Season 5 Ep 32 The Buyer's Rule Book

Hello and welcome to the ballcard show. The sports podcast for the sports collector. I'm Jason Otero. I'm Gary Lomaster and this is season five episode 32. Keep them trucking. Yeah. So nice. We said it twice. We did say it twice. We did this whole episode yesterday and I'm the doofus that forgot to record it. But we went on a nice hour and 20 minutes which only means that this will be a super refined episode for you. Yes. We're putting in twice as much time as we normally do. So it's got to be there's got to be some good stuff in there. It's going to get distilled a little bit. Well, I like that distilled. You had another word that you said really funny. It was in a clip this week. What did I say? You were saying you can have inventory or you can have sales, but it's hard to like stay on top of both. Right. Like if you want to keep your cards or sell them that whole thing. But you said you can have inventory or you can. It was very dramatic. Yeah, it was almost like a musical like somebody was gonna come out. You know, I try to clip farm a little bit when I can. You can. It's almost like you were singing it. I don't like that. Quick little reminder for you. If you're joining in today, you see the thumbnails about buying and you're like, good, this is content that I've been looking for. This is part three in a series on the value box where we talk all about buying. So today we're going to get a little more into the tactical, a little more of the real time scenario, the type of situations, how we handle those purchases, the margin percentages that we try to target. But before, if you're just jumping in, we would really recommend go back, watch the first two episodes on this. They'll also have buying in the title, same thumbnail, everything like that, just a different title structure. Last two weeks, it's going to give you an overview that's going to help you build out a plan of what makes sense for you if you're buying for inventory, collecting PC or whatever. Yep. And also, before we get any further, if you have been following along the series and you've enjoyed this series and you have not yet hit that red subscribe button or that little bell button, if you like the series, you like what we do here, help us out. That helps us a ton. It's free for you guys. We try our best to bring you guys as much actionable, real content that's going to help you in this industry as possible. All we ask in return, if you're so inclined, is hit those buttons for us. We aren't as pushy with that, but we're actually getting kind of close to getting paid on TikTok. Yeah, they're like, come on guys. The monetization is very close. We keep putting it out there. We'd like to be paid for our efforts. Yeah, help us out a little bit on that front. It goes a long way and it helps us keep bringing you guys this content if you're enjoying it. Yeah. Also, had a couple people reach out about sponsorship opportunities. We will be selective in those. We want to make sure that what we're putting out there or what we're promoting makes sense for collectors and dealers. But if it is something you're interested in, you can hit us up on socials or in person at the show. We're open to the conversation. Bring us your money, if it makes sense. All right, hobby news. You're not going to believe this, Gary. I know we recorded this already, but you're not going to believe this. I'm not going to believe what? I have something positive to say about PSA today. Let's go. PSA announces that in 2026, they will be opening or launching a Frankfurt, Germany location for the EU, and it's going to actually make a lot of things more efficient. I think it's a smart play. I really think if you're demanding top dollar and you're providing top value, there need to be enough facilities for people to get their stuff back in less than three months. It's going to decrease turn times for folks overseas. It's also going to likely, at least to a small extent, decrease turnaround times for us here. PSA currently in the United States has two locations. They have a shadow third location that's called SGC, and I'm a pretty firm believer that the reason that SGC turnaround times have been so bad lately is because a lot of that staff has been reappropriated for PSA work. It's a boutique. You're going to end up in a 1,200 square foot boutique. I think that's a positive thing. I'm glad it's going over there. It's kind of cool that I think the target Fanatics has put out there is not necessarily getting the current collectors to spend more money, although that's part of the goal for sure, but their goal is to basically evangelize the hobby of collecting, to just create more collectors in the world and outside of the continental U.S. It's important that we have places that are great for those fan bases. I can imagine with the World Cup next year, obviously that's an area where there's a huge soccer following. Soccer's going to start getting crazy. If you are a soccer fan and you haven't yet started collecting soccer cards, do yourself a favor. If you plan on doing it, start buying those now because by about February, that market, if you weren't around four years ago for the last World Cup, that market will at least double, if not triple in the run-up to the World Cup competition. It will be at a fever pitch during the World Cup. Then, outside of that very niche soccer collector world, it will go back to normal for 3.5 more years. That's how that cycle works. I think the goal is that eventually that market's a little bit less volatile, but it's just such a big event. That event's always going to do it. Every once in a while, the Copa Cup also happens. If somebody gets really hot during that time, their stuff will, and then as soon as the cup is over, it just dies back down. Think of it like with football leading into the season and then what happens that last five weeks leading into the playoffs for the teams that are in contention. What happens to the quarterback market? That's what's going to happen to the whole soccer market, except for defenders. They never are worth anything. It is with a twist, though. I'm a big C.J. Stroud guy, and I've been saying if he just had a functional offensive line, the beautiful thing of the World Cup is all these players that may be on the wrong team, or the wrong fit, or if they just got more opportunities at goal, now they're at their country. You may see it. There's a little bit of prospecting that goes with it, but if you have never dabbled, you have so much homework to do. Be very careful. Soccer's a different world. Don't overextend yourself, but next year I think, and you may be in an area where there's some soccer and it goes for cheap because not that many people are opening it or ripping it. If you see some of the big names and you get them right, you might want to put them away for a little while and see what happens next year with them. Speaking of market trends, I want to talk about one thing that we've noticed. I'm going to say two things about this before we say it. One, this is somewhat anecdotal. However, this is coming from multiple people here in our market, which is the Ohio and tight Midwest market, not all the way out to Minnesota and stuff. The second part of that is Ohio is likely, if you don't realize this, it's going to sound crazy, I don't know that there's any place in the United States where the sports card market is crazier and more competitive and hotter and more indicative of the overall market than Ohio. Maybe Florida? Maybe. Because there's a show about every 20 feet in Florida on a Saturday. We've got about three to five every single Saturday in the state of Ohio. It's crazy. Take that for what it's worth. California is like, we have 30 a week. We are noticing something that has not happened in my time doing this as far as shows go. I don't remember it happening for probably 10 or 12 years. The first few weeks of this NFL season, NFL product, and most importantly, the hot quarterback, the young guys, stuff's just sitting in showcases. It's not selling. It's not selling. The NFL stuff that is selling is the Josh Allens and the Patty Mahal, but like the Bo Nicks, the Caleb Williams, the Kim Wards, that stuff is just not moving. The right case hits will still fly? Yeah. But if it's not like a top tier or- If it's not like a PSA 10 mosaic color Caleb Williams that's $100 card, it's just sitting in showcases. I think I have three decent Caleb Williams, two slabs and a case hit. No attention. Which is okay, and hopefully that means that people that have been entering the hobby have a couple years under their belt now and they rip all this retail and they realize that this card that was a $7 Jaden Daniels select die cut three months ago is going for three bucks now and it's probably not ever going to see $150. And so that's what an example of, I would say, especially when you consider while that is happening, the GOAT market, the established players, I say GOAT market meaning like people's favorite players, right? The ones that are super popular. And then the all timers too. And the all timers. That market, especially mid to high end, mid is starting to get touched with even more, is skyrocketing. The amount of money that's moving in the hobby hasn't changed. The allocation of those dollars is changing. Well, the amount of money is changing, but it's not going down. If that's what you're worried about, it's going up still. Yeah, the amount of money isn't going down, but the allocation of those dollars is changing. The Jordan market is going crazy. The Kobe market is going crazy. I mean, Mr. Wonderful and Shine that bought that big card, I was watching a press conference. They're showing up on the news about sports cards all the time now. Well, the most recent thing is that they've been talking with several banks about launching an index fund for people to invest in and their whole thing is we'll have the top 1% of the most elite trading cards in the, anyway, Wondershine is what they said they're going to call it. Interesting. That is very interesting. More to hobby positivity coming up now. Product releases. Oh, what I was going to say. That's a sign of a healthy market correction, in my opinion, where the retail, the unestablished player market may dip. The speculation is dipping. As the greats and the goats are going up. And you've heard us talk about how dangerous the speculation game is for a long time. You can play it, but you better know what you're doing. And you're just going to have seasons like this where you get hit. Now, could it just be delayed in week five or six? If Caleb Williams puts together a few more weeks like he did this week, I do think people are going to be trying to snag those up. But it's definitely a little bit different from the last few years. Yes. And it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just something to adjust for. Yes. Product releases coming up. We got Donruss Football just released at $400 a box. Is that right? Yeah. The Hobby and the True