My Story: How I Got Here

Learn from my mistakes entering the hobby...

hear about how I got here and where I'm going.

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Transcript

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Welcome to Slabnomics, the intersection of collecting, investing, and market theory for sports cards. Today's episode is a little different. No frameworks, no case studies, no mythological metaphors or chicken sandwich origin stories. Today I'm going to tell you my story. Going to tell you where I come from, what I've learned, how I got here, and why the hell I believe so strongly in this strange little cardboard sandbox we like to play in. First, a little bit about me. I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin in the 90s, the oldest of eight kids. That alone probably tells you all you need to know. We didn't have much, but we had books, we had Packers football, we had cheese curds, we had cold winters. I challenge anyone to outnerd me growing up. I played chess obsessively, I took Latin for eight years, I started a chess club in high school. I dominated trivia bowl, and once I even won a rodeo in Texas riding a sheep. That's right. Your boy was a champion muttonbuster. I do have the belt buckle to prove it. More than anything, though, I was a curious little lad. I always wanted to understand the why behind even the simplest of things. I wasn't particularly interested in fitting in. I was too busy building chest strategies, tinkering with what I could tinker, and seeing how high I could push the boundary of how things worked. That curiosity has shaped every decision that I've made. The entrepreneurial wiring clicked in during Cub Scouts, my dad's in sales, so he pushed me to go out every single day for two weeks selling popcorn door to door around the neighborhoods of Hudson, Wisconsin. Picture a pasty, round little boy in a scout uniform pulling a red wagon full of popcorn boxes, working with the goal of a color TV radio on the horizon, as well as the fabled stomp rocket. I guess this motivation was enough because I sold the most popcorn in the region and second most in the state of Wisconsin. This exercise taught me something really fundamental that hustle compounds and that sales are at their heart emotional. I've always been a collector. I collected rocks as a kid, Pokemon cards before my mom threw them into the garbage, and silver bullion as I got a little bit older. I got into weird custom jerseys for the EDM community. I just love the thrill of the hunt. And when I fixate on something, it sticks in my head until I can cross it off that list. So I create opportunities to go after the things I'm obsessed with, because otherwise they occupy too much space in my brain. I still have a holographic dragonite. I remember once when I was a kid down in Texas, I captured a live scorpion, smuggled it through an airport, and then I traded it for a holographic dragonite. Still have that Dragonite today. Sports cards didn't show up until way later, but when they did, I jumped in headfirst. More on that later. My professional career, like many facets of my life, shows a focus on shoring up weaknesses by challenging them. Even though I had a liberal arts degree with a history major, I made up my mind to go into finance as I worked my first couple jobs out of college to pay down my loan. I didn't really know how to get into finance, so I asked some friends that were in banking and investment firms who said, I have no idea what I'm doing. Show me how to get my foot in the door. That led me to taking a job with PNC Bank, but with a little bit of a twist, it was located in a grocery store. I wasn't natural at striking up conversation with people about their finances as they were picking out their bananas, but I did gain a lot of introductory experience in sales, in lending, and in just the financial system in general. This led to a position as an FX analyst at a firm called World First that provided cross-currency transfers for high net worth individuals as well as international businesses. I grew into this role to the point where I became the economist for the U.S. client base. I was writing daily updates on geopolitical events that impacted currency markets, while simultaneously I had moved into a sales role for high net worth individuals and later moving into the corporate side. While doing this, I was moonlighting as a writer for Seeking Alpha, for Forbes, and for the Motley Fool for a little spell. This was around the mid-2010s. So if you remember that time period, a lot of it was just clickbaity stuff that gave you a little value and then told you to sub to an email list. That's why I like Seeking Alpha. That was a platform where you could expound your own ideals and you could just expand on whatever investment theory you had. I was able to look at opportunities that arose from unlooked-for tailwinds or market-ignored headwinds. And if you want to hear about headwinds, at Whirlfirst, I'll always remember when the Brexit vote happened. Now World First was a British-owned company, and for months leading up to it, everyone was poo-pooing the idea that the people in the UK would vote to leave the comfort of the Eurozone. Around that time, I remembered the Black Swan by Nassim Taleb was very popular, and as a contrarian, I was always on the lookout for popular bets to go against so that I could get those outsized returns. So with everyone betting on the continuity of the Eurozone for our friends across the pond, I was taking the opposite side with some cheap long JPY over Great British Pound Trades, which is a great proxy for the British exit vote, whichever way you wanted to bet it. Now the day of the vote came, we're all in there early, 