THWC 444: Why The Hobby Won't Crash

What's up, everybody? Hobby with Cage, episode 444, brought to you by Arena Club by card ladder, use code Cage. Save yourself a couple bucks. And by the Philly show, which is coming soon. And if you are listening to this and not watching it on YouTube, you are missing out, as I often put on a hat for the sponsor of the show. You know, like, if someone sends me a hat, it's like a, hey, I'll wear it, and I'll be a sponsor of the show. But, you know, as I like to call myself, I am your favorite influencers. Favorite influencer. That's just. Just the. The moniker that I have. It's. It's what I have it. And hypothetically, one of your favorite influencers sent me this to wear because they really want you to buy Disney cards. So today, I am wearing my Mickey Mouse elsa ears on YouTube to, you know, to. To tell you about the next bit. Nah, I can't. I can't even do it. I lasted a minute. That was enough. Can you tell we just got back from Disney World and brought back souvenirs for people? Oh, no. On the Disney stuff. No, we've been through this already. Oh, please don't do it. Don't. Don't do it to them. Don't do it to them. I mean, put your money on something smart like grated vinyl instead. Okie dokie. Well, with that out of the way, we got our sponsors noted. We've got our Disney hat worn. We're doing everything we need to do. It is back to school time for you parents out there. September. The calendar has turned. It is September. And if you tuned in yesterday because you saw my clickbait title of why I left the hobby, and after a minute, you learned I left because I left for a week, five days, whatever it might be, to go to Disney World with my family. And it was fun. It was restful, it was nice. It was relaxing. And now we're back. And all I did yesterday was shop back to school clothes. I went to a store called Aloe, I think it's called. Holy cow, I need to sell some more cards to pay for athletic pants. It's crazy out there, guys. It's crazy. And I'm gonna tell you, if you guys think cards are expensive, take your kid to the mall. Yu-Gi-Oh I think just everything's expensive now. A pair of pants, $140. What the hell are we doing? You know, I could buy a really nice card for that. I could still buy a Michael Jordan PSA 10 for that on the Cajun cardboard channel. Look at that little plug I gave you there. Cajun. Yu-Gi-Oh I always liked him. He was part of the Luca Nation network. Got a great message yesterday after posting a video of my daughter. Some of you guys who have been with us for a long time love to hear these updates. Our man Andrew doing well, expanding his. His dog care business and, you know, and. And, you know, really growing it and really, you know, doing well. You know, I. I asked him the same question I used to ask him on, you know, hundreds of episodes. He having fun? He's having fun. You know, he's having fun. He's expanding, he's doing well. He found something that he really likes. And I just want to give you guys that update because he checks in every now and again. It's usually when I post something about the kids. You know, the kids always, always loved Andrew, and he's doing good, guys, you know. You know, hopefully, maybe we'll have him back on. Maybe when the NBA starts up again, we'll have him on and do, like, an NBA. An NBA preview show. He was always good at those. He had some great hot takes. We'll see what he thinks about, you know, LeBron to Philly. Andrew's a Philly guy. You know, he was a Philly guy. So I don't know whether or not that changes it. I don't know whether that, you know. You know, it would have been interesting because he's in Florida if LeBron went to Miami. You know, LeBron is just following Andrew around the map. one-of-one enough, enough on that. Rest rejuvenated, relax. We come back to the hobby. And I have to tell you, went to a show right before I left to go on vacation. I'm looking forward to going to a couple more shows. I've been buying cards. I consumed a lot of content while I was away. You know, you get back to the hotel, everybody's, you know, they want to take a nap, they want to get some sleep. I just, you know, consume content. And, you know, you can kind of, if you watch enough Instagram and YouTube and kind of see where we're going, I mean, you kind of can. It's an interesting thing because I talk about this. It's, you know, a lot of repeat stuff. But I have to tell you, every day it seems like there's another announcement. There's another thing that, you know, leads me to believe that we're still going strong. And I had a conversation yesterday. Somebody reached out to me about buying one of my cards, and It's a big boy card, a very big boy card. And I asked a very big boy number which will probably prevent me from selling the card. And Yu-Gi-Oh that's an interesting thing there, right? If I'm still willing to hold out for my price, that is telling you kind of, you know, where I think the market is and where it's headed, right? Because if I thought we were, you know, staring a crash in the face and we were looking at, you know, a correction or, you know, a dip or whatever it was, I, I probably would be a little more flexible with my ask on a card, right? Especially when you have somebody who's interested