Retail SKUs finally released. The little 10s have been out for a week or two now. Yeah, $400-ish a Hobby box, depending on your LCS. I've seen it as low as $375, which I think is the MSRP, and as high as $425. But $425 is kind of the average. It's going to creep up a little bit. The downtowns this year are gorgeous. It's one of the best downtown designs that they've done in a long time. They kind of copied what we've seen in basketball. Not a lot have sold yet. If you're buying those right now, you know how we feel about that process anyways. However, don't overspend. I had an opportunity to buy the Calvin Johnson downtown this weekend, and I made an offer that was less than half of the one comp, and that's because it's only sold one time. The main release hadn't hit yet, and there's going to be 50 sales in the next week, and that's going to be a $1,200 card, not a $1,900 card. Yeah. 2025 Bowman Chrome. Yes, yet. Are you going to do maybe a little segment once that drops? It's dropped once I have time to actually sit down and give you the guys, look at the checklist. We'll do a quick little segment here in the next week or two of guys to look for word of caution on Bowman Chrome. When you see this episode, it will have been three days since release day. As with every Bowman release, if you are ripping, this is the time to sell. You have to sell it quick. If you're buying, do yourself a favor and wait a month. Just trust me on this. If you're buying to hold these guys long term, just wait a month. Unless you're going after the up five or super short printed stuff or super low numbered. Yeah, but just the base autos or the purple autos or the refractors, just wait a month and let this market settle because these first two weeks, it's going to be double what it is in six weeks. Yeah, the right guys Chrome first could be moving for five to ten bucks in the first couple of weeks. Two months in, it's a $3 card. Yeah, and we're not talking about autos. We're just talking about base stuff. Think about the cyclically, think about the season. These baseball guys, they're still around, but we're not going to be hearing as much about them for a few months. When they push the Chrome release date to the end of the season, it's usually a June, July release. Yeah, yeah. We're at the end of September when it comes out. And then we have, what do we have left? 24-25 Immaculate Basketball. Yep. Absolute Football, October 1st. Kaboom or bust? Kaboom or bust, yeah. I like those Kabooms. If I had to pick a case hit, I like the Kabooms better. You made a real good point talking to me about you wish they would go back to that. To like that caricature style. If you're new, you don't realize this, the first Kabooms were basketball only, and 2016 Excalibur. At least I believe that's the case. If somebody in the comments wants to correct me, I'm open to the fact that I might be wrong on that. I don't think I am. It doesn't happen often, guys. Take the opportunity. They were like a cartoon caricature, like over-exaggerated, and they were awesome. And then it's just gotten lazy to where at this point now, the way they create these cards is they just take the image they like of a player, they go into Photoshop, they remove background, and they do a colorization filter. It takes 10 seconds. It's not as cool. I would agree. Use AI at least, guys. Create something that looks cool. Or find another player and just swap them out and put a name on them. You got like Brandon Pettigrew for Calvin Johnson. You could do that too. Oh, I'm real excited for what we have next, this next segment. God dang it. I'll let you. You know what? Have the floor, Gary. Let me just come out without excuses, without preamble. Jason is kicking my ass on picks this year. I don't know what's wrong. I don't know what's going on. And I think there will be a correction to the market at some point. But right now, Jason, again this week, last week went 13-3. This week, we picked five games. He went 4-1. I can't do anything other than put the crown on your head. And we wagered a gentleman's bet on the table fees. Yes, I forgot until you said this. I pay his table fees at Newark this week. So Don, if you're watching this, don't even talk to me. Go straight to that guy. I got nothing for you. I wish I could. I went 1-4 this week. So where's our total? You are 26-11 on the season. I hope that you are making these exact same picks in your fanatic sports book. It's been so good to me. I am still over 500, I'm 19 and 18 and I am fighting for my life right now. So we're gonna pick our five games for this week and let's see where we land here, Jason. You start with, what's our first game? We've got Commanders and Falcons. I am going Commanders on this one. I'm going Falcons because I do not believe that what we saw from the Falcons last week is who that team is. I think they just went out and laid an absolute egg. I've never felt better about you picking a different team from me with the way this is going this year. Yep, I'm taking the Falcons on this one. Alright. That's an interesting take. They got beat so bad, that can't happen twice. Well it's not that it can't happen twice, that's not what I said. What I said is, I don't think that's the real team. Like I don't think we saw, we saw them just play the worst game they're gonna play all year. That's possible. Yeah. Panthers and Pats, one, two, three, Pats. Yeah, we both, the Pats, they should have beat the Steelers by 20 last week. Not about 20, but they definitely should have won that game. They were inside the five three times and came away with no points. And maybe we're fanboying a little bit. We like Brayboying that role. I think May's a good player. Like he threw one pick last week, the ball got tipped, yeah, should he have probably like laid it over the top, maybe, but there was a window there to dart it in, it just got tipped. Yeah. Kidd played well. Eagles at Bucks. I'm going Bucks. Baker Mayfield. Baker Mayfield. He's a dog. Is there a quarterback in the league right now? That plays with that intensity? Well, stop and think about this. If there is a minute and a half on the clock and your team just gave up a score for you to go down, but a touchdown wins the game and you get the ball back with them, is there a quarterback in the league right now that you would rather have than Baker Mayfield? No. Nope. And he's becoming that guy. Now everybody chill out when I give this comparison. He's a dog. I remember like the late teens, like 2015, what was Brady's last year with the Patriots? 2019. Yeah, through 2019. I remember like 2017, 2018, 2019, Brady. They could be down by 10, but if he had the ball and they were three minutes late, you're like, dang it. Yeah. Dang it. Yep. It's not a 30 point lead. Well, even that Super Bowl, the last Super Bowl they lost, he got the ball back with a minute left and you're like, oh, and then he almost did it. He hit Randy Moss in the fingertips on a streak down the side, so. Yeah. I just think he is playing with a level of intensity. He is a leader. He actually is like, I will throw the ball to myself if I have to. He will. That's how he's playing it. Dude is six foot one, maybe 215, 220. Trucking dudes. And if a defensive lineman gets in one of his dudes face, he will get in there and start throwing hands. He doesn't care. Yeah. I mean, he's just become more and more fun to watch. Probably one of my favorite quarterbacks in the league right now. To watch, yeah. Absolutely. And his market is still criminally low. I would agree with that. Up next, Colts at Rams. This is a good matchup. You go first. Until they prove otherwise, I will be picking the Colts. I'm in the same boat here. That defense is legit. The Rams don't suck. No, the Rams don't suck at all. But that defense is, and the Rams couldn't put away the Eagles last week, and that's a team that I'm not super sold on. I think they're kind of a fraud at 3-0. I mean, the Colts' offense is effective. Yes. Jonathan Taylor is healthy for the first time in two years. Like, actually healthy. Well, and there's a pass threat. And Daniel Jones could run, too. And receivers and a quarterback. Yeah. It's a legit team. So, until they prove otherwise, I'll be picking the Colts. The Colts are for real this year, guys. Yep. And I did not expect it. I did not expect that. And the Rams are a good team. Puka's a dog, too. Stafford, we were talking the other day, like, hard to believe this is Stafford's 17th year in the league. So, 16th or 17th. Anyhow. All right. Ravens at Chiefs. One, two, three. Ravens. Chiefs. Oh. Okay. Three that we agreed on, two that we didn't. Yeah. You said oh. Did you want to change your mind? No. You have a window of opportunity here. I'm going to stick with what just came out. I'm going with the Pavlovian response that exited my face. So my reason is the Ravens have been so close to having a very different record all season. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they could be 3-0 very easily. They're really tough. Kansas City, Arrowhead. I mean, good luck. Right? It's just a tough place to play. However, if the Chiefs ever really did have a down year like everybody said for the last five, it really does seem to be this year. This is it. I don't like the pick that I just made at all, but I'm going to stick with it. There's not any— Hey, come on in. The water's fine. There is no logical reason for me to take the Chiefs in this game. Do you mean the Ravens? Did you mean to say Ravens? I might have, but I'm going to stick with what I said. There's no logical reason for it, other than I've made a lot of logical picks this year, and I'm 19-18. Whatever I should do, go opposite. Might have a better outcome this time. I can see that. All right, so, I mean, we've got two different ones there. I don't think we should put a wager on this because at some point, it's going to be too demoralizing for you. But there you have it, our picks from five games that we thought would be pretty interesting this week. Next week, we will have our first update on Football Flip. If you missed it, Gary and I had a $1,500 budget to build out an offense on rookie cards that were slabbed. We made our picks. You can go back and find that. The thumbnail even says Football Flip. But we're going to be tracking their card market value through the season because they're players that we believed, by the end of this year, will have the biggest rise in value, and then the loser will have to buy the biggest winner for the other team, the team that wins. Update for that coming up next week. But we're excited to dive in part three of this buying series in the value box. Finishing it up. So everything that we talk about for the next few minutes, again, quick reminder, we did two episodes already leaning into more of the philosophical approach. Why are you buying? What are you buying for? How do you want to approach it? All that. Today, we get in the weeds with the details of how we buy, what percentage we pay, how negotiations work for us, so on and so forth. But