THWC 438: How To Make Money In Cards Today

What's up everybody? I'll be with Cage. Episode 438, how to Make money in cards Today. What a title. You know, if, if this algorithm I hear so much about that just ignores most of my content gets a hold of that title. Man, hopefully this gets pushed to you guys and you know, you wind up here and instead of all the other drivel that's out there for hobby content, you actually enjoy this and maybe learn something. And Yu-Gi-Oh I can say that because I've done 1500, 1600 episodes. I know what I'm talking about. Now let's get into it. 438 episodes of hobby with Cage. This particular one brought to you by Arena Club, by the Philly show, and by card ladder use code Cage. Save yourself a couple bucks and for today acquire. I mean, this is a nice hat. Look at this. It's good, stretchy, good material. I wear it outside. People ask what it is and I tell them what it is. So for today we got a choir. Yesterday we had Hartlepool, we had some soccer and you know, we, we did some fun stuff. one-of-one we got some new fans from across the pond because, you know, I watched a little soccer. I'm a poorly. So let's just get right into it. I did an episode yesterday about the current state of the hobby with comps. I talked about it because I, you know, know, I was at a card show with my son, with one of his friends, with one of his friends, dads, and there were a lot of lessons learned by me, by the kids. And I talked about him. Yes, I talked about how everybody is basically handcuffed to comps. And it's funny because after yesterday's episode I got a lot of great messages about how it was a good episode, how people enjoyed it, how it's exactly spot on of what you see. And now it's worth taking a minute here, guys. Okay? We talked about this sort of like the stockxing of the hobby that, you know, downtowns and kabooms and case hits and, and you know, a very liquid Michael Jordan Kobe cards. They transact so often that they become something that has a level of certainty to people who don't want to put in a below skin deep bit of research. If you just want to be somebody who is buying and selling and buying and selling the same liquid stuff and you provide sort of a safety net for yourself because you're only transacting in these very liquid cards that you have certainty about the pricing of great. If you don't believe that these are the things that transact. 95% of the time, you. You have to go to a show. You have to see how easy it is for people to just, you know, pull out their phone card ladder, come up to a, you know, a number, come up to a percentage. It's very, very straightforward. It's very, very mathematics. It's very robotic. It's. Okay. The last 10 sales basically average out to 100 per sale. We're paying 95% on these, so we'll give you $95. Okay, great. Shake on it. Move on to the next one. Okay, this one, you know, know. This one's a thousand bucks. We're only paying 85% on these. This one's Pokemon. It's a thousand bucks. We're only paying 80. It's very robotic. People aren't really even looking at the card, the player. The, you know, they. They only look at it for the scanning. Boom. Put the cert number in, okay, See what it sells for, see what, you know, other cards like that sell for, and boom. We'll. We'll. We'll give you a percentage of it. It's almost like buying gold, you know, it is a commodity. Now, if you walk up to one of these tables with a card that hasn't transacted in a while, what do you think happens? Let's take a second here. I want you to formulate the answer to that in your brain. What do you think the dealer says to the person who walks up with a card that has not transacted in a while? By a while, I mean a month, two months. There's only a couple sales per year, whatever it might be, right? What do you think their answer is? I can tell you because it's the same every time they look at their phone, they see it hasn't transacted in a while, and they say, this one's hard to price because there are no comps. That could be the title of the episode. This one's hard to price because there are no comps. And while this is not financial advice for you guys, that is where the money is made. If 99% of people at shows, the kids running around are going to say, I cannot figure out what that card costs because there are no comps. I don't know the value of that card. I don't know what to pay you on that card because there are no comps. They are doing what I would call a cursory evaluation of the card, that they're not using their brain. They're not looking at other Ways to value a card because it just takes too much time and because they're lazy. You have to look at other grades of that card that have sold since. You have to look at other cards that are similar to that card that have sold since. You have to look at other players from that set, right? If you're. If you have a Michael Jordan card that hasn't sold in a while, right? You look up, is there a Kobe that has sold in that same set, right? And then look at. Okay, there are a couple of other things where Kobe sold more recently, Jordan hasn't sold. What's the. You know, look at a more liquid card, a comparable card. What's the relationship between Kobe and Jordan? Okay, well, Kobe is one half of Jordan. Just using numbers. Because you have to do this, you actually have to look up the cards, right? Kobe's price is one half a Jordan. Okay, well, the last time a Jordan sold, it was a thousand bucks, but one hasn't sold in a while. The last Kobe that sold around that Jordan sold for 500 bucks. There hasn't been