in buying it, but I'm not. And you know, the person who reached out, it's, you know, we'll call it a middleman, but pretty high end middleman, you know, is someone I've sold cards through for a while. You know, some high end buyers, they only use, you know, these middlemen services because, you know, that's how it works. That's how you find cards. That's just the way that it gets done. And it's funny because my, my conversation with the, you know, let's call him the card broker yesterday, I said, hey, you know, what are your thoughts? Am I being greedy? Am I holding out for too much? And I asked the question because I like to hear other people's opinions, especially people who have their finger on the pulse and who are out there and you know, dealing with high end and dealing with buying and selling and get to see a lot of the deal flow a lot more than I do just as an individual collector. And I said, you know, hey, look, what about, you know, am I being, am I being greedy? Are we, are we, you know, staring down the barrel of a gun here and I should be, you know, taking some more money off the table? And he said, no, he goes, think about it. We, you know, we did our last deal in June, we did a deal before that in March. We did a deal before that, you know, and every one of those times we had the same conversation. Every one of those times it was like, okay, do we take this money off the table now because is it gonna crash? You know, are we staring down the barrel of a gun here? And every time we've thought, all right, you know, do we need to move this now? Do we need to take some profit? Each time it's gone up, you know, each time it hasn't crashed. Each time we talk about a potential, you know, is this the time the market does its thing and corrects There just seems to be more and more people coming in. And let's talk about that for a second. The attention being paid to the space has never been higher. There is a lot of content being made. And I'm not talking about me. No one cares about what I'm doing. Except for a select few of you that reached out while I was away and said, where are the episodes? What are you doing? No, that was nice. I appreciate each and every one of you. But you know the headlines that are going to be made over the next couple of months are just like the headlines that have been made this year. Think of how many seven figure sales there have been, right? Just a record number. And there is no slowing that down. I mean Alt has a huge auction with a LeBron that's already over a million. A Brady that's already over a million. There's a Pokemon card that's already over a million. You know when those sell, those will be on espn. You know, Tom Brady card sells for over a million dollars. LeBron rookie card sells for $2 million or whatever it's going to sell for, right? And that's followed up, you know, I think two weeks from now, two weeks and change, there's a Goldin auction, a huge Goldin auction that's going to have big cards in. It was a Goldin 100. It's going to have big cards that sell in it. And you got the September premier coming up. You know, the cards will be released in a couple days for that one. And you know that has three debut patches that you know, Fanatics is going to be, you know, discussing publicizing because all three of those are probably seven figure cards. The Cooper flag card could sell for $5 million. Who knows what it's going to sell for. But you have all of these cards and these are cards that didn't exist, right? Topps basketball, this was the first year of it and they bring this new card. I mean you could talk about, you know, for years we talk about, oh, we need Panini, they need Prizm What are they gonna do without Prizm They should buy Panini just so they could buy the license. I even thought they should buy Prizm Just keep the continuity. Look what they've done. Look what they've done with Topps Chrome. You know, I don't one-of-one say seamless, Flawless. It has been. The Zebra factors are selling like crazy. The reds out of five are selling like crazy. The they brought in for football, Tecmo bowl and Kaijus that sold like crazy. These basketball, you have these minion cards that are selling for absurd numbers. I think a Cooper flag one sold for like a quarter of a million dollars, right? I'm seeing Steph Curry out of five selling for, you know, for more than a first year. Flawless patch auto of curry, you know, I mean, you know, and then to beat the band, you have these debut patches. And football, they're bringing debut. They're not doing that premier nonsense that they did previously. Just think about what's going to happen. It's September, September, October, November, December, right? I mean, we're talking about the holidays coming soon. And a lot of times you see a little bit of a. Of a dip in there. Just think about what we have, right? For the overall market. You have the Pokemon 30th anniversary release coming out in a month, all right? That is huge in and of itself. You have football season starting in a matter of days, right? With Mendoza playing and new rookie class. And Chrome releases, the hunt for debuts all at the same time that baseball ends and the postseason starts. And you got Ohtani chasing another World Series. You got Judge coming