before someone walks up to your table, it's super important that you have your own rule book. Everyone's rule book is going to be a little bit different, but whatever rules you kind of establish for your margins, for your buying process, for your spending, for your inventory, for your personal collection, you have to stick to your own rules. So we're just going to give you ours now. Gary and I, some of these things will play out very differently for each of us. But in principle, we're both committed to this rule book for our buying and for our businesses. Yep. So the first rule that we have, there's always another deal. This is a rule that Jason and I both share. A couple of these we don't lean into as much, but this one is paramount. There's always another deal. That rule is so important because it keeps you from reaching. It keeps you from overspending. It keeps you from FOMO buying. And if you don't know what FOMO is, it's fear of missing out. It keeps you from all of that. There's always another deal. Every show we set up at, there are anywhere from 10 to 50 people trying to sell us stuff. Multiply that over the course of a month. Multiply that on top of the things that are presented to you as opportunities on Facebook or Instagram or Discord or wherever else you're buying. Where the buying you go looking for. Yes. As you go to the Facebook marketplace deals, there's always another deal. Yeah. So what that means is, it is possible for someone to walk up to you, have a stack of cards that you want, be very close to a deal happening, it not happening, and still you create a good experience for that person and they may come back. And now if they come back, they already understand where your margins are. If you've treated them with respect, all the things we talked about for the first couple of weeks, if those things were in place, right, and the respect is there, you might have another shot at a buy down the road. But if I can't do this and this is the only one and there's not enough to go around and I can't find enough cards, if that's playing through your head, I guarantee you, you're creating an experience for the person selling to you that is not one that will be repeated by them. Right. So just make sure you understand, if the deal doesn't work out, that's fine. One of the things that Gary says all the time, hey, if you don't want to do that, that's fine. I'll be here all day. And when we're at shows. Yeah. Standing offer. I had a great stack of whatnot stuff where that happened, right? Yep. He didn't. He wasn't. I don't think he knew what the cards were worth. I explained to him, these are things we're going to run on auction, so I have to buy them at a bulk rate. I made him an offer on the stack. He walked off. I said, hey, I'll be here all day. If you want to think about it, no worries. What happened? Three o'clock. Walks right up. Yep. Zach Price, no haggle. He was appreciative. I'm sure he got some lower offers maybe. Yep. He was trying to fleece him, and he could feel that they weren't being genuine. But if it wouldn't have walked back up, I was okay too. Yeah. That's important. So there's always another deal. Second thing in the rule book, and again, we both feel strongly on this, and if you don't feel strongly on this, you're doing it wrong. There is no such thing as selling too soon. For every card that you sell today that a month from now is worth double, and you go, gosh, I wish I hadn't sold that, there's 100 that you sold that are worth 50% a month from now. Yeah. There's no such thing as selling too soon. The only thing there is, is not getting your target. If you make your target margin, if your margin target is 30% and you paid $70 for a card and you can sell it for 91 or above, sell the card if that's your target. The end. I want to speak to the newer collectors about selling too soon, because I think there's not a logical explanation that's readily available for what selling too soon or too late means. Sure. And so when I say that, what I mean is there's a lot of collectors that hit a card. So let's say you're ripping, you bought a box of Select Hobby, which was pricey, but it's a brand you're familiar with. The design was actually really nice this year. Yes, it was. I would say they did a good job with that. And you hit a couple of Jade and Daniel Silvers, and it's Select, so you can pick which one of the 50 different parallels of that card there are, right? And at the time that that product drops, that card's worth 70 bucks. And then you see three weeks later, and I'm just throwing out arbitrary, please don't, I mean, obviously this is just an example. A few weeks later, you see that it's going for 50. The temptation for a lot of newer collectors is, well, it was already at 70, and the season hasn't started. So this is probably going to be a $200 card if he has another good year. There's this math that doesn't have a logical reason built behind it. It's all emotional. Yes, exactly. It's a very emotional thing. It's all emotional. It's like, I really hope this could be. And it could, but it could also be a $20 card. Well, what the great thing about the example you just had is it's a real life example. Oh, yeah. He is. This walk, we had multiple Select, Jade and Daniel Silvers walk up to the table this week. And Jason had looked up one for a while, and he had it, and he goes, what do you think here? I said, it's a $3 card. He was like, what? I said, I just looked it up earlier. Somebody tried to sell me one. I thought it was probably a $15 card. And then the last 10 sales, the high was 10 bucks, and the low was $2. It's a $3 to $5 card now. And when the product dropped, it was $50 to $70. There's no such thing as selling a card too soon. Yes, occasionally you're going to miss out on gains, but you're going to have made up for it three times over by selling the other stuff at the top of its market versus waiting and hoping. So like an example right now is the scenario a lot of people are waiting for. Like Mac Jones is a great example. People are pulling those cards back out. But guess what? In all of their excitement, they're just now learning that even with getting some playing opportunity and even looking functional, it's 50% maybe of where it was when it first came out. So when somebody says, oh, that's when you're going to want to hold on to, if you can't envision a scenario where three to five years from now, it's worth a lot more and what things would need to happen for that new player to become more valuable. If you can't quantify that, sell the card and get your money, get your margins. Hype will always outsell production. Yeah, go through. Here's the challenge. If this little thing that we're saying about our rule book sounds stupid to you, here's what I would ask you to do. Here's what I would ask you to do. At the next show, go to the bargain slab box and I want you to just thumb through there. Don't even buy a thing. As you thumb through there, you're going to see a graveyard of quarterbacks that were going to be two, three, $500 in a PSA 10, right? Because it happened for a window during COVID, that first little bump, this stuff, second and third year quarterbacks were just, they were spiking, right? But it corrected. You're going to go through and you see all those. And then you'll find one Daniel Jones and be like, see, see? And then I want you to go look up what Daniel Jones sold for his rookie year. It's the hold wasn't there. You found a diamond in the rough, but it's a graveyard full of players. And it's still worth half of what it was during his rookie year. Yeah, the market isn't relevant at this point. So if you think you're a hold, be sure it's a longer hold. You're going to have a tough time convincing me a new player is a long hold when you already have margin right in front of you. Now the inverse of that is the next rule and that is dead inventory is dead money. There are going to be cards that you buy. There are cards that we buy almost on a weekly basis. When you're buying in large quantities, this is going to happen a lot where you buy and then the market changes. It is insane to assume that the market is going to change again in your favor. If I paid $70 for a card thinking I could sell it for close to a hundred and then the next five sales are $72, $75, $73, $78 and somebody offers me $70 for the card, what should I do? I should sell that card and get my $70 back right now because that's where we're at. Now there are some cards that are going to be a little bit outside of that, but those are what I call marketing cards. They're not cards where it's dead inventory, they're cards where it's just way more unique inventory and not easy to move. I knew that when I bought it, but it's really cool. It looks great in the showcase. It's going to draw attention from every person that walks by, and the cards that are around that card are going to sell a lot faster than the cards that aren't around that card in the showcase. Yeah. And typically those cards are a little more pricey, but you're maybe closer to 50% margin on those? Correct. Like Gary and I will buy valuable bricks, yes those exist, and essentially we know that we're in them so right, that if the right offer comes up and somebody's actually interested, we can move on it, or if we want to hold out, we can, but we would never play that stronger percentage game on a card like that. There are two cards right now that I can think of in my showcase, and one for sure in yours that I can think of. I have a 2009 Upper Deck Black, if you don't know what that set was, go research it, it's a really cool set. Tom Landry Cut Auto, numbered a 26. Super unique card, and as far as I'm aware, it's the only red ink signature out of the 26 that were made. The other piece that I have is a 1992 Pro-Line, not Pro-Set, Pro-Line Portraits Muhammad Ali, but it's signed Cassius Clay. Those were signed at the National the following year, and they are very rare, they don't come up very often. When I bought those cards, there was no expectation in my mind that they were going to sell quickly. They're really cool, they're really good marketing cards, and everybody that sees them is like whoa. They're not right for every buyer, but when I buy something like that, I know already. The things we're talking about are things that you buy thinking it's going to sell quick, it doesn't, take what you can get and move on to the next. I'll give you the example of some stuff that I bought heavier earlier this year that was actually pretty dead inventory, and I was a little bit surprised. One thing I started doing is I wanted to get away from the ultra-modern prospecting on everything, was I wanted to focus in on having more of the greats, Hall of Famers and that, so I started buying a lot of Hall of Fame autos. They move not as fast as a lot of people think, but they'll move on a regular basis. You attract a different buyer base when you have more Hall of Fame autos. You attract more collectors, which means there's less haggling over 80, 85%. They're just