a Jordan that sold recently, but a Kobe just sold, and it sold for three grand. Okay, well, guess what? The Jordan's probably worth five or six thousand dollars. You just did the fun little math. You found a way to comp the card, even though there hasn't been a recent sale, right? Because if Jordan's worth twice what Kobe's worth and you had two sales of the Kobe, who cares what it is? Duncan, go nuts. Jambalaya, whatever the heck, it doesn't matter. If you need a card to visualize this, great, you go back. The last Jordan sale was March. In March, there was also a Kobe sale, right? The Kobe sold for half. There hasn't been a Jordan sale since. But guess what? There has been a Kobe. Well, double the Kobe. And that's a roundabout way of figuring out what the Jordan's gonna be worth. And here is where the rubber hits the road. That dealer's not buying that card from you, right? If he is, he's gonna try to get it from you for a piece, a percentage of the comp. That's from months ago. Even though they will tell you that every Jordan on their table is more expensive than it was months ago. The ones they're buying, the ones they're putting out in the display case. If you ask to buy any of those Jordans, not just for 90% or 80% of the March price. If you asked to buy any of them at 100 or 150% of the March price, they would tell you no. So why is it that they are going to use the last sale from March on a Jordan card and try to offer you 90% of that old price? Because that's all they know. But let's use that in reverse, okay? Because if everybody is going to be lazy, right? What do I look for? I look to buy those Michael Jordan or Kobe or LeBron or Tom Brady. It doesn't matter. Let's use Jordan just because it's very easy here. I look to buy those Jordan cards that don't transact that often. And I got to tell you, I bought a card like this. I bought a card like this in March And I paid $1,000 for the card, right? And it's a Pop 12 in PSA 10. But there are other versions of the card in PSA 10 in the same set. So you can kind of get a feel for the price, even though this particular one, if you look up the cert, it's not there, right? It's an Upper Deck card. It's. It's an Upper Deck card from a set where they had multiple Jordans, just different photo variations, right? So if you just look up the card and look for the comps that match that card, you're going to see my sale for a thousand bucks and the one before it was like 600 bucks six months earlier, right? I brought that card to shows. I brought that card to shows and people offered me 90, 95% of my own comp, right? I pay $1,000. They want to offer me 900, 950, because that's the last comp. But I bought that card in March. Now I see other copies, not the same numbered, but the same card in a different photo variation that have sold since that are starting to move up. So I hold the card. And by the way, a very important piece of this, in this market, you can buy cards on August 6, go to a show on August 15, and sell them for a profit. I know you can do this because I did it. I bought a lot of cards in an Aug. 6 auction. Jordans, Kobe's, you name it. And the market had moved so much on some of them between August 6th and August 15th, when I walked into show, I actually sold some of them for a profit nine days later. That is one indication of a crazy market. You should not expect to be able to do that, but you can. But because you can do that, people are not just lazy, they're impatient. And you don't want to hold your cards. But this Jordan That I'm talking about this one that I bought in March for $1,000, right? I've held it now. I've held it for four, almost five months. And I brought it to shows with me and nobody wanted to buy it. Nobody wanted to pay me 1200, 1300, 1400 for nobody wanted to give an increase even when I explained to them, hey, look at the other ones in the set. Hey, look at this one. It's obviously gone up. Look at any other Jordan you have. Aren't all of your Jordans up at least 20%, 30%? Forget about it, 50%. So I bought this card March. I paid $1,000 for it. Why? Because I'm willing to hold the card. This is not a card I need to have. It is not a PC card. It's a card that I took a chance on in March because I liked it. I wouldn't mind holding it for a long time. It's a cool looking 90s PSA 10 Jordan card for a thousand bucks. And there are only 12 of them in PSA. 10,000 bucks. I like the card. Wouldn't mind holding it for five years if I. If that's what happened. But I also bought it thinking that at some point in time in the not so distant future, if all Jordans go up, this Jordan will go up. It didn't happen on this particular card until two weeks ago when one of the other 11 of this card sold. So that's the third sale of the year, right? My sale was maybe the second one. I think my. Actually it might have only been a second one. I think before me the sale was in 2025, the last sale. So this is now a second sale of the year. There's 11 of them. Wouldn't you know, this card sold for over $2,000. Shouldn't surprise people. All the other Jordans have done that. All the other Jordans have done that. And now I take the card to a show this last weekend and wouldn't you know, I got offers up the wazoo on it. The same dealers who a couple of weeks before didn't want to pay me 1300 or 1400 for the card were now offering 18 and 1900 for it. I sold it because I walked around the show and what do you think I did? I found two other Michael Jordan cards that hadn't transacted since May that are very similar to these. And I pulled up the May comp