the market hasn't valued it the right way. Maybe the player is going to, you know, have a little bit of a come up. I mean, I did it with Messi in 2024 and obviously you're seeing, you know, that the market has changed on Messi significantly. And it was a, a great play for me. There are plenty of people who got into Messi way before I did and better, you know, I like certain kinds of cards. You know, there are people who, who, you know, were buying 2012 Prism cards way before that became like the key, you know, first prism set of the Panini era. And you know, I have, you know, have Prism Gold cards and there are people who love kabooms. I was not one of them. And they're doing well also. But at some point in time, the market does catch up. And while you may have bought a card for, for a couple hundred bucks, thinking this card should be worth a couple thousand, when it gets to that couple thousand, when all of a sudden that card you bought for 500 that you thought should have been worth a thousand or two. When you're getting an offer of 5,000 for it, it is okay to do that, you know, mental Olympics. It's okay to go through that, you know, that, that process and say, maybe I sell this card. I love the card. I really loved it at $500. But if someone's ready to give me $5,000 for it, I could go and buy other cards of the guy. I can go buy other cards from that set. I can, you know, I can put and redeploy that $5,000 into other things and, and maybe you're able to find 10 more 500 cards that are undervalued and just do the same thing again and again, Maybe you're able to repeat that process. It's harder and harder to do now with, you know, prices going up and less and less hidden, you know, of undiscovered cards. But, I mean, it is a rational thought to say to yourself, I was a buyer on this card when it was here. Now that it's here, I'm no longer a buyer on that. I don't know whether you subscribe to this or not, but there is, you know, there's a. There's a. There's a line of thinking that says that with liquid assets, every day you decide to keep a liquid asset, you're making a decision to rebuy that asset at the price that it's currently trading at. So to use that card, for example, if it's a liquid thing that you can just get rid of that day, the question becomes, if you can get $5,000 for that card, would you rebuy that card right now for $5,000? If not, you should sell it. Because if you wouldn't buy it for $5,000, it means you'd rather have the $5,000. If you can sell it for 5,000, then get rid of it. With cards, it's not as easy as that because that's just math, right? That's black and white. That's debits and credits. That's an accounting sheet, a spreadsheet, a table. And we all know there's more to this than that. There's an emotional attachment. There is. You know, there is. There are other intangibles that we get from owning that card that may be worth $5,000 that you bought for 500. There is the ability to, you know, say I was right. Beat your chest on it. The ability to put it out on social media. The ability to say that you're one of the owners of that card that clearly has appreciated that, that not everybody can own. And, you know, there are reasons beyond that $5,000 in cash to own that card. So it's in. In our space. It's not always as black and white as that. You know, I have to remind myself that pretty often I've sold some big cards that I've considered buying back. Hell, there is a card that I own that I bought back for more than 30 times what I originally bought it for. I bought the card once. It's a boomerang card, and I paid more than 30 times the price that I originally Paid for more than 10 years ago to get it back. Hope to have it in my hand soon. You guys know what car I'm talking about. I'll have it at Fanatics Fest, hopefully if it gets shipped, you know, quick enough and walk around there with it. But so there's, you know, there's emotion attached. And also things change, right? You know, times change. Obviously, when I sold that card, I was ready to take X amount of money for it. And the hobby has changed, values have changed. My own, you know, financial situation has changed in the last 10 years. And, you know, what I value that card at now is very different than what I valued it at in 2015. So there's a lot of that that goes into it. Right? You know, the boomerang card stories are always a lot of fun. Well, let me tell you about something that I'm, I'm building now, and maybe it'll be something you'll enjoy also. Everybody has to have a little side pieces, especially if you're in the market now where, you know, you think the prices have gone up, you think that, that things have, have, have gotten expensive and you're starting to sell cards. I would say net net. I am buying and selling probably pretty evenly, but I am, I'm definitely selling cards. When the card gets to that threshold that I put for myself that is that the, the market values, it's significantly higher than what I value it at. Its value in my PC, its value in my collection, it's not the same as what someone else values it for. I, I recently sold some Tom Brady cards to a big Brady collector who clearly values them more in their Brady collection than I did. I did not have a huge Brady collection. I had some very good cards. It's what I like to do. I like to buy, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4 really nice cards instead of just buying a crazy amount of cards. And this person has not only nice cards, but a lot of nice cards. So, you know, we, we came to a, a deal on, on those. And as I currently sit here when those cards move, I will not own a Tom Brady card. So I'm gonna have to fix that. I'm gonna have to get a Tom Brady card in the collection because, I mean, he's a goat and he's everywhere. So we'll have to be on the lookout for a, a Tom Brady and under the radar Brady that, you know, fits into my collection. So I, you know, I sell, but I also buy, I buy a lot. And here's some fun that I'm Having. There are cards, and you guys, you're not gonna have the same ones as me. Everybody has stories, but there are cards that speak to you for whatever reason is. There are cards that speak to you. I'm gonna tell you one that speaks to me. Devonte Graham, 2018 Prism PSA 10. Why? Because during COVID I watched a lot of basketball, and my son and I said, we're gonna become Hornets fans. I don't know why. He was young. He was four at the time. And, you