THWC 388: Steals and Deals!

What is up, everybody? Hobby with Cage, episode 388, brought to you by Arena Club Card Ladder and the Philly Show. Every once in a while I get an email a couple times a week. Oh, you gotta, you gotta. Congratulations. Someone else signed up using your code on Card Ladder. And I'm like, all right, well, I. I probably would get more of those emails if I actually said my code. You know, I say it's sponsored by Card Ladder. I forget to tell you, my code is Cage. I mean, you're probably going to figure that one out yourselves. Anyway, you know, reminds me of the old Tommy Boy movie. And they're. Was it Time or Black Sheep? Oh, it's Tommy Boy. Same movie, pretty much. They. They're on the plane, right, and they're pretending that they're flight attendants and they're trying to teach people how to use a seat belt. And he says, listen, you put the one end into the other end. Ah, forget it. If you don't know how to use the seatbelt, raise your hand, we'll come back there and hit you over the head with a hammer because you are dumb. Anyway, you know, Code Cage. You probably knew that already. You probably figured that out without me having to tell you. Save some money on Card Ladder. Yeah, And I mean, I'm posting card letter a lot lately because, I mean, look at those Wembley prices, man. Look at those Wembley prices. I didn't post this one, but, you know, late last night, it looked like there was like a 36.99 verified buy it now or Best Offer Sale through Fanatics Marketplace. You know, they're Buy Now Marketplace for Wemby. I mean, holy cow, it's an amazing thing to watch. A lot of people. I posted my. My Wemby, you know, cards, and. And people were like, oh, I'm feeling Covet. I'm getting Covid vibes. I'm feeling co. And listen, guys, if you've been with me since the beginning or close to the beginning or whatever, you know, I kind of do this every once in a while. Not. Not on cards like this specifically, but, like, if there's something I like, I just kind of go crazy with it. You know, Those of you who know me, you know, like, oh, let me go invest. I buy all Verizon. Like, I find something I like and I just keep buying it. All right, why not? You know, it's funny, every once in a while on my. On my. On my Instagram feed, Buffett pops up and he says, diversification kind of kills you. You know, you don't need to be an expert in every stock in the market. Be an expert in a couple of them. And you, you know, when your pitch comes, you hit it. You know, be patient. Find the one winner. And if you're able to find four or five, 10 winners over the course of your life, that's enough. That's enough. And the Wemby thing is a winner. I mean, that was a winner. And you know, people who've been with me for a while, they know, you know, I did this way back in the day when, you know, Tatis was the hot commodity. And you know, I went on ebay and bought every single Tatis rookie I could find. I cleaned out ebay. You know, I, I bought every one of them from, you know, like $30 all the way up to like 70. I bought just hundreds of them. And you know, during the peak, you know, Covid craziness, those things were selling for 325, 350 a piece. Just, just crazy runs. And you see that stuff. But what can be learned from that? I just bought one of those Tatis Chrome cards in the fanatics auction last week. I don't think I paid 25 for it. I don't remember, you know, 25, something like that, something around there. I mean, the bid was very low. I could probably tell you exactly what I paid for it. And it's, you know, it's because Tatis hasn't exactly lived up to what everybody expected him to live up to. And he also had, you know, some, you know, some, some performance enhancing, you know, drama, blah, blah, blah. So that card, had you bought it for, you know, for $300. That's not exactly, you know, that's not exactly doing great stuff there. It's not, you're not exactly, you're not exactly killing it with that. But I mean, I gotta find it was, it was, it was old that I bought it and that's why it's not. I'm looking at fanatics. Can we learn something from that for the Wembies? Sure, sure. I get a lot of people messaging me especially I posted this morning, you know, the sales of 3333.99. You know, a card that you guys know, I po. I posted that in the fanatics weekly auction last week. Thursday I won for 20 $640. That's the last one that I bought. And then they win the game. And now there are sales verified on card letter for over a thousand dollars more than that. And the, you know, the card letter value if you average the last bunch of prices, it's like 3,250, 3,300. So you're talking about a 6, 700 dollar jump in a matter of a couple of days in the value of that, of that card. People messaging me saying