THWC 397: The Seasonality of Sports Cards

What's up everybody? I'm with Cage. Episode 397 brought to you by Arena Club by card ladder use code Cage. Save yourself a couple bucks. And by the Philly show. We've talked about shows the last couple of days. We've talked about, you know, card shows. I've been to cartridges the last two weeks. If anybody knows any good card shows in the Northeast in the coming weeks, let me know. I, I, I looked at like a June calendar. Not much going on, not much by me. So maybe I'll have to drive somewhere and go catch another show. But the last two weeks I've hit shows here and, and you know, they, they've been fun and experience. A couple people reached out to me yesterday and told me to go easy on the weed smokers. It's not just the smokers. I mean, you do what you want to do, but just like walk around the show. It's just like a big cloud. That, that's what I was trying to say. I guess there's a lot of weed, a lot of vapors in the hobby. A lot of people didn't like me coming after the weed yesterday. I don't know, do your own thing. That was kind of an afterthought for me. But for whatever reason, that's what struck a nerve with you guys yesterday. Having some fun guys, you know, you know, with, with, with no more than seven potential NBA games left. It had me thinking yesterday about the seasonality of sports course. And that's what the episode's going to be about. But let me just jump into really quick because some of you guys only get your hobby news from me. And you know, if you're listening to this early on Tuesday, June 2, make sure you check out my hobby news on Instagram. Cage lawyer. Give me a follow over there if you haven't already and subscribe here if you can. But I'll put out my hobby news and some of this info will be in there. Obviously we talked about the, you know, the card letter numbers for the month going up to 650 million worth of sales. Well, one of the fun things that got posted, you know, because it's a new, new month, right, is the gem rate numbers. And you know, it's something I entry to because obviously, you know, when PSA is closed down and they talk about having a 10 million card backlog, well, how long is it going to take to get out from under that? And one of the easy ways of doing that is let's look at how many cards were graded you know, month to month, we actually graded a little bit less items in May than they did in April. But still, 2 million cards graded by PSA, it's pretty crazy to think about, right? I mean, just 2 million cards and about 3/4 of that, almost a million and a half of them TCG and non sport. That's pretty, that's pretty crazy if you think about that, right? 1.44 million. But the, you know, the flip side to that is if they graded 2 million total cards in a month, right? And they have a 10 million backlog, which I predicted last week when they closed, you know, the levels that were probably, probably about 13 million card backlog when all said and done because everybody's rushing to get cards in before they shut down. You know, if we just rounds it to 12, that's six months of card grading, right? If they're grading 2 million a month at six months just to grade the backlog, that doesn't even count any of the cards that they're getting in. And keep in mind, over the next couple of months, I don't know if they're going to be at Fanatics Fest, but I know they'll be at national and you know, there's going to be an influx of cards there that always slows everything down. It's going to take them a while to get out from under, right? I mean, if they're, if they're doing 2 million a month, you know, and you like to think by shutting it down, you know, they will catch that, catch up to that. But we're talking about end of the year, talking about end of the year to, you know, just to, to catch up to the stuff that they had in house, you know, before they open it back up. And you know, you gotta hope, you know, they're figuring out a way to grade, you know, that many cards per month and how many come in, you know, and be ready for it when they open up this way, they're not just right back to this and you know, hopefully the market is still running as hot as it is. But wow, pretty crazy numbers to think about, right? That PSA grade 2 million cards in May, over 2 million cards in May. And one of the fun numbers that was there is, you know, I, I've seen some recent content from the sports card nonsense guys, you know, I love those guys. They have always been SGC fans and you know, some of the content recently, SGC is going to, you know, going to be the biggest one. They're going to pass Beckett, blah, blah. Well, Beckett is a clear cut. Third, right. Beckett TAG and SGC combined graded a hundred thousand cards and Beckett grade 145,000. So they got 50% more than the other two combined. And the cool thing about that was year over year, 145% increase, month of a month, 50 increase. Which means, you know, Beckett is now, you know, they're grading a lot more with Beckett. And a lot of that is the tcg seeing Beckett grading tcg non sport. A hundred thousand cards in May, that's up over 200% year over year from what they did last May, you know, under the PSA umbrella there, and up almost 50% month over month. So, I mean, if you're, if you're looking for any kind of telling numbers in the, the Gem Rate reports, it's, it's that Beckett has seen a significant increase of the amount of cards that they're grading. We'll see how that all shakes out. Right. You know, that surprised me a little bit when you look at those numbers. All right, so the seasonality of sports cards, this is something I'm, I'm thinking about, right? For those of you out there who are, you know, who are riding the wave and, and, you know, thinking about, and thinking about what to buy and when to buy it and you know, one of those tried and true things was, you know, watch the seasons, buy off season, you know, wait for the hype in the preseason and then you can sell. And I mean, it is, it works, right? It most definitely does. Basketball is about to end, right? And for a lot of people, basketball has ended up. I have some Cooper Flag cards that I had, you know, with me at the show and you know, we look at comparable sales and they are all significantly lower than they were. And Cooper Flag had a