Slabnomics
Finance-Bro turned Card Bird explores the intersection of collecting, investment, and market theory for sports cards.
Think Financial Analyst meets Sports Card Collector.
New Episodes drop Tuesdays @ 7 AM CST.
Episodes
53 episodes
Modern Cards Are Overvalued (Value vs. Growth)
174 of my own card flips: Vintage won 62.7% of the time. Modern won 40.7%. Value Premium, What cards are most like value stocks and growth stocks, and how to tilt a portfolio.
How To Read the Card Market Like a Wall Street Analyst
Seven Card Ladder charts. Three years of price and volume. Seven different cycle stages.This episode applies the Wyckoff Method, the 100-year-old framework finance uses to read market cycles, to the sports card market. The three laws. Th...
The Process I Use to Find Undervalued Cards (And the 4-Month Hunt I Walked Away From)
This is the first time I've walked through the full Slabnomics process from start to finish. Post-mortem to pattern recognition to filter to hunt to execution decision. End to end, with one real trade as the worked example. I ...
Why You See "Buying, 80%" (And What to Do About It)
Every Facebook card group has the post. Cash in hand. Buying at 80% of comp. Same wording, different accounts, every week.Nobody asks where the 80% came from. Today we do.This episode walks through the why of that number, the three ...
The Discoverable Market: Why Cards Aren't Like Stocks
Both sides studied the stock market. Nobody applied this to cards. Until now.In this episode of Slabnomics, we introduce the Discoverable Market framework and make the case that the card market is neither efficient nor random. It's exploita...
Negotiation and How to Get Leverage in Sports Cards
Most card collectors think negotiation is just haggling: subtract from the sticker price, meet in the middle, done. It's not. In this episode, Matt breaks down the actual framework behind why deals happen and why they don't us...
Diving into Liquidity: 3 Types and How To Exit the Pool
This episode applies institutional liquidity frameworks to the card market. Three types of liquidity and what each one means for your portfolio. Why soccer trades like a two-buyer auction room despite 91% index gains. How price slippage destroy...
Financial Inertia: What Breaks the Card Market
Have you ever been right about a card and watched the market ignore you for months? This episode breaks down the hidden architecture driving card prices. Not the surface-level "supply and demand" explanation, but the actual forces u...
Becoming the Card Show Oracle
Most people walk into a card show with a feeling. A vague sense of what looks good, what seems reasonably priced, what a dealer's enthusiasm is worth. This episode is about the gap between walking a show with a framework and walking...
Return of the King: Topps Chrome
Topps Chrome Basketball is back, Fanatics owns the licenses to all three major American sports leagues, and the hobby is generating real noise. But this isn't a hype story. It's a supply structure event, and those play out differently than peop...
Sports Card Sets: Top 1% Controls 99% of Value
What Gem Market Cap is and why it matters (PSA 10 population × last sale price)Applying stock market logic (market capitalization) to sports cardsAnalysis of 30 Panini Prizm sets (13 basketball, 13 football, 4 soccer)Total ...
I Found The Most Undervalued Cards in the Hobby
Grading has a structural mispricing that represents one of the most compelling arbitrage opportunities in the sports card market. This episode breaks down the population data, valuation multiples, and market mechanics that explain why.K...
Meta-tagging 311 Sales: Lessons My Sports Card Portfolio Taught Me
I analyzed every trade I made over 10 months in one of my buckets:311 sales, $55,000 deployed and fed it all into Claude AI to find patterns. The result was a complete rebuild of how I think about sports card portfolio ...
Prizm Comparison Across Sports
In this episode of Slabnomics, I pulled every single Panini Prizm base and silver parallel for both players: Lebron James and Lionel Messi. I compared PSA 10 populations, last sale prices, and a metric I'm calling Gem Market Cap. W...
Player Archetypes and Valuation
What makes a card valuable—not expensive, but valuable? Matt shares the questions driving his research: Can sets tell us a player's lowest common denominator? Which archetypes have the most seasonal volatility? How do sports card markets ...
Why Your Cards Sell for Less (Auction vs BIN Breakdown)
After breaking down PSA 9 and Beckett findings on Instagram last week, this episode returns to fundamentals: how to actually make money in sports cards.You'll Learn:The MLD Framework (Market, Legacy, Design) for valuin...
PSA 9 is Dead. All Hail Gem Mint 10
Is the PSA 9 dead? I dove into the data across three eras (vintage, modern, ultra-modern) and four sports (baseball, basketball, football, soccer) to find out when PSA 9s hold value, and when they're just an expensive failure certificate.
A Rising Tide Does NOT Lift All Cards
The market doesn't reward truth, it rewards timing.In this episode of Slabnomics, I break down the concept of DEMAND WINDOWS and why understanding the direction of capital flow is the key to profiting in sports cards in 2026.Key...
Why Billionaires Are Buying Cards (And What It Means for You)
State of the Hobby 2025Everyone keeps saying this is 2021 again. They're wrong. And if you're positioning like it's 2021, you're going to get hurt. I spent weeks treating the card market like an equity analyst treats a stock:...
PSA Buys Beckett/The Importance of Sets and Cycles
PSA has officially acquired Beckett, and this is more than breaking news. It’s a structural shift in the sports card market.In this episode of Slabnomics, we break down what the PSA–Beckett acquisition actually
The Future of Sports Cards: Data, AI & Discovery Ft. Tyler ‘TPott’ Nethercott
In this episode of Slabnomics, I’m joined by Tyler “T-Pott” Nethercott: Senior VP of Product at Sports Card Investor and one of the key minds behind the Market Movers app.Tyler walks through his journey from b...
Time is Money in Sports Cards
Over the last few episodes, I walked through my first full year of selling sports cards...my wins, my mistakes, and what I learned in buying, selling, and grading. Today is different. This one is slower, more reflective, and honestly one...
1 Year of Selling Sports Cards: Grading (Final Part)
We wrap the mini-series with grading—the alchemy of the hobby when used correctly. I share the actual ledger: 1,127+ cards graded, $20K+ in fees/shipping, PSA (525 cards; ~$11.7K) and SGC (602 cards; ~$9.5K), ...
1 Year of Selling Sports Cards: Selling (Part 2)
Following Part 1 (buying), this episode breaks down the sell-side of my first year—$98K on eBay—and the exact lessons that moved the needle: how to seed early feedback, how to structure PWE vs. bubble mailer shipping...
1 Year of Selling Sports Cards: Buying (Part 1)
In this opener to my “Year 1” mini-series, I break down everything I learned on the buy-side of the sports-card game—what worked, what wasted money, and how to buy with exits in mind. From the Spain/Messi spark to my first PSA submission...