is it a sustainable long term, people buying 3, 500 or $3,600 long term, they're gonna, they're gonna be in trouble. Okay, I understand that. And, and guys, sometimes I take that side of the equation, sometimes I do because when things run too far, too fast, the upside is already kind of baked into it and you have to take a pause, right? And here I am. I don't want to speak totally against my, my own cards and I'm not going to. My response to that is it really does depend on what you're looking to do with the card because I do believe that if you buy a card right now for 3250, you know, card line is my belief. You're, you know, not financial advice. But he wins tonight and he dispatches Oklahoma City and moves to the finals. It doesn't really matter which one of those teams he faces. He's a favorite now in the finals, the spurs will be favored over both of the teams from the East. I do believe that card will sell for more then. So if you're buying it at 32.50, is it ridiculous? I think the card is $4,000 next week if they beat Oklahoma City and are favored in the finals. No, it's not ridiculous. And just think about that from a math perspective. If you're, you're buying a car for 32.50 and you're looking to sell it for 750 more, you're talking about basically a 25 increase there, you know, just under 20, 25 in a week. What stock are you buying that's going to give you that? Now there's potential downside. What if Oklahoma City comes back and wins tonight, wins four straight, knocks him out and he plays like crap, then you have the same type of downside there. You know what I mean? You are, you have some downside risk, but the car's not going to zero. You know, the car's not going to zero, especially after what he just did. So you know what I tell the folks who come to me and say, oh, that's a bad move long term. It's, I mean, there's upside. It kind of, there's downside like everything else. The difference with this one is the upside and downside are there's more volatility because he's playing right now. You're not going to get that kind of volatility when you buy a Michael Jordan card. Obviously he's not playing. You know what I mean? There's not something going on on the court right now that's going to impact the price of that card in such a way that there's so much volatility to it. That's the difference between buying, you know, a, a card of an active player versus someone who's not active there. We used to say that, you know, the, the price of the card is really not impacted by what goes on on the corridor on the field. With something like this. It clearly does. I'll do a, a finance comparison. You could buy stock and hold it long term. You know, something that's got no real volatility and doesn't really have fluctuations. Or you can buy a crazy tech stock on the day that ear and it has volatility implied on the earnings of, you know, 10, 15, 20% up or down in either direction depending upon what the earnings announcement is. That's what you're dealing with now with, with, with Wendy. You know, the stock in that company is not going to go to zero. But if the earnings announcement comes out and it's good, you could see a significant spike up. If it's bad, you can see a significant drop down. It's the same kind of thing. And it's what you already saw there in game one. He was an underdog, right? Right. Plus 275 for the series. You know, they were, they were, you know, they were seven point underdog in game one. And he comes out and has a dominant performance and wins the game. That's like an earning surprise to the upside. And boom. You see that in the, in, in the card. Sure, I know what the population is. There's a lot of demand. The population will probably continue to grow. Right. PSA will ultimately grade everything that they have and the pop will probably increase and who knows what the demand will be like. It is fair to say that the demand is at a peak because he just had that crazy performance with 40 points and 20 rebounds and wins game one. It's hard to have a repeat performance, an encore performance Lab. But what if he does and what if he wins? Then the demand might even be more, you know, and you see that, you see, you know, just the, the, you know, the amount of buys now. I watched it. I watched it. Did you know, because I have a lot of these cards. I know what the Cheapest price was to be able to just hit Buy it now on ebay. And before the game, you could get those cards in the mid, high mid, but mid twos. As I record this, there is not a buy it now on ebay for less than 3,250. All of the buy it nows that were there have all been taken out and the auctions are now all selling for higher than three. And that's the impact of a game like that. That's the impact of, of, of, of winning, of