great year. One rookie of the year, but, you know, didn't make the playoffs and team didn't have that greatest year. And no one's thinking about them, no one's talking about them. Now. You don't really have a basketball release. You don't really have cards coming out. And, you know, if you were to look at charts of what players are up or players are down, the down is probably going to be those guys. It's going to be the, you know, the, the basketball players who, you know, are just out of sight, out of mind. Right? And we talked about this with Luca. I was picking up Luca Silvers. You know, you can pick your guy, you know, who you think might be good for next year. Giannis. You know, there's gonna be a lot of talk about Giannis in the off season. He's probably, you know, potentially gonna go to another team. Who knows what LeBron's gonna end up doing next year. I heard a really cool idea that LeBron, for his last year should sign a 10 day contract with every team in the league. That, that when, when he decided it's LeBron's last year, he should sign a 10 year, a 10 day contract with every team. Basically like a one week contract with every team in the league and play at least one or two home games in every arena as a member of that team. You finally get Knicks, LeBron go back to the Heat, LeBron, Cavs, LeBron, Lakers, LeBron, you know, pair back up in Dallas. LeBron, you know, with, with Kyrie and Anthony Davis, you know, have bulls. LeBron, you know, let him wear number 23 with a bulls jersey. I mean, it's some fun stuff. And then, you know, put him on at the end, whatever team is favored to win the championship and let him make a title run. And, you know, if he's on a team, he can get a ring no matter what because he played for every team. Then you get LeBron leaving with another ring. It was a cool idea and it'll never happen, but that's a fun idea. Imagine, you know, being able to, you know, go to a nick game watching LeBron play as a nick. Fun idea. I forget where I saw that, but that was a fun idea. And, and you know, you know, LeBron, another guy, you know, I mean, never really out of sight, out of mind, but you're not really looking at basketball cards right now. SGA lost, you know, you might see a dip in his cards now. And maybe, you know, maybe if you have a little bit of a, you know, of a window here, you can hang on to those and, and, and you know, watch the price go back up. When basketball's about to start again and people are Talking about can SGA win three straight MVPs, you know, what do they do to that team to be able to come back and have him win a championship next year, etc. Etc. The hype is what moves things. It makes you think about Wendy's cards right now, right? Is the championship already baked into his prices? Maybe. I mean, you've seen a significant run up, someone, you know, very handsome, who you listen to their podcast, maybe might have told you about Wemby, might have been the more confident Wemby buyer out there telling you to buy him. But, you know, even I don't have all the Wembies that I had, you know, I have very few of them left, actually. You know what I mean? And, you know, I mean, it's. It's. It's a sell the rumor, right? You know, or buy the rumor, sell the news. Which one do you want to do? I like to sell the rumor in this case. You know, when you think about it from, from a card perspective, a lot of the success is already baked in. So, you know, if you're holding Wemby cards and it's not something you're planning on holding forever, you know, now might be a chance to take some of that profit off the table. His cards have definitely run a lot. The flip side to this, right? Something actionable, right? Because, you know, if you're sitting there saying, all right, the Wemby stuff, enough, I didn't buy Wemby, so stop talking about it. What can I do now? All right, let's talk about that, right? A couple things. Number one, what off season are we in? Well, in addition to what I just told you about, maybe Cooper Flag, maybe Luca, maybe SGA over the next couple of weeks, football will start up before that, right? You know, we have Fanatics Fest, we have the National. We have, you know, preseason football basically starts right that week of the National. You have that hall of Fame game right there. So you get football, you know, people will already start training camp. People already be talking about it. I have been buying, you know, know, Jackson Dart downtowns, you know, and, and, you know, Genti and Bowers because I'm a Raider fan and you know, your rookie quarterbacks and I will probably be looking to move those Fanatics Fest and. Or national and not hold them into the season, sell them with the hype, right? You, you know, you're starting to see NFL News. Yesterday, Miles Garrett traded to the Rams, and you see the Giants signing some wide receivers. And you see A.J. brown traded to the Patriots. You know, if you were a Drake May holder, you know, now hearing that he has got this number one wide receiver weapon, you know, that could be some hype, right? That, oh, wow, Drake May and the Patriots, they're going places this year. You might want to move his cards, you know, into that hype, maybe, you know, sell for a little bit of profit now. Same thing with Dart. Another thing in the preseason, the lead up right to the beginning of the season for baseball, you know, people going crazy for. For baseball cards. Oh, this guy's going to do this. Baseball is a very long season. You know, we will have the all star break in About a month. We're approaching the middle of the season and you know, it's, it's, there's a lot of out of sight, out of mind. Baseball is a very long and drawn out, stretched out season. And you know, Otani started off with a little bit of, a little bit of a slump. He still leads the whole majors in war. He's going to win the mvp. You know, he's a front runner for the Scion. There's a lot of really good pitching going on in the National League right now between Sanchez and Mizarowski and even Skeins is in the mix. You know, I don't know whether Otani can actually win the Cy Young. He's got the best ERA in the league. We'll see. He's pitching again, I think tomorrow, but I mean, another three hit day yesterday and no one is talking about it. You know, he's having another MVP