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.
Slabnomics
Data Mining and Practical Takeaways Ft. Gemrate
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Ryan, Founder of Gemrate is on to talk graders, the direction of the hobby, and hidden opportunities.
Weekly Newsletter Signup: Slabnomics.com
🎥Youtube
📸Instagram
Welcome to episode eight of Slabnomics. Very excited here to have a very special guest, Ryan, founder of Gemrate. Welcome, Ryan. What's been going on in your world?
SPEAKER_01:Well, first, thank you for having me. Excited to be an early participant in what I think is a really cool space that you're trying to cover in general, but also the angle and what you're speaking to it. So thank you for having me. And yeah, we just released a couple reports. So I'm just finishing up. It's in my world, it's kind of the earnings gauntlet, but it's just more of a reporting gauntlet of just speaking to sort of the recent trends from June that happened in the grading space, but also the first half of the year. And we just put out a couple posts the last couple days, sort of covering some of the basics there.
SPEAKER_00:Awesome. Is that a post that you put out to subscribers or who does that go out to?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so that's going out to our social feeds, which is just Instagram and X slash Twitter. And then we also send it out to our email newsletter audience as well, which you can sign up for on gemrate.com if interested.
SPEAKER_00:Amazing. And yeah, from what I know about Gemrate, which I get to tool around the site, I go there every single day. Um I utilize it a lot for the PSA, BGS, and SGC data, but I think there's a lot more on that site that we can kind of get into about maybe treasures that haven't been unearthed yet and things that we can talk about around that. Let's get into first what brought Gemrate about. How give me the creation arc? You know, what were you doing when you decided that the world needed this? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So I kind of alluded to it before, but I used to work in banking. And so, you know, I'm I'm a finance guy at heart, and that's sort of I spent eight years of my career, and then I worked in the startup world for for a while doing data and analytics work. And, you know, I'm like a lot of people who jump back in in 2020. And at that time, I had some money that I wanted to put into the card market. I had sort of how it was trending, and I was excited to participate. So I did a ton of buying. Classic mistake that most people do when they sort of understand that this is a thing again. They spend a lot of money, and you know, you you take your punches in the process in the sense of you either overpay or you don't fully understand sort of the nuance of what actually determines the card's pricing. You know, for example, I was doing a lot of stuff in baseball and I didn't understand, you know, that the true colors matter way more than other parallels and variants with shimmers and other just nuance that was added to that market. But anyway, ultimately I got to a point where I was like, okay, I got to start selling some of these things or figuring out sort of how to move them and what that meant. I wanted to just understand the pricing of assets better. And I the pop reports were like great data, but a little bit hard to come by, hard to make sense of. It was just hard to navigate the way the pop reports were presented five years ago. Yeah, I was really interested in the grading elements as well, inside of the business. That seemed like an opportunity to make money in this industry. I just started to dig into pop reports deeper. As I was doing that, I just realized that this is data that I wanted either in an Excel format or be able to handle on a website that was more powerful that could allow you to just customize what the what you were looking at. And so I set out on trying to collect the data for each grading company and create a tool that would allow you to do those things more sort of um programmatically in the sense of the collection of it, but also programmatically in the sense of you know a website that was designed with more features that would allow you to just slice and dice the data a bit differently. And so I started doing that in January of 2021. And I've been doing it full-time ever since. I mean, this has been my only focus and project since then.
SPEAKER_00:That's awesome. So before 2020, and when you were working on this in 2021, how were people getting out that kind of pop data? Did they have to dig into it, or was it not even something that people really referenced when they were trying to sell their cards?
SPEAKER_01:One of the reasons I got frustrated was I was buying cards and they were just sort of misrepresented in the presentation of it, whether that be through eBay or through marketplaces. People presented pop through the lens of an individual grader, which I thought did a disservice to actually like what supply was. It favored the seller in many ways, and it was sort of an accepted standard in the hobby, which is PSA Pop 1, none higher. But yet that could be a card that was released in 2015 when Beckett was sort of at its peak of its powers, and most people were grading with Beckett. So, you know, a PSA Pop 1 means nothing in the context of actually how many of those cards have been evaluated and graded. And I just felt like you know, there weren't any tools that were delivering on that. And so, you know, people weren't speaking to um the total population very often, and it's the gem rate that you might consider with it. And so, you know, that was where the name of the site came from, which was like an interesting concept that had been discussed. It's tucked into some of the collection management tools, which was great. You know, they were some of the first ones to sort of showcase like what a gem rate of a card could even look like. Um, but it was pretty narrow in the sense that it was just through a specific card. And I like to look at and compare gem rates across cards, across sets, you know, across, you know, a player's catalog, for example, just to understand outliers or what did that era of manufacturing look like up for that certain player or for that certain set? So it was it was out there, but it wasn't something that was like easily available.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so you mentioned context, and I want to get into the player and set specific data as well. Do you think that really empowered people a lot to make better investing decisions around that? Was that an important step in the maturation of the sports card hobby becoming more dug in, let's say?