4 AM just in case. Phones were quiet. We all messed around, we had breakfast from Paperboy here in Austin. We chatted about the usual bullshit. Most of my big clients have been waiting for this vote as they figured the UK voting to remain within the Eurozone would give a British pound a nice lift, and they could move over big chunks of money into dollars then, grabbing a few percentage points along the way. That can be very lucrative on half a million. A few of the more cautious customers did end up calling in to move some money out of pounds, but this was the exception, not the rule. Noon came. News of the vote came through on our big TVs around the office. They voted to leave. Yen over pounds by twenty percent, which as a currency pair that affects many trillions of dollars is a massive move. It was an immediate cacophony of chaos. The phone started ringing and they did not stop until we moved them over to our Australian desk at eleven PM. Everyone was freaking out, trying to move their money as quickly as possible, and it was absolute bedlam. It was at that time that I learned a lesson that's been reinforced many times. It often pays to be prepared and seldom pays to be passive. Fast forward to when I entered the sports card market in 2024. I'd been messing around with EDM jerseys, successfully flipping many online through Facebook groups, but I needed a market that had structure. I needed a market that had history, that had durability, something I could build systems and play long games with. So my first few months were about experimentation. I started sourcing lots from Facebook Marketplace and thought that with grading being one of the highest leverages for profit in the space, I could quickly get up to speed with my grading eye. And if I bought from people that bought storage units but didn't want to spend the time and have the patience to know cards, I could leverage my time and patience into an ROI. Man, you learned some quick lessons about how hard grading is. Even quadruple checking through my first batch of cards, a bunch of seventies and junk wax baseball, basketball, a bunch of seventies and junk wax baseball and football, I didn't get more than three tens out of the entire hundred cards submission, and I got many more fives and six than I care to admit. I quickly learned that I wasn't above statistics. From there on I tried a bunch of different things auction arbitrage, buying on hybrid and selling on eBay, putting trackers on garage sales and events and estate sales, putting out ads in the paper to ferret out people's collections, searching misspellings and off hours auctions through eBay. But at the end of the day, what I learned again is there isn't a get rich quick scheme. There is just grinding out small wins and positioning yourself constantly better and better so you can pounce on big opportunities when they present themselves. Now, for me and how I like to think, it's always in terms of systems. It's just how I'm wired. Cards clicked for me once I reframed the market into a three-part lens. Stop me if you've heard this one. Market, legacy, and design. The market, legacy, and design valuation trinity came to me as I was thinking through the concepts themselves. Now it's really just a stretching of supply and demand to encompass the human inputs a little more fully. Supply and demand for who is buying and selling, or who is a fan of that player, how they will change throughout time, and the expression of that supply and demand for the set and for the specific card. In the short term, these things are hugely important. All three have to be in sync for a card to truly pop off. Now I think one advantage I have is experience in many different financial markets. I found from events like Brexit or COVID or the US-China tariffs in 2016, I have a really good pulse on watershed moments. It's a sixth sense that you develop, and you do it by being curious and cognizant in those moments. And then you string those moments together into a web so that you can feel the tremors from future events. This has freed me up a little bit from emotion so I can recognize how quickly these elements are changing, and I can be nimble enough to pivot my thesis. Now we talked about the short term, but do you want to know something really crazy about the market legacy and design framework that I haven't highlighted quite yet? In the long term, it's all about the question will it stand the test of time? Will the player, will the card, will the set? Because the real compound interest comes when the sports card demand side continues to grow, and the same proportion still want the card of the new people coming in. As more people enter the hobby, they still want that 86 Flear Michael Jordan. They always will. And with the supply being capped, that means demand continues to rise forever. So price will correspondingly rise long term. Structure your assets like a portfolio then. You can have those blue chip stalwarts like that Michael Jordan rookie, you can have your small cap long shots, and you can have your emerging marketplace. Now let's talk a little bit about my weaknesses and my mistakes, because that might help you more than the strengths might. My biggest weakness is pride. Like many, I like to be right. But in cards, you can find that gets expensive. I used to hold I used to hold a card waiting for the market to end up agreeing with me. But there's no prize being early if you can't exit. I learned really quickly that you need to take your L's in this game, because there's no insurance on ACLs and DUIs for the sports guard guys. Here are some rookie mistakes I've also made. One, not giving myself a night to sleep on a big purchase. It will always be there in the morning, and the