back chasing a World Series, him healthy. Is it another situation where you have the Yankees and the Dodgers, you know, meeting in the postseason for crazy numbers and crazy eyeballs with people selling crazy cards? You have the basketball debut patches selling. And that's just the next month, the next month and a half. You know, football season starts up, some quarterbacks gonna take off and go crazy. And do we see a little bit of a dip? We always do. November and then December picks back up. People are buying for Christmas. People are buying for Christmas time. You got the MLB debut patches coming out in products probably in December so that people can buy it for Christmas time with a crazy rookie class. And then it continues, right? You get the Zebra bowl, people are buying cars. And then baseball hopefully might be a little lock out there, which is silly. Watch, man. I mean, the fun part about this is Fanatics has tapped into the news cycle like nobody's business. It used to be. We would talk about, okay, look what's coming up. No, there. It's there. And they're doing a very good job of spreading the cards around. And I would say creating a vertical, right? You have athletes, and I don't call them content creators. You got these young kids who are the face of the space. They're opening card stores, they're being involved in card stores with. I'm sure Fanatics help. I mean, I'm not a young face, Obviously, I'll be 50 in a month. I mean, I look good for 50. You know I do, but I'm not a youngster. I mean, look, the king of cards just announced, you know, he's gonna be in the house of cards partnership. He probably has a little bit of an ownership stake in that. That's smart. You know, now he's involved with an NFL owner. Think about how that works, right? You have Fanatics who partners with the league. You have an NFL owner, Loomis, who's involved with the house of cards out of New Orleans and in Texas. And now you have, you know, the king of cards, Kyle, involved in that store. He'll go there, do a show, he'll prop the store up. They're able to get Kevin Nagandi to do an announcement like ESPN style, do a draft. I mean, it's kind of cool. It's cool. Content, you know, say what you want about, you know, what's behind it and who the people are, you know, it's smart. And now you have Cooper Flagg opening a store, and you have Lewis Hamilton opening a store, and you have Brady with stores. And I mean, it is. It is a never ending news cycle. And Aaron Judge, dual gold logo man auto sold this past week. My son was like, you should buy it. That I don't buy cards that big. But it was, for a minute there was looking, you know, reasonable. Well, I didn't buy it. And the reason I didn't buy it is because call Anthony Towns wanted it more. I mean, you know, $900,000 for him is not the same as $900,000 for me. So you could have it ca. You know, good for you. Great card. You know, if you ever need the cash and need to liquidate it, you know, reach out to me, you'll have to sell it at a significant loss. But I mean, great buy. But how do we know about that? How do we know? Because as soon as it gets bought, it's everywhere. And that's a cool thing. At least I think it's a cool thing because, listen, in all asset classes, in all investments, in all places where you put your money, you kind of want to know who's holding with you and why, you know, who's involved in the space. And cards are an interesting thing. We've heard about them as an alternate asset class for a long time, right? And the last time around, was it true? I mean, they were lumped in with NFTs and lumped in with, you know, and everybody tries to kind of, you know, you know, make them something. This time around, you have a little bit of a different thing going on here, you know, everybody still talks about institutional money, right? I don't know that we have that yet. At least not publicly. Right. I mean, there are always these funds that everybody talks about buying cards, but just on its face, cards are mainstream. They just are. It seems like every week there is a sale that makes its way to the headlines on espn. You have way more league involvement, you have way more player involvement. I mean, it's in the Zeitgeist. I saw content yesterday, Instagram that had Dana White with the jelly bean. You know who. I now had to learn who that was because she was trying to buy the Cooper flag card. My kid had to tell me who it was, and then I had to yell at my kid for knowing who it was. But, I mean, you have. It is pop culture mixing with the cards, making it kind of cool. You know, my son wears a card ladder hat and half the kids in his class are like, I use card ladder. Oh, man, where'd you get the hat? Think about that for a second, right? A cool hat to wear to middle school is a card ladder hat. Should kind of tell you everything you need to know about our space. It is mainstream Fanatics has, you know, has. Has really thrown gasoline on the fire. And I still get the same question that's when's this run going to end? This is the opposite of financial advice. I can just tell you what my answer to that question is to everybody who asks. And I get asked a lot. Who says this is a run? Who says it's going to end? I'm certain that there are cards out there