season and the Dodgers look good and they'll probably be playing meaningful baseball in the fall. But you might be able to buy some Ohtani now. You know, I know Ohtani is not ever flying under the radar, but compared to the hype and craziness that there was about him in the beginning of the season or lead up to the season, you now have this long couple of months here where people are not really clamoring for it because everybody's talking about Wemby right now, right? So when everybody's talking about Wemby, this hidden stuff. But you have to know that, you know, here we are in June, you got July, August, September. We're going to be talking about who's winning the mvp. Is he competing for the Cy Young still? And by the way, they are playoff team. Can Ohtani add another World Series ring? And then people will be talking about him and when you're talking about him, there's that hype. That is when you'll be able to sell. So I mean, I'm not, this isn't financial advice here, but it's just, this is the seasonality of sports cars. This is the stuff that goes on every year in, every season. You see people get crazy, you know, add to their, their collection, want to pay and you see prices go up in that lead up. Right. You know, it won't just be Ohtani now in the fall when, you know, when, when, when, when playoff baseball starts and when the award season comes. But you know, right around that same time before basketball starts up, you're gonna have the same, you know, hype cycle. You know, Zion might be so damn Cheap now that when the articles come out about how great he looks, you know, there might be a little bump in his cards. Aunt Edwards, is this the year he takes that step? Who knows? But, you know, there's going to be articles about it. You know, there's going to be, you know, press about it. You know, there's gonna be people looking for Ant man cards, and they're not looking for them right now. So you have to. If this is going to be where you operate, if this is going to be the space for you and you're looking for ways to kind of, you know, navigate this area, you have to buck the trend. You have to not be looking for the guy when everybody is looking for it. And you also have to be patient that if you own those guys, you have to know when the seasonality is going to strike, right? If you didn't sell your Ohtani cards in the beginning of the season and you're sitting with them now, don't sell them now, because nobody's looking for him now. There's no hype right now. We're in the middle of the season. Summer hasn't started yet. He hasn't had that week that he's gonna have where he hits five home runs in one week, right? You gotta sit with those now. Now you gotta be looking for something else, right? You gotta be looking for the stuff. Not Wemby. Not Wemby, where everybody's looking for Wemby. And the price has gone up right now with sell Wemby, look for somebody else. Look for Jackson Dart, right? Look for the basketball guys that everybody's dumping to try to get into Jackson Dart soon, right? So soon people are gonna be buying him. They're gonna need money to buy your quarterbacks, buy your Drake May. Well, what are they gonna do? Gonna sell. What are they gonna sell, SGA they're gonna sell basketball cards because basketball season ended and they held a little longer than they should have with Luca hoping it was to make the playoffs. Joker, you know, hoping he was going to be, you know, winning the championship. You know, maybe they held some Kate Cunningham cards or Paolo Bangaro cards because they were going to the playoffs and maybe they made a round. Well, no one's buying those now, you know, but people are gonna dump them. Maybe you pick those up and hang on to them. If you have a couple of months to stash them away. And then when basketball hype starts up, all of a sudden those cards are up a little bit more. It's the same thing. You can check the Stats you could check, you know, go back and look at quarterback prices for the last couple months, and then go back to August of last year, you know, check out the prices. You'll see the chart. It's spikes up, you know, and I'm gonna have a whole bunch of quarterbacks ready to sell at the national because that's the time to do it. And that's the seasonality of sport cards. I. I hope you enjoyed this one. It's a little bit of different stuff, but I got a bunch of messages yesterday saying, hey, you know, the Wemby victory lapsed and the selling cards at shows is always great content, we love it. But, like, what are you actually doing? And, you know, this is one of those things I could tell you, I'm buying this car. That. That doesn't help, right? It's. It's like Andrew used to say, right? You know. You know, you can lead a fish to the desert and. And then a horse with the water can do some stuff. That's what he used to say. And you understood what he meant. You know, he messed the saying up. But it was, you know, give a man a fish, he'll eat for the day. Teach a man the fish he could eat for his whole life. I'm teaching you how to fish here. You already knew this. Sometimes you just got to pound it in, you know. Sometimes you just gotta, you know, remind you, especially because with what we do here, there's so much emotion, there's so much craziness, you get kind of caught up in it. Everybody's posting their Otani cards. Everybody's posting Wemby right now, right? Everybody's posting their Wemby. Well, that's why Wemby is sky high, right? You can't be buying, Wendy. Now. Now is not the time to buy Wemby. Time to buy Wemby was a couple months ago. Time to sell Wimpy is now. You got to find out who now the buy now what's the two month ago Wimpy now, who knows? But you can definitely take some chances on stuff that's low and not being looked at right now. Stuff that you know will be looked at soon as the season starts or as the postseason starts for baseball or as the preseason starts for football, or as the preseason starts for basketball. Happens every year. Not telling you any. There's not rocket science. It's just sometimes you gotta remind. And that's it. Another episode 397 of these June 2nd Tuesday Hobby with Cage brought to you by Arena Club Buy card ladder, use code cage. Save yourself a couple bucks and buy the Philly show. Talk to you guys soon. Take care, everybody.