looking for a couple bucks off. You might land at 95% on something like that. Then I started getting into the relic game on the Hall of Famers. Hank Aaron, George Brett, Willie Mays, Nolan Ryan, all that. Now, Nolan will sell for me quick, but those other ones take a long time to sell. They're 30 to 50 bucks, they're game used. I know you guys are like, if it's not a premium product, if it's not a top-tier product, some of that stuff kind of stays bricked in your showcase for a long time. Some of the stuff that's a really cool, relevant product in the history of this hobby, you'd be shocked. Well, maybe you wouldn't be, because you may be listening to this and you're newer into the hobby in the last four or five years, and you don't have any clue what the relevance of 2001 Topps Heritage Baseball is. The things that some of us that have been around for a really long time recognize and know as cool, it's hard for us to remember that 80% of the buying population in this hobby have no clue what the relevance is, nor do they care. So, trying to justify your price on something that you may be 100% correct on, it doesn't matter what your justification is. They don't care. Yeah. I agree. Margins do not ever have feelings, rule number four. This is a tough one, because you're going to have people walk up with this stuff that you really, really want and need, and they'd be happy to work a deal with you. And they may not be lying when they say, if I sell it to you at 5% over what you're offering, that is going to be a better deal than I'm offering anyone else in the room. Yeah. It does happen. It happens a lot. Are you going to pay up to maintain the relationship, to keep them happy, to keep cards hopefully coming back? Are you going to say, no, it just doesn't make sense for me because that 5% is a margin I'm counting on? And what we're saying to you is, take the feelings out of the decision and just say what absolutely makes sense. So I'll give you an example. If a mid-90s Jordan insert, and they're all popping off and trending up right now, especially like the high end, the $200 to $1,000 stuff is really flying. I mean, heck, $50, $70 stuff is going to click too. But if that stuff walks up, and on Jordan that's nice, like Jordans that are over $50, if somebody said, I usually am trying to tap out at 80%, if they're like 85%, there has to be another card in this transaction where they are either valuing it lower than I am, or they're willing to give me that margin back on that card. If not, I just have to pass, and I say, it's an awesome card, you're probably going to sell it in five minutes. And they look at me puzzled, but what's going to happen, if I buy that at 85, every offer I have is going to start at 80%, and then we're going to go back and forth, and it probably, a lot of times, I can tell them to take a hike, but if I want to sell it in any kind of reasonable time frame, it's probably going to be a 90% offer, 95%. Or you just wash your money. So this rule, margins don't have feelings, if there's one piece that you take out of everything we're talking about today, if you're wanting to do this as a business, if this is just a hobby for you, or you're using it to fund your hobby, and it's not something you're counting on to pay your bills, or a portion of that, this may not be as important. But if you're like us, this is what you do for a living, and you're wondering why it feels like such a grind, and you did 10 grand in sales at a show, but you only have $1,000 in profit to show for it, this one rule can change that for you, okay? You need to define for yourself what your target margins are on every type of thing that you buy. For me, I do that by price band. It's not based on whether it's a case hit, it's not based on whether it's liquid, it's price band, okay? So for me, $50 and under, I don't pay more than 50% on. I just don't. And if somebody doesn't want to sell it at that, no worries. It's not worth the effort and time for me to pay $40 for a $50 card to probably get $45 out of it. It just doesn't make any sense. I don't care. From 50 to 150, I'm going to be 60 to 70% depending on how liquid the card is. And then over $150, somewhere between 70 and 80%, usually trying to be way closer to 70 unless it's something I feel like I can move really, really fast. And here's why this matters. If you think that you are going to get 100% on every card you sell, you are outside your ever-loving mind. Realistically, we sell 80% of the inventory that we move, sells between 85 and 90%. I'd say that's accurate, yeah. And another 10% sells for less than 80%. And another 10%, we get 95% plus up to our sticker on. But the vast overwhelming majority of what sells at our table, remember the profits from that are what pay our mortgages, pay our car notes, all that stuff, sells between 85 and 90%. Yeah. So one of the phrases I hear you say sometimes when a seller is pushing back at us, right? Yeah. Now there's a tug of war, there's tension, right? Yep. And they're pushing back as like, 85%, make your quick 10% or make your quick 15%. What's wrong with 15% margin? People can't fathom this. And you say, I'll show you 85% being a 15% margin when you show me the line of people that are going to pay 100% for this card. Yeah. It doesn't exist. Well, those cards do exist. But it's there. But it's probably not your PSA 9. Correct. So yeah, I think that's an important qualifier and all that too. For sure. So when I run my margins, similar, I'm at 50% on $20 and less, although I would say that I probably was doing that more up to 50 until about a few months ago. I'm starting to move a lot more of that $20 to $50 stuff. So as I get more confident in the liquidity at that price point, I may pay up 60 or even 70%. It's got to be closer to 50 bucks at that point. Just because when I have multi-quantity buyers, it's nice having some of those in there. Sure. Repackers, I don't know if you guys are aware of this, a year and a half ago everybody was just selling tons of stuff to repackers. Now they have five or 10 people working the show, all buying, and they're targeting certain tiers. Yeah. Like we sold how many cards? To one, probably between the two of us, probably 100 to 120 cards to one buyer this weekend. And it was all like 30 to 70, 30 to 100 bucks. So having those in there matters. Above 50, I'm probably at 70% to about 200, probably about 300 is where I draw that line. Above 300, I'll pay 80, 85% is reserved for me for cards that I believe will sell before the show ends. Or that you don't care if they sell. Or yeah, or if I don't care, well, there's very few of those just because we're doing that as a business, but I guess that's true. Yeah. If it was more like that. And one of the things that I think so many, if you're listening to this and you're just a seller, you go to shows and you just sell, right? You don't set up. You just walk the show and you sell stuff to dealers. What I'm about to say is going to blow your mind because my guess is you have only been doing this for two, three, four years at the most, right? Maybe not, but if you've been doing it longer than that, then you know what I'm about to say is true. Until COVID hit, the norm for dealers buying at LCSs, at shows was 50%, maybe 60%. And that's still the case across other collectible industries. Yeah. Our industry is the only one where there is this idea that you as a seller can demand margins from us that don't make any business sense whatsoever and then get offended when we're like, this just doesn't make sense. Well, no, no, no, no, no. I'm going to push back there. People get offended for getting whatever offers they get. I mean, I kind of enjoy watching it happen at sneaker conventions. I've seen it happen with coins. I want to push back there. People are going to get offended regardless. On the average. Yes, there's always going to be carrots. What you're trying to say, I think, is when they're offended at the math that you present, if I spend 90% on this card, right? Yeah. And you're saying I can sell this at 100%. How many cards do you buy at 100% of the show? Yeah. How many do you buy? When you're trying to sell to me at 90, how many do you buy at 100%? I guarantee the answer is zero. Right. Well, or minimal. Now, for those of you saying you guys are just whining, yeah, we're whining. It's hard. That's frustrating. But at the end of the day, we don't have to buy it and they don't have to sell it. So we're talking about what happens in the negotiation. Back to rule number one. There's always another deal. You have to be okay. There have been some heartbreaking deals. We had a really, really cool Jackie Robinson walk up to us, 1952. What was the brand? Do you remember? It was the Bond Bread. Was it the Bond Bread? It was a PSA 7 off center. And the guy also had another card. I wanted it immediately. And I wanted the other card. It was a LeBron James auto to 25 on a booklet with Russell Westbrook. We asked the guy what he wanted for the cards. And he told us not a dime less than $3,500 for the LeBron auto. And I think the number started with a three on the Bond Bread Jackie. At the end of the day, a friend of ours, another content creator, Big John, shout out, comes by and we're talking. I said, did you find anything cool? He goes, yeah, I bought two really cool cards. I was like, oh, what were they? And he starts to tell us about them. And I was like, are you kidding me? I said, what did you pay for the LeBron? And he gave me a number that was somewhere in the vicinity of a third of what the guy told us was the minimum he would take. And I was like, what? And he goes, yeah. And then we bought this Bond Bread Jackie. All of a sudden, Jason's head snaps around real fast. And he's like, what? And he tells us what he paid for that. And we both are like, we would have snap bought both of those things at that price. And what we know likely happened was the guy came in through the food court and we were the first big table he saw. Big banner, always buying, and he came straight to us first, gave us his numbers, and he walked around the rest of the show and gave everybody else his numbers, and everybody else rolled their eyes at him too. And then he got reasonable and never came back. So I think it's important on that one. We made the right decision to let that walk away. Somebody else got that deal. The only thing I think is, is there something I could have said, a question I could have asked? Maybe. Maybe I could have drilled down. You know who's really good at that? The Chasing Cardboard guy asks really good questions like, why are you selling this? Is it something that you personally, is it your personal collection? Just getting a feel. But sometimes you just have to, you know, say no and realize that one day it's going to be you where the cool stuff walks up at the end of the show. It happened to me a few weeks ago in Xenia with that Marshall and Lentz and the TJ Watt. It's going to happen. It all moves around. There's always another deal. Stick to your margins. You're