few times that's not is probably a good thing. Second, being emotional or frustrated with people I'm trying to do a deal with. This is something I'm always working on, getting better at it day by day. Third, trying to pre-grade vintage baseball cards digitally, especially in some cases big cards where hundreds of dollars are made and lost through the different grades. Fourth, buying cards before I understood how and where I could sell them. And that leads into fifth, failing to have an investment thesis. Now that last one's a big one. Over time I built a discipline. Write a thesis for every major buy. Define the time frame, the catalyst, and then the exit. Because if you don't have a thesis, your emotions are going to run the show. And as I've talked about before, the game is going to punish that. I've also learned to recognize the trap of falling in love with the story. Just because I want a narrative to play out doesn't mean the market will agree. Players get injured, scandals break, thought light spotlight shifts. Liquidity dries up. That doesn't mean the thesis was wrong. It just means the timing was. But sometimes timing is everything. Now on why slabnomics, why slabnomics, thinking of cards within the financial instrument framework was just something that came naturally to me, but I found that many other people didn't have that. I spent a lot of time analyzing price to earnings ratios, watching greed and fear in the stock market, and combing through company 10K annual reports to find out how the sausage really was being made. At the end of the day, though, these markets, the stock markets and the sports card ones, are really similar because the supply and demand economics remain undefeated. If I had to give someone some advice about changing thinking, I would say this think this price takes into account the current information of the market. Because when you think that way, it makes you look for how that might change. And that's how you can profit in sports cards. But back to slabnomics, I started this because I saw something missing. There was good content in the hobby, plenty of hype, breaking news, showing pictures of your cards, chasing down new collections, and that stuff's awesome. But what there isn't enough is rigor. There isn't enough structured thinking about why prices move, not enough comparative analysis. And there isn't enough of that between sports, between sets, or between eras. I wanted to bring a voice to that, a voice that mixed investor logic with a love of collecting. A voice that helped people treat cards like a portfolio without losing the magic of the hobby. This is a thirteen billion dollar market, and it's still growing. There's room for frameworks, there's room for discipline and intelligent optimism. I think there's a ton of value in applying these metrics. I think there's a ton of value in applying these metrics and disciplines of traditional finance into the hobby, and I think the hobby deserves that. Valuing something just based on what someone has recently paid for it is only something touted by those who want to ensure they can profit off of you. I mean, think about it. This is where dealers really make money. They have pricing leverage because they know something you don't know and the market hasn't baked it into the price quite yet. I'm here to give you mental tools. Here are some things that I truly believe. First one, not gonna be popular. 99% of cards go down over time. Second one, buying strong comes from relationships. Selling strong comes from systems. Number three, narrative is the real engine of sports card investment. Four, attention compounds faster than ROI. Being forced to sell is death to your ROI. And let me share with you also a part of my collection that I'm most proud. I'm most proud of the cool moments that I get to capture within it. As a historian, I like iconic stuff, especially iconic rookie signatures. I like to think that when a player held that card and signed it, they got to think back to that time when they were just a fresh face rook. They were able to think of what life was like before all the stardom and all the starlets, and think how much simpler those times were and reflect on that. I like to think of the concept of cards as portals. Right now, I get to use this podcast as a portal myself. Later, if the community tells me it needs me to go in a different direction, I'll go over there. But for now, always let me know what your feedback is. Thanks for letting me share a little bit about my own story. It's these stories that make us human, and connecting with each other is to me the most beautiful part of this hobby. If there's something that you felt strongly about in this episode, feel welcome to comment here or hit me up on Instagram. You can always shoot me a DM as well. In our next episode, we may just have a new story to explore with one of the biggest creators in the space. Stay tuned and make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that one. For now, I hope you for now, I hope this episode gave you some more clarity. Not just about me, but about how you can build something of your own in this market. How can you measure your own success and meet whatever goals you set for yourself? Oh, and one more thing to think about before you go. If money is energy and attention as currency, then what you're really doing every time you buy a card is voting for a story to become true. The best investors, they vote early, exit clean, and keep their ego out of it. Is there something that won't shake itself out of your mind that you haven't explored fully yet? Might be time to give it another look. This has been Slabnomics episode 7, My Story. Thanks for listening. Keep building, and talk to you later.