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
70 episodes
Slabnomics Set Deep Dive: 1996 Topps Chrome Football
1996 Topps Chrome Football is the inaugural set of the most important modern chrome brand, and the market still has not priced it correctly.In the first Slabnomics set deep dive, we go through the full history: why Topps needed an innova...
Past Results and Predicting Future Returns in Cards
Two data-backed frameworks for buying cards in 2026.First: the psychological barrier learned from 800+ cards. Only one pattern held with strong correlation.Anchoring, cascading demand, and pop-vs-price gaps explain why. <...
Swimming Naked: Early Warning Signs in the 2026 Card Market
The sports card market is up big. Disney is up 5x in six months. Pokemon volume is at all time highs. So the question everyone is asking: how much longer?Let's talk dry powder. The rotation from modern into vintage. The...
Grading Mistakes in Cards: Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced
9 grading mistakes killing your sports card and Pokémon profits broken down by skill level. Matt covers PSA's new 50–70 business day turnaround at the $80 tier, why Beckett only bumps a certain amount off the average, how PSA ...
PSA vs BGS vs CGC vs SGC vs TAG: Who Actually Grades Hardest
Five of the most graded cards in history. Every grade from every grader. The data says a PSA 10 is easier to obtain than most competing top grades, and the market pays for it anyway.Cards analyzed: 2023 Van Gogh Pikachu, 1989 Upper Deck ...
The $80 Floor: What Happens When Bulk Card Grading Dies
Grading built this market. Grading is now changing again.This episode traces card grading from the 1990s, when buyers and sellers eyeballed condition and negotiated it live, through the trust-building years of the mid 2010s, into the COV...
Does This Bull Market Have Legs? (Fanatics Fest/National/Soco)
The bull run is roughly a year and a half old. People are getting nervous.Matt takes the temperature three ways: Fanatics Fest, the National, and the SoCo Expo. Three different reads on the same hobby.Covered in this episode:<...
The Pokemon Pullback and Putrid Pulisic Performance (World Cup)
The hobby is loud. Buzz, hype, panic...and it all sounds the same until you learn which frequencies matter.Fresh off Fanatics Fest and headed to The National in Chicago, Matt breaks down what he saw on the floor and what it says about wh...
18 Years of Fantasy Football Taught Me How to Buy Cards
What do 18 years of fantasy football tell us about sports cards markets?This episode maps the five phases of dynasty fantasy football onto sports card and TCG investing. The core argument: most people think you win in the acc...
Wait, Do PSA 9s Have Better ROI Than PSA 10s?!?
Is the PSA 9 dead? Not so fast. Matt digs into three iconic cards across three sports to test a strange pattern: PSA 9s outperforming PSA 10s.He indexes every sale against player and sport baskets, then walks the data. 2003 Topps Chrome ...
I Ran a 15-Month Soccer Card Fund. Here's What Actually Worked.
A 15-month soccer card investment fund, reviewed in real time during the 2026 World Cup. Why demand trickles top-down in illiquid markets, why case hits (Kaboom, Color Blast, Stained Glass) hold a floor, and why Messi, Mbappé, and Haaland...
Parallels, Graders, and How PSA's Submission Pause Might Affect the Market
I looked at all 83 parallels of Victor Wembanyama's 2023 Prizm rookie and indexed every sale against his player market. The best returns did not come from the 1/1s. This episode is a thought dump on that, plus two bigger questions: is vin...
All 63 Wemby Rookie Prizm Cards Ranked by Return
One Victor Wembanyama rookie card. Sixty-three parallels. Every grade, every grader, tracked from first sale to today. Only on Slabnomics will you hear a ranking of all parallels by return percentage AND grader breakdowns.I b...
Only 4 of These 1952 Topps Legends Beat the S&P 500
Out of the 10 biggest names in 1952 Topps, only four beat the S&P 500 over 22 years. We pulled 9,720 real sales back to 2004, ran every PSA grade through three market cycles, and spoiler alert, the winner isn't the 1952 Ma...
PSA: The Federal Reserve of The Hobby
PSA just halted all four of its value grading tiers. The hobby is calling it a failure. We're calling it something else. PSA just acted like a central bank.This episode breaks down why PSA controlling the supply of grades is the same le...
Mangos, Messi, and Market Cap: The Hidden Math of Card Prices
Sports card investing through a Wall Street lens. Matthew Worley breaks down supply, demand, and market cap mechanics using three Messi Prizm World Cup Silvers (2014, 2018, 2022). Learn float vs pop report, gem rate math, why hypermodern ...
Don't Buy New Card Releases!
Here's why it's a bad investment every time. Only on Slabnomics.
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...