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. When when this space was really hot in 2020 and 2021, people were trying to, you know, push cards as an alternative asset, you know, in the same vein as people were starting to think about NFTs and things like that. And so NFTs had the blessing of being very transparent and a very open sort of data environment. So you could understand and distill information pretty quickly in that space. But the card market, as it became more and more sort of explored as an alternative asset, just very limited from an education standpoint. Education materials are really limited in this space and very narrow when they do surface. And so the idea around what we were building and in general was yeah, to sort of bring more information to the potential buyer pool to make you know thoughtful decisions that you weren't going to feel like you got suckered at the end of the day. And I feel like a lot of people enter into this space and they make the classic mistakes that I mentioned early on, which is you look at an eBay listing and you think that's the price of it because that's what somebody's listed it for, but you don't realize that it's been selling for a third of that for years prior to that. It's just somebody waiting for the next sucker to come along, right? And so that sort of was something that was just pretty prolific. And since I entered back into this hobby, I've long felt that um the more confident the buyer pool was, the better this hobby would do because you would just get better purchase behavior, you get better retention throughout the hobby, and ultimately you'd be much more likely to recommend it to the next set of people in your, you know, in your group of friends or family. That was sort of a missing piece, you know, five years ago.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, 100%. I think having someone be happy with the transaction that they made and empowered by knowledge, I think, is is a huge step for the maturation of the hobby and for people to really view it as something that they can be excited about and develop win-wins for me. I love those trades that you have where you feel like both sides won. I think it should be that way when you buy and sell a card as well. Tell me a little bit more about my favorite stuff, the sets and the player data that you have on there. I've gone on there and I've seen Michael Jordan and kind of look through the different gem rates of all the different sets, 90 FLIR, 86 FLIR, everything. Tell me how we can use those or or the features that I might not know about connected to that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so there's two things we're trying to do. So, one, the collection management tools are great at really presenting information through the lens of a if you're researching and you want to get an estimate or an understanding of how the pricing is looked over time or understanding, you know, where a card may be valued today. They're fantastic at that. That's been their bread and butter. We have a different point of view on how people might want to consume information, which is presenting a catalog, whether that be through the lens of sets that are in existence or through the lens of the cards that are available for a player in the market. And that's been the center of how we presented information since the start of Gem Raid. And so, for example, uh, I'm a big collector of Trey Murphy of the Pelicans in the NBA, and he's kind of like an uh emerging sort of, I don't know about a superstar, but star in the NBA. But he was injured his first year, didn't play too much, and was not really discussed. And so he was not featured in a lot of cards. His market looks very different relative to other rookies who were in the 2021 classes. He doesn't have any of the SSPs, he doesn't have kabooms, he doesn't have downtowns, he doesn't have sort of these high-profile cards. And so navigating what matters for him is very different than navigating what might matter for somebody like an Anthony Edwards from 2020, where he was sort of the high profile athlete along with LaMelo Ball. And so, anyways, when you look at a player's catalog, the context matters just as it relates to what's been graded a bunch, and what's been graded a bunch typically is also correlated to what's moved a lot in this in the aftermarket, right? So there's certainly a high correlation there of just what are people grading, and they're often grading it because they know they can move it. Other people are obviously grading for other reasons, but oftentimes grading is used as a way to uh make your cards more liquid. And so the player catalog is really robust in that sense. And we finally are reinvesting and thinking about just what are ways that we can integrate more data points into our website. So, for example, when you're looking at the player data now, you can look at the recent transactions on card ladder for that specific card for every card in our catalog, you can do that, right? So it's basically just removing friction. You don't have to go in and type in 2020 Anthony Edwards Prism Silver. You just click that on our page and it'll take you to that data. So, you know, I think of myself ourselves as sort of more of like a Bloomberg in that we're sort of um, you know, neutral as it relates to like the different players that provide data in a sense, and we're more about integrating and hooking in different sources of data to allow people to advance and certainly through the hobby in the way that they sort of prefer or see fit. And so we work with Card Ladder right now, but we're sort of very open to and constantly talking to other providers. We're also now for 60, 70% of our cards, you can now see a representative cert for every for uh for that card, what it might look like in a PSA 10, which is just like another short path to sort of getting context around like what does this card look like in you know perceived great condition or perfect condition. Uh so there's like a couple things that we've done there. On the set thing, I'll touch on this really quickly, but the thing that I've been most excited about was what we launched at the beginning of the year, which is this advanced stats pop report. When you think about a pop report, it's a it's a fantastic resource, but it's a it's a set of data that's looking at uh the population in aggregate. It's showing you all cards that have been graded all time. You can't slice and dice it to say what cards have been graded in the past week, what cards have been graded in the past month, past year. You can't look at different periods of times like you might look at a pricing chart, right? You might want to look at things uh very narrow window or a very extended window. And we're trying to show trends that allow you to see just what did things look like over the last week, what are things look over the last month, what are things look like over the last year. And that matters from both the standpoint of just what players are emerging. It might be surprising if you're just in the discovery mode of just like trying to understand a player's catalog or you're trying to understand the nuances of specific set. But what uh really what the thing that I love the most about it is you can see the gem rate over to, you know, over a period of time, which matters, right? You you get a very different picture if you look at a full-time gem rate, all-time gem rate of a card versus what something might look like over the last year or last month, even. Because typically what you see happen is that the best cards surface first and get graded first, and then the long tail starts to get graded over time, but those tend to not be as strong from a quality standpoint. But inherently, there's probably some slight bias that comes into play as it relates to, you know, a grader who sees a card that all of a sudden becomes high profile, and they have to think about what the value of this card might be and give it an extra look, as opposed to a card where, you know, a few years ago was sort of not really a high profile card. So, anyways, we're trying to provide more integrations is the short answer. And we're trying to provide better context windows to allow you to sort of zone in on things that matter to you as it relates to recent trends of how many cards have been graded or what cards are being graded or how a gem rate might look over different periods of time.