know, he's like, yeah, we're gonna. We're gonna watch Hornets. And we watched the Hornets, and, you know, we watched Devonte Graham. You know, we watched Devonte Graham play. He was four in 2018. He was five and a half. I think when. When we were watching the games, maybe six. And, you know, basketball came back, and we watched the Hornets, and, you know, Devonte Graham was on the team, and he was playing, and he averaged, like, 20 points a game out of nowhere. And he was, you know, nobody cared about who he was, and, you know, the whole deal. And he just kind of came out of nowhere. And, you know, we had fun watching him play. And we were buying his cards for, like, a dollar because nobody had heard of him. And then, you know, he goes off and SC points against the Nets. I remember in one game, and we had all these cards, all these, you know, the base prism and silver prism that we paid a buck for and graded them for five or six bucks, and we were in these cards for seven or eight dollars, and people were paying significant money for them. And we're like, all right, we'll sell some. And we wound up selling all of them because we could always buy more, right? And now I don't even know if he's even playing anymore. He's definitely not in the NBA, but that's one. So I bought myself a PSA 10 Prism Devonte Graham recently. I think it was $12. But there are other stories. There are other cards like that. There are other things that harken something back. Maybe it's something from the 90s. Maybe, you know, you collected with your dad or. Or, you know, you collected as a kid. You. You remember riding your bike to a store and buying a card as a nostalgic tie to it, right? So I bought 1995 Zenith football cards. Love them. The do fix on them. The Z teams and the rookie roll calls and, you know, Marshall Falk, Drew Bledsoe. And I'm buying those for myself. You know, more recent stuff. I had a ton of you know, baseball rookie cards, the Tatis, you know, the, the, the horizontal Tatis tops where I was just, I had so many of them and I sold so many of them during the last boom. And, you know, it was, it was, it was a fun hobby story to talk about. And we talked about that, that bass Tatis, the chrome Tatis so many times on our, on our podcast. You know where it was. It was one of those just crazy rides. It was, it was, it was like one of the calling cards of COVID the Alonzo rookie, the Tatis rookie, you know, Vlad Guerrero and just, you know, those baseball cards that kind of just took off the base rookies. So I bought one of all those. I bought a Guerrero, I bought a Tatis, I bought an Alonzo. And you know, these are cards that come up. They're in the weekly fanatics auction a couple weeks ago. They're in almost every one of them. And, you know, you can pick them up for, you know, less than it would cost you to grade a card on PSA right now. Definitely. Because, you know, it costs you 80 bucks to create a card PSA. So, I mean, I was, I think I bought the Tatis, a Guerrero and an Alonzo for less than it would cost me a grade one card. So I'm building up this cool, fun little PC that people will look at me, well, why that one? And I will have a story. I'll be able to, you know, talk about how many of those Tatis cards I bought over the course of one weekend. And, you know, what happened with them pricing wise. And you know how there was this crazy time in the hobby where we had this base card boom, you know what I mean? So for me, that is, it's therapeutic, it's housekeeping, it's cleaning it up, a little Formula 409, bringing it back to the beginning. Because I'm selling some cards in my PC and it makes sense for me to take a couple bucks of what I'm selling and maybe build up this little side PC, this little actual PC, this personal collection, because I don't believe that there's going to be a time where anyone is going to want to overpay me for my Tatis base PSA 10. I don't have to worry about that. I just want to own it. I want to own it so that I can talk about the story. I want to own it so that I can, I can, you know, relive that memory when I open up the box and look at it. The Devonte Graham one. I mean, One day my son will graduate high school, college, you name it, and live on his own. And I'll go to my basement, pull out the Devonte Graham, and remember when he was this high and we watched a lot of Hornets games together because there was nothing else to do. And that's the fun of cards. So think about something like that. Some memory, some fun you had in the space, some card show you went to with your kid or your dad, and a card that does not have to be expensive. $12 will do it. That, you know, will mean more to you in your collection than even a more expensive card. And go out and buy it, because I have a feeling in time it'll be one of the best $12 you ever spent. And there's another episode, guys. We're cleaning things up. Formula 409. Episode 409 of the Hobby with Cage. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. Obviously you liked the last one. You like the last couple. If you didn't go back and listen to the other one or. Or don't, as always. You can find this episode on YouTube. You can find my episode on anywhere you get your podcast, Apple, Spotify, you know, we're all over the place. Amazon podcast, we're everywhere. If you like this and you have not yet subscribed, subscribe, subscribe on YouTube, subscribe on the podcast. I appreciate that I've started to look at those numbers a little bit more. It's a vanity thing. When I see content creators out there getting, you know, rewarded, being put on platforms and being put on fanatics. It is, you know, human nature for me to, you know, take a look at the mirror and say, why not me? Maybe part of that is because I'm an asshole, but maybe the other part of it is because, you know, I don't know, maybe. Maybe I don't have as many subscribers as other people do or as many followers. So the vanity kicks in. Hence my ask, which I never like to ask you guys for anything. This is free content. You got to come here and, you know, and hopefully enjoy yourself and maybe learn something. And there's another episode, guys. 409, brought to you by Arena Club by card ladder. Use code Cage. And save yourself a couple bucks on that and the Philly show. And we only have a couple weeks, guys. I'll see you guys at Fanatics Fest, and I'll see you guys at the National. Talk to you soon. Take care, everybody.