only hurting yourself if you break your own rules on this. The person that sold you doesn't care. They gave you a card for less than the top of market. They feel like that's a great deal for you. And unless you establish why you need X percentage or what you're working towards or making the deal feel right for both of you where it makes sense, you're going to be really frustrated. When you make this rule book for yourself, you may take some of these rules out of them. You may have some others of your own. The rule book only matters and it's only effective if you follow the rules that you set. For me, Jason will tell you, unless it's for my PC, which is three players that I never have to overpay for, I don't pay a penny more than 80% for anything ever. I don't care. There's always another deal. I can't do it because if I let myself do it once, then I'll justify it and then the next time I'll justify it. And before you know it, I'm paying 85, 88, 90% just because it's cool stuff and then I'm toast financially. Doesn't make an ounce of sense. So, and what does that mean? That means that there are some really cool, the hottest, newest, latest. We're never going to have. Well, it's hard to get. We get it. We get that stuff, but it's not the majority. That's a different model than a lot of people. So that's one thing I want to say is there are plenty of people. Making a lot of money doing things differently. Yes, and that's okay there are people that can pay 90 95 percent and Do have the channels and audience and reach and buyers to sell some of that stuff at over 100% good for them Yes, all we're saying is We built a system and model that works for us. There is nothing proprietary about it We're buying for as little as we can that makes sense for the seller and selling it for as much as possible That makes sense for us and the buyer. Yeah, and so for us These are the rules that we put in place with that. So if you're a 90 percenter, don't be a 92 percenter, right? Yeah, yeah, whatever they are follow them and track your numbers how much profit did you make? I think a lot of people they sell through shows and they realize how much work it is to like account for you know Okay, I sold 2k at the show. I brought this inventory, but then I bought five cards while I was there I have I have no idea how much profit I made there's ways to do that. You can have a pricing system You can do inventory Clever Cuban has a $5 spreadsheet or he did at one point on tick-tock that gives you a break It's a very in-depth like six tabs on Excel breaking down all your expenses your mileage everything current inventory value plus cost of acquisition for the goods Have a system in place Actually hold yourself accountable to it. Those of you pushing back at us. All I would ask is this Look at your numbers at the end of the month And see how much profit was made and how much bankroll it took to get there And if that equation works for you Keep doing it right if it doesn't just pause and say what needs to change Yeah, but please don't give up on the hobby or the space as a Yeah, because I think a lot of people are exiting the hobby over disappointment believing that it would be a little bit easier It's work. It's work. You're still you're still flipping cards. It's fun. Yeah, this is what we'd get to do for a living So once you have that rule book established the next thing that is gonna make or break your ability to buy Is the type of relationships that you're able to develop? The random one-off people that you never see again that come and sell you stuff at a show or that you see on Facebook marketplace They are gonna make up maybe 20% 25% of your buying opportunities the rest of your buying opportunities are going to be relationship based Yeah, they're gonna be people that come to you at every single show They're gonna be the LCS owners who you've worked to establish a positive strong relationship with They are going to be the Repackers that know they can trust you and that you can sell them a lot of stuff and they don't have to spend an hour at your table comping every single card because they trust that your prices are where they should be and if something is off you're gonna Tell them We had that happen with that big purchase. Yeah in Cincinnati this week guy was looking for a certain price point I had two or three cards or Mike man That's been in the showcase for a minute and he hasn't even had nibbles and on the lower price stuff I kind of leave it out there and somebody usually points it out, you know, because I put the work in on it Usually if it's been a few months I'm sitting there. I'll reprice it in this case There were two of them that were probably 30 or 40 percent over comp Yeah, they were there earlier in the year, but they're not anymore And I just knocked it to half of the current market just to get those cards out to make it right And what else does that communicate to the buyer? You can trust me that even as you're stacking cards and you're about to pay if something is off and I'm aware of it I'm gonna make you whole Yeah, because I would rather sell boatloads of cards to you with trust at a little bit of a smaller rake on Volume. Yes, every time that you show up then have to go back and forth and make you wonder. This is somebody who does Tens of thousands of dollars of business just with us every year. This is somebody who Spends probably a quarter of a million dollars every weekend that shows The same Situations the same deal that we're talking about this same customer had bought probably a month ago a card from me It was a PSA 10 Josh Allen number to 10 out of 20 21 or 22 elite it had been sitting for me for a while. The card didn't have a direct comp However, there was a comp from the set of a PSA 10 Josh Allen at 400 bucks We I showed him that comp we I think he bought the card for $330 from me. I had had it for a little while. I was ready to move off of it At this show this weekend he came up to me and said hey did I buy this Josh Alfred? I was like, yeah, he goes. Hey, man, I Can you show me that comp again? I it looks like a raw sale and he was right there is a raw sale of this card ever one time for like 20 bucks However, there are multiple sales of the of 99s enough 49s at 40 and 50 and 60 bucks and I couldn't find that one comp I knew it was there, but we were we were crazy and I said listen man, I'll tell you what What do you think the max value of that Josh Allen is for you for your repacks and he goes probably 200 bucks I grabbed a hundred and thirty dollars worth of slabs two slabs It was like a cheap slab and like a hundred dollar slab and I said here before we do anything with this deal Just take these if we find that comp later, we'll figure it out down the road, but I don't want you to walk away ever Like with a bad taste in your mouth from dealing with us because this relationship is more valuable to me than a hundred and thirty bucks In a reputation. Yes, and yeah, and he was I don't want to say he was taken aback by that, but he really appreciated it Yeah, I'm never gonna argue with somebody in that situation I Didn't think he was trying to pull one over on me. He didn't think I was trying to pull one over on him He was comfortable enough to come to me with that concern Oh, yeah, cuz if he was actually concerned, he just doesn't stop at the table anymore, right? He's just not coming back. And so those are when we say building relationships That's where you want a relationship to get to where there's enough trust on both sides where you know You're gonna take care of each other that counts for your LCS is if you're trying to build a relationship with your LCS And you go in and you're trying to sell them some stuff that you don't care about and they make you an offer Don't fight with them over it Take the offer and do that a few times that way when you want to buy something from them Yeah, that's gonna get reciprocated and if you find yourself in situations where you're not getting reciprocal treatment just go Okay, these aren't gonna be the relationships for me move on. There are some really bad LCS is out there Yes. Now one thing I will say whether it's good or bad I have a more negative bias on this just in the conversations. I've had with LCS owners is it does seem like one of the intentions that fanatics has with all these overhauls and new expectations of shops and the Uniformity and all that is just to create a more uniform pleasant experience for the buyer I think that's the intention of a lot of the things The practice the way it's played out the way not so great being held accountable. I'm not as crazy about but When you go into that shop build a relationship buy a box every now and then and don't be fake about like Like one of the places that I buy stuff out of they get a lot of late 90s early 2000s wax I'm usually in it for a couple 300 bucks on two boxes and I have a great time opening it I know what to expect probably nothing half of it I can list on eBay because there's enough stars and if I had a couple of fun refractors, it could get really interesting, right? But spend a little money there though the the shift I think with relationships that a lot of people don't consider is if there was such a thing as a residual income In this space it only happens in the context of the relationships that you've made There are people at your show this weekend and a lot of people don't realize this. They're always out early They always got a bag full of cards and a ton of cash. They're buying the best stuff They're beating you up a little bit, but they have an eye for what they want and you ask them. Do they break? They say no you ask them. Do they set up? No, do you have a shop? No, what do you do this? And what is it over the years of collecting they've built a hundred meaningful relationships with people that have money to buy cards and have a taste for a certain type of collectible and They go shopping for them. And at the end of the week, they make us a spreadsheet and say here's what I bought What do you want? here's the price and Because of the relationships and trust that have been built and their willingness to travel all over to be up all of the United States a lot of times, you know, they're they're working hard. They don't have to set up at a show ever. Yeah, they don't need a shop They don't need an online presence They're buying cards and they're selling them directly to the relationships that they've built with collectors and they're doing well Yeah and there's a lot more of that out there than you realize it's people with Experience people that have been doing a while people that used to have a shop People that used to have an eBay store that that was their whole income the relationship dynamic I think is just so missed out on because especially it's so transactional right like we're talking about a transaction, but Taking time to make the effort to realize Even if you're a selfish person and not even a great human being if you can at least understand that there's value in a working