SPEAKER_00:So I think that answer that Ryan just gave shows why I like talking to Ryan so much, mentioning a lot about sets, talking a lot about how they change over time and about how we can interpret data in different ways is the kind of stuff that scratches my itches. So I appreciate that one. There's a lot in there that I want to pop out. I was just speaking with a friend about PSA versus BGS and the reputation for the grading company can ebb and flow. And I've always been very curious about how those prices go down and up over time. And it's so hard with the history of the card markets and especially how grading has been only in vogue for a short period of time to be able to look back and say, okay, right now PSA is king. BGS used to be king three, four years ago. You know, is this a flippining that's going to be forever? Is it going to be something that comes back into BGS on top? Do you have any thoughts about that or any data that you've cobbled together around the grading companies and how maybe their their tens have been graded and how that that switch happens over time?
SPEAKER_01:So I would say maybe at a level higher than that, as it relates to BGS, can they recover? Can they become as relevant as they once were in the hobby? As on the flip side of that, one of the hardest questions to answer that I think about most often is if you're a newer emerging grader, how do you break through? With the pandemic, BGS kind of took for granted that they were a leader, shut down, undercommunicated, and didn't really put together sort of a customer-centric approach to how can we sort of navigate this more trying time where people have a lot of assets, a lot of cards that they wanted to grade. They have um a lot of money tied up because that was a peak period of buying. And then, you know, the reality of it is part of the reason PSA has sort of emerged and why SGC emerged as sort of a secondary sports grader was liquidity became really, really, really important to this equation. More people were spending, more people needed to turn over that inventory. And the easiest way to make money, it's also an easy way to lose money, to be clear, is to grade cards. You have to be really thoughtful about what you're grading. And that was one of the things that we ran into in 2021, which is everybody took for granted that things were going to grade well just because there were new cards or pack fresh. Um, and that's certainly not the case. Um, but ultimately, liquidity is sort of front and center. That's what's helped PSA sort of build on their lead. It's what helped SGC establish themselves as a secondary player. PSA does it from a value standpoint. Gemmin 10 is sort of the gold standard for what you can hope to achieve through most grading experiences. SGC on the flip side of this was like, we're gonna actually focus on turnaround times, right? We're not gonna be necessarily the greatest from a value standpoint, but we're gonna get you your cards back, which will get you your money back quicker, and we're gonna allow you to move into the next card sooner. And that really stood out. You know, in the meantime, you had BGS, who was sort of just not really doing much as it relates to like they were kind of, I've joked, and you know, I hope they don't take this too personally when I say it, but they're kind of like the AOL of the hobby in a lot of ways, in the sense that they kind of were at a at a good footprint, but weren't really switching the boundaries of what they could do to innovate. And they were sort of still reaping the bed of a really strong base, and you know, that was a problem that ultimately has surfaced into public perception, even though they're still grading nearly as many cards as they were grading a few years ago. The perception has changed significantly that they have taken a massive step back. And the reality is they're still grading a lot of cards, they're still grading a lot of high-end cards, but the perception has really changed. Um, and CGC on the flip side has just really leaned into the TCG side of the market, which like really resonates with their core audience. It's sort of the most uh lapping, and that's done really well. Sports on the other hand, DSA has clearly been established as the leader. GC's had its moment, which led to an acquisition. PGS still has a lot of loyalists and a huge install base of cars that are in the market that people don't want to move towards lower prices because they have 11 million slabs in people's hands.
SPEAKER_00:And I'm with you that when I first came into the hobby, SGC was the one that had those quick turnaround times. I would get my cards back within a week sometimes. And when you're trying to flip, that side speed is is worth a lot. You know, you can turn it over five, six times before you get your PSA back. So yeah, some really good thoughts on there. 11 million Beckett slabs is interesting to me. That's quite a number. Do you think that Beckett is too big to fail with that install base?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Short answer is yes. In the short term, I listen to Dr. Beckett's podcast, you know, a few times a week when he's when he's doing them now. He's basically open that they the management understands that they've mishandled the last few years and they're sort of trying to recalibrate. But there's been a series of missteps through different leadership teams there. We have an iconic tracker that we released mid-month, which is really focusing in on the cards that have real significance in the hobby and what's being graded there. And what that's doing is highlighting what is moving through the graders' doors and being submitted and graded from that standpoint. And what is interesting about that is circling back to the Beckett question, you know, they still get a lot of high value cards. They still have a sweet spot within basketball. There's people who don't want to pay the PSA upcharge, for example, for the higher tiers of grading services, but people will just want to pay a flat fee oftentimes and they'll go to Beckett to grade some of their higher-end cards. For, you know, there's it's been known for years that Beckett is a more favorable grade for thick cards, for example. So people will send those to them, right? I mean, we we published a report, which was 2024 Prism Football. And it was not a 50-50 split, but the number of one of ones of the high profile quarterbacks from this class that went to PSA versus Beckett was like a 65-35 split. It's not what it looks like when you look at the volume numbers, which is Beckett only has 3% share currently as it relates to the volume equation, right? But when you look at some of the high profile cars, it just speaks to your question of are they too big to fail? I think so. They have that very loyal base for that was well earned, but sort of been taken for granted over the years.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I agree with you. I think at some point it has to get rescued. There's too much grading emphasis nowadays, uh, especially to unlock value, which who knows what other things might come around that help unlock the whole massive value of raw cards out there, but PSA can't just handle the whole volume itself. It's interesting that you say that Beckett is handling 3% of total volume, but also is doing what they were two or three years ago. What does that look like in terms of like total cards per month?