that have gone too far too fast and will see pullbacks. And it doesn't take a genius to see which ones those are. I mean, you saw, we talked about. You saw the run up in certain cards leading into the national, which was in Chicago. Some of the Fleer Jordans kind of, you know, they kind of ran and they've sort of corrected a little bit. I'm seeing metal universe cards now. Base cards run crazy runs. I don't know how sustainable something like that is. I guess people see the precious metal gem version, the PMG version, they say, oh, it's a million dollar call. Make it. I will find it. But I started this episode off talking about Andrew. Part of the reason why was he definitely, when we. Way back in 20, 20, 20, when we were giving plays with every episode, we were talking about PMGs, we were talking about the cards, and he gave the Michael Jordan base PSA 10 card as his play. He said not everybody can afford at the time. Not Everybody can afford $100,000 for a PMG Red. Jordan, now it's a million dollars says, but you can go out there and get a PSA 10 of the base card. Same picture, doesn't have the red or the green background, but same picture of him kind of skying with the ball flying a cool looking card. And I remember he gave the play. It was like you can get them easily for a thousand bucks. You know, if you search, you can get it for 800, 900. I remember him. I remember like it was yesterday giving that play. Guys, go look up what that card is now. A PSA 10 base card. Now everything's kind of gone up since then. And you know, that's the interesting thing, why I bring it up is we're seeing a lot of the same stuff, but it's sort of playing out differently. Right? The overall market is playing out differently, but individual cards, you can see the thought process play out the same way that it did previously. And I use Andrew as an example because, you know, he was new to the space. You know, he was coming in with a thought process the same way that a lot of the youngsters who are here now. It's what made our show great, that he had an idea. And I would say, okay, this is why you might want to pump the brakes on that idea. And obviously on a card like that, I was wrong because he bought it for 1,000 bucks and sell it for 20,000 now or whatever. It's at crazy. I don't even know what the last one so far, probably more than that. You know, everybody looks like a genius, but that's the kind of card that ran and then pulled back. You do have to put some, you know, reasonable thought process into this and think to yourself, should I really being buying a card now for $30,000, that was $2,500 in April, a couple of months ago. Those are the ones you might want to be a little careful about. A little careful about. But that's just an individual card. You do have to do your research when you're buying a specific card and see how far it's come and in you know, how much it's run. But those conversations are very different than overall market conversations. At least I think they are. That's a long winded answer to when's it gonna crash? When we get a pullback. There is no date, right? Some of the cards that we talk about will come down. That's just nature, right? Some of these cards that run and do this straight up, this parabolic boom shoot up, they will naturally pull down. It's like walking around at Disney World. It can't be 105 degrees with the beaming sun on you for the whole day. The rain has to come and cool it off a little bit. It happens every day around 3 o'. Clock. The rain comes, you hide, and a half hour later you come out. Anybody who lives in Florida knows I'm not lying. When it gets too hot too fast, a little rain comes, but then the sun comes back out. You know what I mean? The hobby overall really hasn't done that. If you look at hobby charts, overall hobby charts, the climb is a little more slow and steady up. And that's a little more comforting than just a boom spike, boom spike. Because spikes usually have valleys. Now if you pan out, you know, it's. The chart looks okay. I think what Fanatics is doing and what we're seeing and all of the events that happen, all the money coming in, all the new kids coming in, all the new people coming in, will prevent a hobby crash. Again, not financial advice. You know, the overall economy can turn into, you know, a real problem. We have, like I said, a bunch of things going on all over the place. War, wars and, you know, craziness and midterm elections and, you know, for every World Series that could help the hobby, there are a million things that go on that impact people's money and finances that could also negatively impact the amount of money that gets brought into our space. But overall, the conversation I have about the overall space is very different than if you're reaching out to me about one individual card, especially a card that's kind of done this crazy run. So one-of-one that's me, Elsa with my Mickey ears signing out for another episode. 444, brought to you by my Mickey Ears Arena Club card ladder use code cage. Save yourself a couple bucks. And by the Philly Show. I'll see you guys there in a couple of weeks. 444 of these in its September. Man, the world doesn't stop spinning for anybody. Enjoy your day, guys. I'll see you soon. Take care, everybody.