business Relationship with somebody then you'll even treat that experience Differently when the numbers aren't where you want them and I You and I have multiple times had somebody that said no or we said no and later It's become a very profitable business relationship for us. Yes, and some Listen, sometimes the profit in that relationship isn't cash yeah, sometimes the profit in that relationship is When that person knows that you might be a buyer for something that they're not and they pass that deal on to you That's a good point Yeah, like sometimes we we miss the idea that profit doesn't always mean immediate cash right at that moment There are all kinds of profit in any industry and in this one sometimes that's the profit sometimes the profit is just that person is super plugged into part of the part of the hobby that you aren't plugged into and you get information ahead of time and Gives you an edge the other people don't have like there's lots of ways to look at that So what also I want to go I'm gonna go a little bit deeper in yes one of the things that I underestimated as I was doing this as a business for myself is You are really and now we're getting like I'm getting pastoral here I've got a few if you've got a little bit of this left. You're in a space. That's pretty by yourself and It is easy to feel very Isolated when you're listing cards and running eBay and running a show and you may even have a whatnot you may have an online presence but I believe Like in my core as human beings that we're designed for relationships. I do I really do not with everybody, right? Not all relationships are the most important one but I believe deep in our being we are and I think there's a lot of people working in this space that are kind of Just at home and we're kind of hermits until the show time and we get out there and I think You know, whatever the version of touching grass is for card collectors and dealers I think that that matters and We are at times known for being very critical and the reason for that is we made a promise when we did our first Podcast that we weren't ever gonna lie to people About what we thought or what we think is happening in the hobby and at times that's a very alienating experience You create enemies Unintentionally you create enemies intentionally, right? Right, but it is important to like value the relationships in that community I've seen some really cool things happen in that. Yes. I've seen people with a horrible diagnosis facing medical Bills that are mounting and a group of people decides screw it. Let's all pitch in and and help out And within 24 hours tens of thousands of dollars are raised and it takes a load off a family Not to be too preachy on this but there's another component to is like if you're somebody that is at home it's easy like I struggle with it because it's something that I can have like a tough season that I go through and It's just because I'm not out and about very much because my weekends are shows So yeah, I had to tap the conversation you a couple weeks ago Like dude, you need to set aside at least half a day every week or you just you're not doing working seven days Yeah, we're working our tails. I mean, it's nice. We're working seven days a week Weekends multiple evenings as we're trying to grow this it's a lot You need to have people in your life And I think it's important that you realize that when you're making transactions that it's not just about getting the bag from somebody Yes that there's a relationship there in somebody else. So I know that's a tirade. That's all right Maybe winners coming and I'm just feeling the the seasonal stuff coming on, but I think it's important well, we've talked about establishing your rulebook right and we've talked about the importance of Relationships in relation to that that's the foundation of how you create a business in this So now let's get real down to the nitty-gritty. Let's talk about how we buy. Yep Specifically margins everything like we're gonna be very transparent here how we buy for for and from Different platforms. This first one is all you which one eBay I would say this before Jason talks about buying for eBay. If you are a dealer, okay And you set up at shows all the time and you are sourcing your inventory a lot from eBay You're killing yourself. You're Absolutely, just it doesn't work because all you are doing is creating a comp that you have to fight against Very rarely, is it a situation where your comp is such a drastic outlier that everybody recognizes it as an outlier Or it needs it would have to be something that's just not gonna come back up for sale in a couple Yeah, like something that sells every three or four years sure, but like if you're buying PSA 10 Bowman first mojo Ellie de la Cruz on eBay and then trying to turn around and sell it at a show for 25 or 30 percent more than the Going rate on eBay. You're never selling it if you're okay with a 20% margin You could probably source a vintage on eBay maybe because there's a little bit more of a spread But I would argue you're gonna have to target like the lower up to five grade You're gonna want to get earlier 60s and not so much in the 70s stuff But how many people listen in here are vintage guys for the most part not many, but I'm hoping it grows Yeah, sure. I'm just saying it is I don't I want you know, it is a possibility but by and large Yeah the ultra modern stuff you're setting the comp and then everybody that has a phone and the internet and a brain is gonna point out To you. Hey this sold for this. Well, I bought that Yeah, it doesn't matter Yeah, so now if you are and if you are somebody who sells on eBay or looking to sell on eBay Jason did a solo episode probably four or five months ago that was, if I was starting an eBay store from scratch, go back and listen to that. But Jason, if you aren't aware, has an eBay store, pretty large one, anywhere at any given time 40,000 to 50,000 listings. Just over 48,000 right now. And it's mostly low-end, either vintage or modern or ultra-modern stuff. What would you say, 75% of it is $10 or less? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So let me give Jason a second here. How do you buy and what do you try to pay on a per-card basis for eBay? So let's start with what I try to buy. There's a couple different buckets on the high-volume, low-end stuff. So when we talk bulk, vintage bulk is a no-brainer. If you're doing something where you can upload, whether you have a duplex scanner, AI software for recognition, however you're doing that. But if you have the ability to scale your inventory quickly, vintage bulk is a great way to do that. You want to find a box where there's a bunch of vintage cards. It helps you a little bit to ask, hey, are there very many stars in here? Doesn't matter either way. I'm just trying to get a feel for what's in here. If you don't like your answer, then slowly dig through the box. Every four or five cards, pull one up, take a look. Usually by 30 seconds in, they'll be like, well, I've pulled out a lot of the, okay. Do you have any interest in moving the whole box? Well, I hadn't thought about that. What are you thinking? How much? Is what they go to. I was like, well, I buy this stuff in bulk. Do you have any more boxes like this? So I'm immediately establishing, when I say bulk, I actually mean it. Do you have any more boxes like this where it would make sense? Blah, blah, blah. I do. I don't. Oh, really? This and that. Then at some point, I say, just throw a number at me. If I took the whole box. I want to make sure. You're saying it's mostly commons in here, right? Yep. Yep. So I'm weighing in on condition. It looks like most of these are VG to EX. Do you think there's some near mint in here? I just constantly trying to establish, is this a valuable? I said, does it make sense for me to buy this all at once? Or would you rather maximize your profit over the next few years of people, you know, buying them a little bit at a time? Because that is the truth. They will probably make more money if they're willing to leave the box out. And if it sells in three years, fine. But you're going to be hauling that box in and out of there. So you won't be able to buy anything with the 50 cents you get for one card at a time. Right. Whereas, if I come in and I can offer you 200 bucks for the box or 100 bucks for the box, whatever, maybe, maybe you could take the 100, 200 and buy better again. So with vintage, that's the approach. But I think the first question you ask is what's the right type of inventory to buy on eBay? In that episode, I focused on collectability. Collectability does not mean valuable. Collectability does not mean expensive. Collectability means something that if somebody PCs the player, it just has a tendency to be like, oh, that's really cool. I haven't seen very many of those. Right. It could be a $5 card, $20 card. It can be a big card financially. But for the most part, those things are a little bit unique. That's what I would target. Beyond that, be picky on the names that you're putting on there. Go after the weird subsets, the die cuts, the inserts, the numbered stuff. I just never buy a single eBay card. It's always volume. It's all volume for me on eBay. If you're doing the higher end, the super rare stuff, the auctionable type of stuff, that's a different conversation. But when I approach it, it is in bulk. Many times I'm in for one to five pennies per card because I'm buying so much of it. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Say you're buying a four row box that's all penny sleeves. So that's about 4,000 cards. You're wanting to pay what in a perfect world for that $100, $150? I would probably pay up to $100. It's going to have to be right. People that understand what bulk buying is usually know that it means, hey, I have a few boxes. This is what I want per box. Or this box is a little nicer. My immediate gut reaction is usually I can buy that box for about $75. Now vintage, right? It isn't going to be four rows or five rows of 62s. It's going to be a lot of beat up 75 inserts. There's going to be 77, 78. There's probably going to be some 81, 82 in there, right? And then you'll have some odds and ends of the other stuff too. But the vintage stuff scans so quickly. The AI software recognizes it so quick. It is not unreasonable that I could have within an hour, hour and a half, three, four, 500 vintage cards completely listed on eBay. So the scalability of it, the speed of listing it, even if I just put $199 free shipping on it, a minute a penny, I'll net 30 to 50 cents based off of fees. So that's the approach I take with eBay. It's bulk and if people try to go down to card, I'll be like, hey, no problem. Thank you. I appreciate it. Just I need volume. That's my approach. That's what I was going to say. Back to rule number one in the rule book. Be prepared to get a lot of no's in that situation and it's okay. Move on. Next deal. Let's talk about how we buy for what not. Now from what we see a lot talking to people who do what not. We get a lot of questions in our DMs. We get a lot of comments at shows people talk to us. There are so many frustrated what not buyers. What not sellers I mean. So many people that sell on what not that are very frustrated with their experience. I'm going to share with you how we fixed that for ourselves completely. If you sell on what not, there is probably an 80 to 90% chance that you are measuring whether you're making money based on every single card that you sell individually. I paid $10 for that card and it only sold for $7. I paid $20 for this card and it only sold for $23. If that's what you're finding yourself frustrated with, let me solve your problem for you. This is such a big deal. Yeah. Here's how we buy for what not. We have a budget every single week. We run a weekly show. We're probably going to be starting to run a bi-weekly show, two shows a week. Bi-weekly? No. Bi-week? What does that mean? Bi-week is every other week, right? Yeah. Okay. I don't know what twice a week is, but either way. Twice a week. Twice a week. We buy this way. Here's our budget for this week. Let's say it's $1,000 for round numbers. I can't tell you the last time that we comped a card for what not before we bought it. It doesn't come into our equation at all. Through experience and with our community, we know what our community likes. We know roughly what things will go for, and so we're looking at the number of cards. So if we buy 350 cards and we spend $1,000, we don't care what each individual card costs us. It doesn't matter. What matters is of that $1,000, we bought 350 cards, so we're in each card for around $2.80. Then you add your materials, a mag and then shipping materials, we're in that card for around $3.50. If you're wondering about the mags, we know. We got the hookup. Yeah. We're around $3.50. That's our cost per card. At the end of the show, the only number we look at is what was our average sale. If the average sale is where we want it to be, which we want to be before fees at a minimum of $7. If it's a $3 average. If it's a $3 average, right? We're not going to make bones about that. We don't think it's, there's nothing wrong with making money. That's what we do this for. We want to be at least there. Ideally, we want to be at $8 plus. That way we're netting about double after fees and everything else. That's all we care about. That way you never worry about, and we buy in bulk, so we buy cards and almost every week in these lots that we buy, we find hidden gems. We had a card last week in our WhatNot show that I think is about a $300 card. Sell for $88. For most of you watching this, you're cringing inside if you sell on WhatNot, like, oh my God, I couldn't afford that kind of a loss. We don't care that it's worth $300. The way we look at it is we paid around $3.50 for that card. We 25X'd our money on that card and the buyer got an amazing deal and they can go make money. What happens now? Guess what stream that buyer is going to be in next week? They're going to be back in our stream. We say in our stream all the time, our job is to buy so well that everybody wins. That's how we buy for WhatNot. That's how you should buy for WhatNot. Those of you saying, well, if you're just running a bunch of $3 cards and getting double, that is not what happens. No, not at all. You'll repeatedly see us run cards that comp at $20, $25, sell for $10 to $12, but what we have done is we have learned our audience, so what will begin to happen if you're sourcing for WhatNot? Let me back it up and just kind of give more of an approach to take maybe. Maybe you've been doing this a little while and this is what's really hurting you. You've got an audience, people are hanging out, they're shopping with you, but as soon as you get to a certain price point, you're losing money and you can't sell those cards. Why can't? It's like there's a ceiling on a certain value of cards. It took us about two months of running every single week before we began to get a feel of what our people like to buy and it actually is a little bit unique for each room that you're in. Yes. You may not realize it, but we noticed that because I'm 40, he's closing in on 50, I'll be 40 in a couple of weeks. He's closing in on 50. We may attract a lot of people our age or people that met us in the podcast that know that we do a business, so they already know how we talk, how we act, what we think. We have a lot of people that like the 90s and early 2000s. The music we play on WhatNot is like 90s hip hop, country, a random incubus song, all that kind of stuff. We create that environment. We learned that stuff that's a little bit rare that are inserts from late 90s, early 2000s are what our group likes. Cards like that that may have one $10 comp, one $2 comp, and a $5 comp, if it's interesting and if it's something they're not going to see in their value boxes around them on a regular basis, it has a tendency to do a really good job of driving up the market on this card. It may not have sold in the last five years. It may not have sold in 15 years. We have some cards that have never sold ever. It's not that it's a big card. Probably 15 bucks, probably 20 bucks. By buying on a cost average, we take the whole stack. There are going to be some cards that are worth ... We've had $300 cards in stacks where we cost averaged at three bucks. It happens when you're consistently available. People know they can offload a lot of that, but there's a ton of ultra modern that we are going to be grinding it out to get the three or four bucks on the auction too. You'll get a feel within a couple months what people like, what they'll buy, what cards can run on their own and have a little bit of action. Once you do that, build a model around it. What can I find consistently? How many can I find? How many auctions do I need to run on a regular basis? Then cost average. I do this all the time. People say, you can't buy in an LCS. I source in an LCS all the time. I look for one or two cards that are below market value currently. Then I build out a big stack. I ask for a deal. Sometimes I get it. Sometimes I don't get a deal. If I do get a deal and they say 85%, but one or two cards carry enough weight and there's enough margin there that it really isn't like a 75%, I'm cost averaging what I spent at the LCS versus the total comp value of what I've purchased of the entire lot. Then that becomes a new percentage. What changes with that? There are certain cards that I was at 55% on that now that I cost average them, I'm at 70% on because if I cost average and those were the better deal, they're making up a difference somewhere, but what it's done is it's enabled me now to realize I can source everywhere. Yes. I think that's the key. If I don't see any good deals, guess what? I don't spend any money. I didn't lose any money. That's it. That was the next point. We've talked about eBay. We've talked about how we do what not now. How do we source at shows? When we're the buyer and somebody else is the seller, they're not walking up to our table. We're walking a show. We're in an LCS. I know for me, Jason does it a little differently than I do. I used to really like dive deep and try to negotiate and like, hey, I try to show comps. I have found for me, probably because of my personality type, that that is a losing battle. I'm not as emotionally driven, so I can't connect on an emotional level with people the way that Jason can. For me, it's a lot more efficient to just look and see what's in the showcase or what's on the table that catches my eye and then see if it's already priced at a point that makes a lot of sense for me to offer them $10 less on their $100 card that's probably worth $130, but they have it tagged at $100 and I offer $90, they're going to say yes. It's a lot harder for me to see $130 and try to offer $100 and get from point A to point B. I'm always looking for things that are already a deal and then just asking for a tiny little bit more, not 70% of that sticker. Jason is much better at saying, well, let's look at this and this and this and then having a real conversation and being very friendly. I like to think I'm friendly too, but he's just way better at it than I am. How do you do that, Jason? I do think some of it's just personality, but I think one of the big things is I respect the boundary. As soon as a dealer is like, no, dude, I'm just like, are we both trying to play the same game here? I'm sorry. I actually am like, I'm on your turf. These are your cards, sell them for whatever you want. If you don't want to, I don't get offended by it. I think it's such a thing. People are expecting you to get into a tug of war. It's the best visual I can give them. We're both trying to get to this certain percentage, this and that. Well, what if somebody just decides I'm not going to do that? I'm going to see like, hey, that one, okay, not that. What about if I add a couple other cards in? Yes, no, whatever. All right. Well, I still want to get this card, right? So before the conversation has started, and this is what a lot of people don't realize. Before I've even begun to do this, I've been staring there quietly sitting there, friendly, whatever. But I'm making sure that I know that there's one or two that I'm already gonna be right on before. So we're similar in that. I'm just so comfortable with the pushback. Like though, oh no, I can't do that. Oh man, no way, no way, no way. And I'm like, oh, okay, no worries, man. I get it. It's a really cool card. For some reason, when you do that, at least 25% of the time, you end up making a deal. Oh, you want me to say why? When I do that exact same thing, they're like, okay, cool, have a nice day. It's not what you say, it's how you say it. I don't know how to be anything other than me. It's just a willingness to try. Now, the way that does work for me at dealers, at shows, and at LCSs is value box stuff. I remember when you were first getting going, is really doing this outside of eBay. We were walking at Xenia one week and there was a value box that had a lot of Bowman stuff in it. And I made a stack and the tag was whatever. I don't usually care what a tag is in a value box because my assumption is that most dealers look at their value box the same way that I do. I just want it gone. Unless that's the majority of what they have out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I handed the guy- I've never had luck on those ones where it's taped between three, four, and $5 differences. Somebody went way too hard in the paint there. No, no, if it works for them, great. But so I hand this guy a stack and I don't remember what the tag was. I think I said, what can we do here? And he goes, well, what do you want to be at? And I said, probably like 70 bucks. There were a few in there that you were pretty close on. There are a lot that I think you probably tagged a month or two ago. And he was like, yeah. He goes, I couldn't do 70 bucks. I'd probably need to be at 100. And he thought we were negotiating. I'm not negotiating on value boxes. And I went, cool, no worries at all. Totally understand. 