SPEAKER_01:So they're doing like 60,000 cards per month right now, which has kind of been their their sweet spot uh over the last five years. They've been up and down between 50 to 80,000 for you know five years. And I think their peak was probably around like a million cards in a single year, which you know, for perspective, you know, PSA did 1.6 million in May alone and did 1.4 million in June. And um, you know, there's just you know, we're orders of magnitude away now in the behavior between those two companies and the scale of those two companies. Um so you know, Beckett's still doing a lot of what they were doing, but PSA, you know, post-acquisition are really leveled up operationally and from a brand standpoint and from a technology standpoint. The collector's umbrella owns 90% of the grading activity each month. So Beckett's a small player relative to that, or through that lens, while they're still seeing a lot of really you know important cards walk through their doors.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Sounds like a lot of the kind of new volume coming in for graders is going to be the ones going to PSA because they come in and they ask themselves or Google who should I get with graded, and then they say, Oh, PSA gives you the highest values, and they're like, Okay, PSA. Sounds like a lot of legacy is still going back at from what I'm hearing. But um, yep. One question I I had a do you think that BGS nines being that we're in this junks lab era, nines are way undervalued historically, and then BGS is pretty undervalued. So BGS nines is almost a double whammy. Any thoughts on that as to an investment possibility for kind of a long-term horizon?
SPEAKER_01:100%. Yeah, I I think there are pockets of this hobby that just lean into one known fact or understanding and like lean into that as hard as they can. And I am sure there are people making good money off of just cracking BGS nines and resubmitting them, hoping for you know the outlier 10, but just knowing that you're probably still holding on to some value, moving it into the PSA slab and sort of covering your grading cost to some degree, right? So you're sort of getting a free shot and an upgrade, but still sort of just moving it to a slab that's going to be more liquid and have slightly more of a premium associated with it. So I do think in general, that's a major play for certain players in this hobby. And in general, I just think they're mispriced in the sense of like, you know, all. If people are buying the card and not the grade. Despite the fact that there's a perception that Beckett has had a real considerable fall over the last few years, I think that they still have really strong grading standards in place. And so, you know, I don't think from a real progressive valuation, I should say, of PSA nines versus Beckett 9s, you're going to find many, you know, glaring differences at scale in the sense of, you know, I'm sure pretty closely matched. And if you're finding that there's a price discrepancy there, buying a BGS9 versus a PSA9, for example, is a strong value prop, just in the sense that they're probably the same card. You know, and I think that's the nine, you know, not only that, you have subgrades, which is sort of a whole other part of that equation, which is part of why Beckett suffered, was that subgrades are something that's really favorable as a submitter and a seller of cards. It's not great from a liquidity standpoint of somebody who's trying to get deals done quick in a flipper's market, which is I don't want to have to be uh arguing with you about nuance of subgrades. It actually adds friction, right? And so the subgrades has actually done them a disservice in the current environment the last few years, which is part of why you probably see BGS9 sometimes at a discount to a PSA 98.
SPEAKER_00:That's an incredible point. The friction of subgrades. And since we moved more into the flipping age, it's such a good point. I I know that you mentioned about PSA and BGS having a close gem rate percentage. Is that something you've tabulated where you can say over all of the cards, BGS has this gem rate and then PSA has this one, or is that not something you pulled out?
SPEAKER_01:I just published a report yesterday that that looked at the overall gem rates for the first half of the year for sports for each of the companies. So let me see if I can pull that up real quick.
SPEAKER_00:We'll put this up on the YouTube as well. Um, I'll get a screenshot from Ryan. We'll put it up on there so you guys can watch along on that one. Slavnomic on YouTube.
SPEAKER_01:So for the first half of 2025, for example, the gem rate for PSA for sports was people. I mean, look, and that that's across all eras of cards. So that includes vintage, that includes, you know, the 90s and um that includes the ultra modern stuff, right? Uh but 34% was the gem rate for all cards, all sports cards that went through their doors in the first half of the year. Beckett was 44%. And so, you know, Beckett's higher, but Beckett has a more lenient scale at the end of the day, right? Which is part of the reason people send cards to Beckett and have for a long period of time was that that nine and a half gem mint, especially a min 9.5, where you had, you know, uh the three nine fives and one nine, was sort of your safety net in a lot of ways. It allowed you to get that gem mint grade, but with less risk in some instances. If you knew you had a flawed corner, but everything else about the card looked great, you knew it wasn't going to gem at PSA who's tougher on corners, but you ship that thing over to Becca and you can still escape with the nine and a half and get a you know, get a solid price for that. That has the market has adjusted for that now. I thought where I'm going with that data point of the 34 versus 44 is if you were to eliminate like the min the min 9.5 and you sort of held it more to like a true gem, I bet that moves much closer to 34% than people realize. And so you probably get a 10% bump of cards that are just on the margins enough to be get given that gem mint label, but probably wouldn't qualify if they were a little tighter with their standards. And so I think you know, um big picture, yes, I think they actually grade on a fairly equivalent at a fairly equivalent rate, you know, with the nuance of certain cards grade more favorably with each grader.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and that's really good information when trying to value because it's hard to evaluate those nine fives versus tens right now. You're right. And a lot of times right now they're like PSA nines, which are like raws. I mean, you can get gem meant BGS for raw prices sometimes, just how crazy this market is. Um but I wonder when we see that flipping and come back. It's interesting going back to your earlier point about how you can crack BGS nine, put it into a PSA nine, and have the free upgrade possibility. The longer term play is to grab the BGS9 really quick, wait for BGS to rebound, and now maybe the BGS9 is worth more than the PSA 9. It's so interesting the different plays that you can do depending on timeframe and kind of what your narrative is that you want to build in. And data empowers us to do that, which is why Gemrate is so awesome.