and I said to the dealer, hey, what do you add on these? And they say, oh, I got my price on the sticker. I said, all right, well, the sticker is a little higher than the last sale. You're going to wiggle room. Sure. There was wiggle room. And I wound up buying these cards close to the last sale in May. Because even the dealers who have these cards out, they're beholden to their comps. They saw what the comp is. They got 5 or 10 or $20 more. One guy I think are $35 more than the last comp. But I know something, and what I know is that both of these cards will sell again publicly soon. But it might it be this month, could be next month, maybe might it be six months from now? Sure. But when they do, as the market continues to move in the direction it's moving, if it does not financial advice, I believe that these cards will also go up and I will have an easy time selling these cards after that comp hits. Or I can just put them in auction in a couple of months and I'll be the comp. Because either way, as long as you are patient, as long as you find the right card, as long as you are willing to do a little bit of research and find a card that has not been stuck in this flippers vortex, if you will, this, you know, this comp craziness, it's sort of a black hole where the comp is all that matters. And you need to have liquidity, you need to have this, this, you know, this repeat transaction to have some sort of certainty on the price. You can also get yourself certainty with the price by doing a little research, using what's available to you, using a little bit of card knowledge, using your brain, right? And that's where I think the money can be made in cards today. You can't be buying the same card that everybody's buying. I mean, I guess you can, right? There's still money to be made there. But where the gains are and where you don't have to fight everybody for the same 1994 Jordan card is the ones that sell every couple of months. Because if the market is still doing what it's doing, those cards will also appreciate. And that's it. It is really as simple as that. Again, not financial advice. And I do not have to tell you to buy Michael Jordan cards. This applies to almost everything, right? It just, it truly does. If you're buying the right player and that player's market is going up the way that Brady's has, the way that LeBron's has, the way that Kobe's has, the way that Michael Jordan has Otani. You don't have to buy the same Kaboom or Downtown or Prizm Silver. You have to buy the same thing that everybody else is buying. As long as you're willing to do the research and hold the card for a little while, the gains will be there too. You just have to be the one that's willing to put the money down, pay a little more than the last comp, a little more than the last comp and not be beholden to the comps. That's it. It's really all it comes down to. And that's a fun 438 title. How to make money in cards today. It's definitely not, you know, grading right now. I got a friend who has a whole bunch of, you know, lower level vintage cards and you know, they don't want to pay 80 bucks each for PSA. Anxiously waiting to see what the, what the backlog is at. I have an order that's been in there since April. It's been an assembly for a month and a half. I don't anticipate it comes back during my September, you know, target when it's supposed to come back. I'd like to see, you know, PSA open back up and, and do that fun stuff. But when they closed, I did say that we were probably going to see an increase in the value of these commodity type cards, These Michael Jordan PSA 10s and PSA 9s and even PSA 8s, these cards that find their way into repacks because you're not getting those graded now. You know, you're not, you're not finding more of those because people aren't sending them in. We are seeing that. I don't know whether PSA is the total cause, some of the cause, a little bit of the cause. But you know, cause and effect is tough and almost irrelevant because PSA is closed and the prices are going up. So I'm just going to make, I'm going to just draw that conclusion. I hope you enjoyed this one. A little bit different. I had to piggyback on the show stuff and the comp episode because everybody loved it. This is sort of like a part two to that. It's, you know, a lot of people love the episode. A lot of people talked about the buys that they were making but a lot of people who are new to the space said, all right, well what am I supposed to do, you know, if it's not just, you know, beholding the council, what am I supposed to do? Well, here's what you do. You know, unfortunately, it's going to be a little less, you know, on demand. Plug and play. You gotta put in a little bit of work, a little sweat equity, if you will. You have to do a little research. You have to learn about cards a little bit. You have to find, you know, let's not call it a direct comp, but you have to find a way to a comp or a value of that card by using other data points. And I think once you get a little more proficient in it, you spend some time doing it. It puts you head and shoulders above 90% of the people who are just here running around the shows, just comping our cards and doing, you know, the liquid stuff. So one-of-one there's an episode for you, 438 of these and this one brought to you today by Arena Club. Buy card ladder, Use code cage. Save yourself a couple bucks and buy the Philly show, which is coming up in a couple weeks, and check out the hat by Acquire. Hope you guys enjoyed this one. I'll talk to you soon. Take care, everybody.