70's where I need to be. And I just started to walk away and I got two steps. And he goes, wait a minute. 70's really where you need to be? All right, that's fine. I think that's risky in my opinion, but if it works for you, it works. No, I mean, the risk is you're trying to, in that scenario, it sounds like you're trying to bring them onto your turf. This is my game that you're playing. And that is not how we want people to experience us when they walk up to us. See what I'm saying? Sure, I see what you're saying. So that's why sometimes I think people are like, bye. And I'll sit there and be like, oh yeah, I mean, it is yours. You can tell me to take a hike. I don't do that on showcase stuff. I don't do that on that stuff. I do it on value box stuff. So. And part of it too is like Gary has a tendency to qualify what's about to happen a little more. The advantage to that is people that just want to know what's next and don't want BS and don't want a conversation that are selling to us, like they appreciate that he's like, here's the next five things that'll happen. Mine's like, I am watching you. I'm listening to your tone. I'm watching your body language. I'm getting a feel for what kind of deal are they looking for? And I'm trying to create an experience for them. I know that sounds super like ethereal and out there in mystic, but it's not. Well, the positive of that is you see where things are going to go sideways before they go sideways. Yeah. I don't see it going sideways until the car's already skidding. Well, for you, it's like a volume number thing. Yes. And for me, it's like my personality would rather have three deals a day that turn out to be bigger deals than to have 50 deals and 25 of them work out. Nothing drives me crazier than when somebody comes up to the table with their box and says, hey, are you buying? Yeah, we'll always look. That's what I always say. We'll always look. I'm not always going to buy your stuff, but I'll always look. Before I start digging through your box, there's two questions. Is there anything here that's not available? Yeah. No, everything's available. Okay, cool. Do you have a percentage that you're looking to sell at? I'm trying to get a feel for whether it's even worth my time. Sometimes they'll be like, I'm not really just a pencil card. Let me look. Sometimes they're like, yeah, I'm going to need to be at like 85% plus. If they say 85% plus, I'm out. I'm not looking through the rest of the box. On to the next, because it's outside my rule book. Now, what will drive me insane is they go, it really depends on the card. I know where you kind of need to be. I said, yeah, I'm going to be somewhere between 60 and 80%, depending on what it is, is what I always say. And okay, cool. If I take a half hour going through your box after having that conversation and we set aside a bunch of cards and we agree on the value. And then I make you an offer that's in the range that we agreed on. And you're like, ah, no. I mean, I really need to be at like 90, 92%. Leave and don't come back. I'm out. I'm done. Because your time was wasted. But here's the thing that I think, the reason that doesn't work for me is it is never, and this is going to make you crazy. I don't believe most deals that walk up to the table are about the percentage. I don't, I don't. I think most of the deals walking up the table are not about the percentage. I agree if it's a collector. I can only say that because every week people walk up and if they mentioned that early on, I'll look at what's in there. But we all have starting points. People are expecting a negotiation. So I never lead with the percentage. The only time I do that is when I open up a case, a four row or whatever. And the first 10 cards I go through are all big, rare cards. Bigger than what we have at our showcases. And they have more value in that box than I have in my inventory. This is an experienced buyer. It's curated. They didn't rip this stuff. I have a hunch they're just, this is how they're trying to make money. And there's nothing wrong with that. But there won't be meat on the bone for both of us. There'll be meat on the bone for one of us. In those situations I'll say, this is stuff, and I do it with a compliment. And I mean it. This stuff's really nice. Almost too nice for my showcases. Are you gonna be targeting that 90% range? And I'll start a little higher. Just to kind of feel it out. And if you're like, oh yeah, I would need it because I know this stuff's awesome, man. I'm probably not the right guy for you. And if I can point them to somebody, I do. And those people point weird modern stuff back to us all the time. But I think starting out with percentage, if that's not natural for your personality, it's gonna create that struggle immediately. And I would rather look through those cards and I'd say, hey, I'm gonna look through this. I asked the same question, anything in here not for sale? And I said, and I'm gonna try to build a stack of the stuff I like. What did I just do? It's a positive reinforcement. I'm not trying to pick one card out of here. I'm already setting the stage for bulk to somebody that I'm buying from. It's like subconsciously or with those words, it's like, oh, he wants to spend some money with me today. I'm gonna build a stack out. Then we're just gonna look at value and make sure we think it's about worth the same stuff. And then I'll be able to make you an offer. Does that process make sense for you? And most people look at you like you're stupid and go, yeah, that's why I'm here. However, those things matter because in any sale and any deal and any negotiation, people do not wanna be blindsided, tricked, feel like you're trying to do something different than what you said. So much so that I'll even have the pile there. And let's say they have a couple of Jordan and Kobe's, and they're like, man, I really wanna get paid well on that. It's amazing how many people I'm like, okay, I'll give you 85% on these two. I have no problem with that. I think you're right. These are goats. And then I get the margin on the rest of the stack. And I average out at 75, 78%. It makes sense. Now, if I were to start with percentages right away, and they have nice Jordan and Kobe stuff in there, and in their mind, what's the first thing you're thinking about in your case? The most valuable card you have, the stuff that you really aren't gonna let go for nothing. So for me, I don't wanna create that as like one of the first steps in the deal. The way that Gary does it isn't like that. It's just, you can tell right away, here's my process, here's the steps, let's keep it moving. Are you cool with that? And there's some people that walk over to Gary, make deals with him in the first two hours, and I still don't know their name. And I see them every week because Gary's their guy. There's nothing wrong with that. There's also people who have tried to do deals with Gary, and they just didn't like how it feels. Then they turn around and sell it to me for a lower percentage than he was trying to get it for. Now, the only problem that Jason runs into there, and he'll be the first to admit this, is because of the way he does that, he will miss out on other buying opportunities. He will miss out on sales from his showcases because he's got stuff spread on top of them for 30 minutes while he's working on this $200 deal. Well, that would be a very rare occasion, it's 30 minutes. But still, as people are passing, they can't see my stuff, so trying to move that over. Then if you buy cheap stuff, it's like seagulls on the beach when somebody's got boardwalk fries. It's just coming in. So you have to have a little buying area. We're probably close to needing to add another table just so we can keep people in one spot for that, but that's an us problem. But hopefully you guys see, very different approaches, same rules, different approaches. Last thing I will say before we wrap up for the week. One of the things that I think people don't understand, and you hear Jason and I talk about our sales background and companies we've worked for and things like that. Don't get it twisted. When you're on the dealer side of the table and you're buying something, you're selling. That is a sales process. You might think the other person's selling to you, and in technicality, they are, but they're not trying to sell you on anything. You're trying to sell them on why they should sell it to you at a number that you can make money on, right? It's a sales process, so treat it as such. Yeah, treat it accordingly. Be yourself in that. Be ethical in the process. Pushing people around will work for a little bit. It will not work long-term. You will not have residual income from repeat buyers and sellers. The way you treat people really does matter. We could have done another 20 episodes drilling down even further on buying for this type of product, that type of product, this type of card, that, but hopefully the overarching themes and these tips we're giving give you stuff to think about. That's what we hope our content is thoughtful, that it provokes thought, that it makes you really question and consider some new possibilities for your hobby, your business, your collection, whatever. One more thing before we wrap up. I'll make it really quick because this is a long episode for us. Low-end liquid for this week. I did not think I'd be saying this anytime soon. The early 90s junk wax basketball stuff has been popping off for me. 91, 92 hoops, and I just buy the stars. If you don't know much about that, maybe you're not much of a basketball person, but you do the low-end eBay, just look for the Dream Team, guys. The ones that were on the Dream Team. This, the hideous FLIR set that is super nostalgic for us. Way back in the day, FLIR 91, this stuff is selling. There's a Reggie Miller, but a lot of multi-quantity orders. What I think is happening is as the Jordan market is popping off and there's a tension turning to basketball, we're gonna see that happen more. And what a lot of you need to consider is how filthy and awesome the licensed basketball product will be because of the vet list that will be on it next year. So you'll see more of that. So junk wax basketball, names are everything on that. Get them cheap, cheap, cheap. Sell them cheap, cheap, cheap. Make 30, 50 cents a pop, but sell 10 of them at a time. For sure. And double, triple up, whatever. I think that's everything for this week. Hopefully these last three episodes have been super helpful for you. Let us know. Leave a comment. Again, hit that subscribe button every Thursday night at six o'clock, whatnot. Come hang out with us if you really like that mid-90s to mid-2000s, just cool stuff you don't see all the time, Hall of Fame game news, patches, things like that. That's about 80% of what we run. Jason, you got anything else for us? This has been the Ball Card Show, the Esports Podcast. For the Esports Collector. Bye now. Peace.