SPEAKER_01:It's it's hard to argue that they can reach the PSA spot on the leaderboard, but they definitely can regain momentum. And, you know, there's opportunities for them. You had PSA who turned over a whole team of employees that had worked there when they were a dividend-paying public company to a private company that was much more of a tech company from a look and feel standpoint, which was incentivized by owning shares and by the potential output of the company would be beneficial to their impact. You know, you just see different behaviors. And so where I'm going with that is BGS probably needs this really different look and feel or incentive structure to sort of start to push the boundaries of where they might go ultimately in the long run. And so there's there's an argument with me that's part of what has made or CGC successful because they have private equity backing, um, and they've they've got incentives to push hard and see some potential return on their effort beyond status quo. Whereas BGS, I just don't think it's been pushed to you know go further beyond what they already know.
SPEAKER_00:That's an excellent finance guy lens right there. Clear out the old leadership, bring in new leadership, get some incentives in place. Let's get people going the right way by giving them the right incentives. That's that's what you need, you know, breath of fresh air at this point. And I think that'll be good for the hobby. I think it will happen at some point. We all are just waiting for when that happens and see who does it. This is a window of opportunity that I see. I'm one of those windows of opportunity guys, so I'm out here catching fallen knives and hoping that they go back dead cat bounce. But let's let's hope they just get a new customer support team because Beckett, please come on. Let's let's talk a little bit about that iconic tracker before we go more into the business of Gemrate and where you want that future to go. Let's talk about the past. So, the iconic tracker, how do you collect the names of the cards that you include on that? And does that change very much? Is there much turnover?
SPEAKER_01:Adam Gray did a project with PWCC back in 2022, or he was an employee there and it was in partnership with them to establish through an expert panel what are the most iconic 100 cards of all time. Um, and it was a great list. Really was one of the few that I thought that I had seen that really put in the work and also provided context on how they got there and what it meant. And Adam just does a great job of collecting the information and putting a good thoughtful survey in front of people. Um, and then making it work in the sense of providing a payoff for the people that participated or were paying attention to it by sort of explaining how these cards got there. You know, what do they mean to people and participants in the hobby? And so that was the main input for us was just it was a really thoughtfully done list. And I was really impressed by uh just the collection of cards that were on there. And I honestly I didn't want to weigh in. I wanted something where I could be objective. And so we just leaned into that completely. Uh, and that's been the foundation for that work the last, you know, two years, two and a half years. Uh, you know, and it's it's you know, it's not perfect. I personally, for example, would also love to do that exact same exercise for TCG and get one built for a whole other subset of the hobby, which would be, I think, really fascinating to keep track of. That's like a dream of mine is to put together an iconic tracker from the TCG lens. And just for your listeners and your audience, um, we just went through the exercise of doing a new project. Adam had approached me about potentially doing a 25 and 25 for sports. It was just what were the most iconic cards in the last 25 years? And that was really fun to do. We're just starting to unveil the output from that. I think it's fascinating. Sort of sneak peeked when he did the iconic 100. That was through the lens of experts. This is looking at two different segments of the hobby. This is looking at the expert panel, but also the community panel, which anybody could participate in. And you just saw very different results when you sort of look at it through the expert cohort versus the community cohort. And I just think it really highlights the experts stamp for something and sort of what's aspirational to them is very different than what the general population of collectors might look like and what is aspirational or sort of available or accessible to them. Adam started to unveil it, you see it where there's sort of this the split in the cards that are being discussed when the expert voted it to be, you know, 15th and the community voted it to be 40th, right? Or vice versa. So, anyways, that's sort of the foundation to answer your question. But we're sort of sort of exploring that again, but through a narrower lens of just the last 25 years.
SPEAKER_00:Amazing. And shout out Adam Gray. I'd heard about that on a couple other podcasts about the 25 for 25. So really excited to see those results unveiled. Where are those gonna be unveiled?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so it's being unveiled on his Instagram currently, uh, the Real27 guy, and on his YouTube channel. He and I are also gonna put it on gemrate.com and just start to release it there. So the articles will be available there probably next week. They're gonna be released sort of every other day, though. So it's good, it's a it's a slow roll, which Adam loves to do. So we, you know, the full list won't be available until after the national, so probably early August. But we're we're starting to avail it now.
SPEAKER_00:That's what I'm talking about. You gotta wait for it. You gotta want it. You gotta build that into Bassian.
SPEAKER_01:I don't have that kind of discipline or patience, but Adam does, so good for him.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, yes, I love that. I love hearing Adam talk. He always uh brings such a refreshing viewpoint to these things. And I know you guys got what 500 different unique uh submissions for that. So a pretty good data pool.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it was awesome. I mean, I really didn't know what to expect there. You know, it was a survey that you couldn't really just fly by and do in 10 minutes, right? If you want it to be somewhat thoughtful, it took people a lot longer. It's part of why we want to make sure we're putting in the work to pay it off for everybody that did participate or everybody who's been paying attention to it. Uh there was 135 cards that were nominated to select from. And I mean, on a different day, you could have 50 of them that were really like in strong consideration for that top 25 list. And so, anyways, it was very interesting.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, really looking forward to that stuff. All right, so let's talk about the business and vision for where Gemrate is going. We've talked a little bit about where it's been. So, what's on the docket? Where do you think it's gonna be in the next year or two?