performing. And I believe it also, you know, it raises the floor on someone like Wemby. We talked about that. So anyway, enough, enough chat about that. I'll come back to Wemby in a second because I gotta look at the clock and make sure my 24 hours is wrapping up here. But yeah, the Knicks, wow. I mean, come on, basketball playoffs, you gotta enjoy this. The knicks were down 22 points with under eight minutes to go. I don't think in the playoffs anybody's ever come back from that. And they did. They were losing 93.71 with 7 and change. And they came back tied it brought it to overtime and then dominated in overtime. It was what I thought was going to happen to the spurs yesterday, where OKC kind of hung around and then tied it up at the end. And then I thought they were going to just completely demoralize, you know, know, the spurs by beating them after being, you know, soundly outplayed the whole game. The Knicks were outplayed the whole game. They had no answer for, for, you know, for Spider. He was getting where he wanted to go and, you know, but then all of a sudden, just the Knicks woke up in the second half of the fourth quarter and could not miss, and Cleveland could not hit. And that's one of those things that's tough to come back from. It really is if you're Cleveland. You know, it's an interesting thing to see how that team kind of gels. Spider is not a really loud leader. Harden is, you know, he seems like a visitor on the team, you know, and Mobley and Jared Allen, they are, you know, big guys, but they also don't seem like, you know, really vocal. It's. It's an interesting thing to watch. I think if the Knicks come out and, and beat him up in game two at home, it's going to be very, very hard for Cleveland to even show up in this series. Like, you could be looking at a sweep or, or winning five for the Knicks. And that's crazy to Think of. Because they were being so summarily beaten. I mean, Mitchell was just destroying them. Last night I was watching that game and it was like, where are the Knicks? They're just not even playing. And then boom, just a, you know, flip a switch and you got a different team. After a loss like that, it's hard, that's hard to come back from. We'll see, we'll see what Cleveland does in game two. You know, obviously they come back and win and steal home field advantage and you know, it's a, it's a completely different series. But that's one of those things that you kind of, kind of, you know, rips your heart out when you, when you have one in hand like that. You think you're gonna win game one and you know, possibly come back for game two and steal two on a visiting turf. It's hard to really come back from that after losing the way that they did. But yeah, interesting stuff. It really is. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna end it with this. We're 13 minutes in and you know, I've done two long 19 minute episodes. Sorry. Mailman Everywhere is not the longest episode. I gotta, I gotta wrap it up. Have fun with the cards. There are no other sports out there that you know, there are no other hobbies out there that, that are as fun as this because you get to watch what's going on in the, in the, you know, in the games. Don't sleep. Wemby. Awesome. Nick's Brunson. Awesome. Otani is waking up. He's brought his average from like 230 to like 270 in the last four or five games, guys. Multi hit games, every game, you know, not hitting the home runs. And now he's gonna pitch and you know, he's still the ERA leader for the majors, but he has multi hit games, getting rbis, you know, extra base hits, pretty much doubles and, and, and a couple triples here and there, you know, another two doubles I think in last night's game, you know, an RBI and you know, the, the, the home run totals are not there yet, but he's figuring it out at the plate and those home runs will come. So that's another fun one. Don't sleep on. By the end of this week I expect him to be leading the majors in WAR very quietly with nobody talking about it because he had a hell of a slump there. But he is coming out of that slump and you know, you start talking about Wemby and what his cards are doing. You know, the easy comparison made by a bunch of people is, you know, they're comparing him to Otani. For those of you who took advantage of yesterday's offer at the end of the episode, I congratulate you. There were a lot of you very smart, very smart to make it to the end of the episode, listen and message me and take advantage so that you could share my win. And that's another episode, guys. Brought to you by card ladder use code cage. Save a couple bucks for yourself. Brought to you by Arena Club and by the philly show. That's 388 of these. I'll see you guys soon. Take care, everybody.