SPEAKER_01:So great questions. I heard your podcast last week about your strengths and weaknesses in the hobby. And I was thinking about some of my strengths and weaknesses in the hobby. And I like to buy these really low pop cards that, you know, just sort of fly under the radar. They're the SSPs that people don't pay attention to. I can't participate in the second tier of the market for under most circumstances. But I can pick and choose my spots for certain players and certain sets and things that I think have like fit the aesthetic that I like to deliver or that I like to see my cards represent um from a look and feel standpoint or from like a significant standpoint of who the player is and what their catalog look like and what might matter from their from their catalog five, 10 years from now. Um, where I'm going with that is that I'm really poor at actually buying these cards and showcasing them. I never post anything to Instagram, so they're kind of ghosts for better or worse. And you know, for example, Obsidian has this contra card, which I just think is beautiful. It's a porcelain white card that's usually, I think in soccer it's numbered eight or nine, uh, basketball it's numbered to three. And with the niche segment of the hobby is very well regarded, but most people don't know about it, they're not gonna see it that often. But anyways, I acquire a lot of these contra cards and I never showcase them. And my point with that is sort of like I think they have some appeal to them, but the fact that I never window them makes them almost fade into darkness, like that them, they don't even exist, right? People can't even sort of build up hope or sort of some desire that they might own this card at some point in time. And so I'm not really doing like the contra set any favors by never showcasing any of these cards that I've purchased because they're really beautiful. They really speak to the strengths of that specific set, and I just never bring it to market. One of the reasons, and where I'm going with that, is one of the reasons Gemrate exists is to provide data to advance narratives. Like if you don't tell the story, oftentimes the story doesn't get told told in our hobby. That's why one of the things that I think has been one of the most missing or sort of key elements that's sort of been overlooked over the last five years when the hobby sort of had its ups and downs, but for the most part, has seen progress is showcase showcasing your collection is still really, really hard to do today. Like you can flex on Instagram, but Instagram is a different, it's built for a completely different purpose. How they want to participate there is very different on a collector by collector basis. And so I think showcasing is a limiting factor right now of helping cars build momentum or build value. And the other side of that equation is data. And so that's the vision for where I want to go is provide more data to help advance narratives. And so for people who are researching, our sweet spot is most of people who are in the research phase of or the last part of the phase, you basically are like, I have interest in this player, I have I'm intrigued by this set. What can I go do to understand the strengths of that set, compare it to other sets, figure out what players seeing success through the lens of that set, or are outliers through the lens of that set. And what I'm, you know, examples of that are, for example, if you looked at 2020 Prism basketball and you looked at the silver prisms, you know, you take for granted that the Lonzo ball is valued if you just looked at the price, but then you look at the gem rate of it, and I don't remember it off the top of my head, but it's like a 5% gem rate card as opposed to most prism silvers are like a 45% gem rate out of that set. And so there's a reason that price is different than an Anthony Edwards price who carries much more significance in the hobby today than Lamello Ball. But like if you looked at a price-by-price basis alone, it's gonna just do a disservice to why that card is valued differently, right? And so this is part of the supply narrative. I've started to sort of, you know, frame this as like the junk parallel era, is there's a lot of non-numbered parallels in our hobby. And so, you know, you kind of have base rates of like how many times does this parallel get graded relative to the base card, right? You can start to extrapolate what might that actual print run look like, or if these were serial numbered, what might that actually be? And so the vision for what we're doing is to provide the sort of tooling to let people advance their narratives from a buyer standpoint, helping you figure out how do I make the right decisions and what to own. From a seller standpoint, trying to sort of convey the value that should be associated with this card. Not value from a pricing standpoint, but value from a context standpoint of here's how to think about the significance of this card, whether that's through the lens of the player, through the lens of the set, sort of taking a step back and thinking about what makes this card significant. And we're trying to add value through that lens. And so that's the vision. Now, the more we can help people feel confident in their purchase decisions, in their selling process, their grading process, that's gonna add value because more people will continue to participate. So everything we do is related to sort of bringing more confidence and helping people advance the narratives of how they participate in the hobby. There's things we want to do from a product standpoint to advance that, which I think will be really interesting. I think the next 12 months will be really telling for sort of how well that vision plays out as we sort of move beyond sort of you know the current way that we're perceived in the hobby today. Four years ago, my dream was to build a Chrome extension to overlay supply data over over and across many of the highest profile sites in our hobby. We're now lucky enough, most of them, which I which is great. It's already integrated into a lot of the larger auction houses. It's integrated into a lot of the collection management tools. But you know, my dream has always been just make the eBay process simpler. And you know, to the degree we can work with eBay, fantastic. But in the meantime, the dream has always been to allow you to overlay it.
unknown:Cool.
SPEAKER_01:You know, the question is just how much time do I have to build that? But that's very much on the near-term radar.
SPEAKER_00:Isn't it always in the startup world? How much time do I have to build that? Well, when you get the end of beta, hit me up and I will come and test it for you. I appreciate that. A lot of things that we can kind of touch on in that I think for me, I kind of go back to the gem market cap that I like to look at when you're talking about the Lonzo ball. Do you believe that that has value and provides a good layer of context? Many people kind of poo-poo the idea of doing the gem market cap. Where do you stand on it?
SPEAKER_01:So I do think it has value. And so one of the other things is related to the vision is translating the supply data to the to the actual transaction side of the market, right? And so I think a lot of the collection management tools put together a great starting point of what it means to understand the value of a card through the lens of a market cap or a gem cap, right? Through the lens of what does it look like to take the price of the card and multiply it times the known supply of the card to understand that and do it across all the grades for a certain card. Understand this is how much money has been invested into this card at this point in time, right? Which is what that effectively represents. And I think that's a great starting point. I think that helps people understand sets better. For example, you would treat a treat the Nikola Jokic 2015 Prism very different, differently than you would a Teen Prism, Zion Williamson, if you understood it. It's basically the same as you know, um, fares in a public company or a private company of how many of those are available, right? A lot of times people take for granted that the price is the price, but you need the other context to actually understand the value or sort of the perceived value of an asset. And you mentioned this in your last podcast, and I believe this too, which is 99% of cards work their way to zero. And I do believe that to be true as well. The 80-20 rule is often mentioned these days. But yeah, I mean, ultimately the price is limited, limiting in sort of your understanding of a card. And so the more we can understand the supply side of the equation, too. Oh, so Caitlin Clark is a perfect example. I don't know how much you've been following this this week, but Caitlin Clark had a rookie royalty set that was released by Panini that's extremely high-end, right?$30,000 was the initial ask in the in the Dutch auction, yeah. The Dutch auction worked its way down to$3,000. Still an extremely expensive box. But if you're holding a Caitlin Clark Prism Silver card or a Caitlin Clark Prism Anything card right now, you're sweating because that was sort of known to be the highest profile card or one of the highest profile cards that was going to be available. The reason a market cap might be limited is you might start to see a dip in that Prism Silver for Caitlin Clark, right? You might see a dip in the pricing of the Caitlin. And I don't even just mean it from a price standpoint. I mean it from a market stand market cap standpoint. You might start to see that decline. And people might say, well, Caitlin Clark market's down. Look, it's deteriorating because they're her highest profile, her flagship card, her signature card is declining. Yet at the same time, you just had hundreds, potentially millions of dollars invested to a different subset of her collecting category, right? Or collecting catalog. And so ultimately, her value as sort of a collectible entity in this hobby probably has gone up, right? It may have gone from 10 million to 15 million, but her flagship card is going to show a decline in pricing. And people are not going to be able to rationalize. They're not going to be able to sort of string together, okay, her market as a whole has gone up. People are going to lean into what they know. And this hobby has constantly been presented through the lens of a singular card, sort of being a proxy for performance for a player. Generally speaking, your average collector is going to lean into that data point around the Prism Silver migrating or sort of decelerating from a momentum standpoint and not pay attention to the amount of money that was invested into other cards that became available. And so I think to answer your question, it's a great start, but you really need to understand the catalog of a player. And that's a problem for most people. But at least, and one of the things you're most focused on, which I really enjoy about what you're trying to do here, is the why, right? Some people will say, like, is Caitlin Clark becoming less favorable? Is the WNBA losing momentum? Is the Prism Silver X, Y, and Z? Whatever the argument might be, people are going to try to rationalize it one way or another. Very rarely is supply limited unless you're talking about the vintage side of the market. That's why people love vintage, right? Is because the dilution is not happening in that market, the way that it's happening in the ultramodern market or the modern market. Right.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, there's so much there, so many takeaways that I kind of want to highlight. One that I really want to bring up is a point that you had earlier, which was speaking about the entire rookie pool of a player can be very different, right? If you look at within soccer, which is the world that I've been playing in for a little bit here, if you look at a player like Jude Bellingham, his soccer rookies are just very limited in that he was only in one or two sets, right? Whereas you look at La Mania Mall, the dude was in like five or six sets. Basketball, an easy way to look at that is Dion Williamson. His cards got printed to the moon because they knew that they could, they had all the demand so the manufacturers could print. All these cards. Whereas if someone's blowing up that was underprinted before, you have a supply and demand shift that's incredibly powerful. It's a bunch of bunch of big people trying to get through one small door, is what it is, right? So when that happens, it's good to be able to know, as Ryan's talking about, how many rookie cards they have available. And that is kind of a hidden juice that you can prepare for. And again, to that Caitlin Clark point, when she is going to have this top-tier product that's going to be coming out, and you heard about that, probably time to sell your Caitlin Clark silvers. Because as he's saying, your market, the itch that people are trying to scratch is the same, but now they have more places that they can scratch it. Right. So if you sell out at that time, you're changing the short-term dynamics, which I think is a really powerful tool to know the more you can do with it. So that's really great stuff. Do you have any kind of market values? I don't remember if I look at Jordan, if it shows me the total market value of all the Jordan sets, or does it just give me kind of a list with the gem rates?
SPEAKER_01:No, right now we're just going to give you a list with all the cards that are in the Jordan catalog that have been graded, right? We don't even cover cards that have never seen a grading room floor before. They're not going to be in our database yet. Um so to answer your question. Now the dream on that front is to work with one of some of these partners more deeply and just have a you know an API hook in and sort of deliver some of it through the lens of how Gemrate thinks about data to sort of allow for more set level analyses or player level analyses. Right now, it's just that would be a really hard question to answer because you'd have to click all sorts of links, right? And it's just we're doing a disservice to that particular thought process right now. And it's something that I would love to address at some point. But yeah, right now we're sort of the the first step in that is just allowing people to access pricing information through some of our partners.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you can only do so much. You can't do everything. All right, let's do uh a little quickfire segment. Let's just go as quick as you can answer it. So let's start with an easy one here. Do you believe we're in a PSA 10 bubble?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we are. I mean, I think PSA is synonymous with um a premium and liquidity right now. And I just think that that lends itself to the things we were talking about earlier with EGS. It does feel a bit like a bubble.
SPEAKER_00:If right now we have too many cards that are going to go to zero over time, what's the one thing we should look out for for cards that we buy for longevity?
SPEAKER_01:Well, so you mentioned this again. I love referencing what you've already talked about because I think it's relevant. But like having a thesis around the card. So why is this card going to be significant, if at all, for a player? Like, for example, I collect certain cards of a player named Isaac Okoro on the cast. I know he's working his way towards zero in the sense of like this card just aren't going to retain value over time because he's just not going to be somebody that people are going to think about 20 years from now, not let alone five or 10 years from now. And so that's part of it. It's just knowing like you're buying this to build a PC, but your PC is more about like a representation of what matters to you as a collector and sort of what you want to showcase or sort of how you want to highlight what you collect and how you collect. And that is purely like a PC mindset that I have for that. And it sort of showcases it's more of like an expression of my identity than it is an investment by any means, right? And so that's the lens I look at certain cards like that. I know that when I'm buying them, and it's just sort of capital that I'm setting aside, knowing it's more of like a fashion item than it is a investment item. Then there's the lens of Trey Murphy, for example, who I mentioned has a limited catalog, but he also has a ton of cards that do not gem. And so he's a really tricky player to sort of collect in the sense of most of his cards that have been graded are a PSA 9. Like he way under indexes from a PSA 10 standpoint as it relates to like what's available for him and what might matter ultimately. I buy PSA 9s of him all day because I think like some of his higher profile flagship cards that aren't going to sell today because they're not a 10 or going to be sold at a discount because they're not a 10, are actually going to stand the test of time if he becomes this four or five time all-star potential all NBA player. I can get a discount on these cards today, but I think 10 years from now, this is actually what's going to matter when the PSA 10 grade won't necessarily be the thing that differentiates it. But if you do the work and you do the research on, again, things I was mentioning earlier, like the base rates of how often these are being graded relative to other cards, you can evaluate or extrapolate what a print run might look like for certain cards. So it's kind of understanding and picking and choosing your spots. I think the guys at like card ladder on the crossover do a good job of this, but just thinking about what are going to be the significant cards for that player. You know, generally speaking, what has been the theme for the Panini era? What is specific nuance to that specific player?
SPEAKER_00:Two points of commentary there. The two words that you should be most excited about if you're looking to sell cards, liquidity squeeze. And then the second thing, something like I've been thinking about rookies a lot and why rookie cards are so important. And to me, rookie cards are their own set, right? If I want LeBron James, there's rookie cards, and then everything else is an entirely different catalog.
SPEAKER_01:I think that's important. Is one of the things I'm very focused on milestones. I love the idea of sort of reframing like what matters for a player and their collection around MVP years or milestone years, right? Like as we think about the stock market and investment, you need the things that people don't expect to happen for there to be changes in the values of assets. And so if people all of a sudden start to value milestone cards differently than they value them, you know, value them now, they become higher profile, like your MVP, your MVP, your cards stand for something different than they did, you know, five years from now than they do today, that's gonna change the value of that card pretty dramatically, right? And that's like that's the stuff I like is that people are sort of overlooking right now, but I do think it's a big part of top's vision for where they might go with this. I 100% agree with you. The rookie card catalog is sort of separate entity for each player.
SPEAKER_00:What is more important, condition or rarity?
SPEAKER_01:I think condition is a subset of rarity to some degree. And so I I think that condition is a way that people have helped to construct an argument for rarity. And so I would argue that rarity ultimately is more important than condition for topic. But I do think like the grading of superfactors or one of ones is a great topic. Take it. It's triggering for a lot of people. You ever watch people show a graded one-on-one on IG, they're gonna flip out and be like, why bother? And it's that's all the things we just talked about, which is like people may only look at there are certain people who only look at that single card, but there are people who are gonna look at that catalog of cards and they're gonna factor a PSA 9 superfactor differently than a PSA 10 superfactor of a nearby neighbor of that set. And people take for granted that that doesn't matter, but I assure you it matters. So, anyways, I think that there's layers to that question that you asked, but ultimately I think of condition as a subset of the rarity equation.
SPEAKER_00:And that's an excellent answer. And I also believe that it is under the umbrella. I agree a hundred percent on that. And I think we're getting more and more conditioned to see the rarity and the condition in the same way. And that's something the manufacturers want us to do because that allows them to sell more base cards. As you said, the parallels that they have out right now are kind of like an extension of the base. I don't really mess with the parallels, but to go back to one of your earlier points, if you can know what the actual grading is of those, then you can carve out a little niche, carve out a little base niche of of liquidity that you can sell into that also has an element of rarity to it. So that's one thing that I'm taking away from all of this is maybe I shouldn't be ignoring those things that take a little bit of extra work. Their value is is a little bit hidden, a little bit underneath that work. And that's gonna make 95% of people not look into it, which is kind of what Gemrate is all about, right? Yep, absolutely. Okay, cool. So that was great. I really enjoyed a lot of those conversations that we had. Thank you for doing the the quick the the quick questions. Is there anything else that you kind of want to talk about or bring up before we start heading out of here?
SPEAKER_01:No, that was it. Thank you. Thanks for letting me sort of go on a few rants there. You know, I think those are all great questions, things I love talking about, which is why I can get pretty long-winded with some of those answers. I think you're covering, again, a really interesting angle in this hobby, which speaks to the why of a lot of what we're doing here and breaking it down to some fundamentals that just aren't really discussed, which is awesome. I just think that's a really overlooked segment of what actually matters in our hobby. So I'm glad you're I'm glad you're doing this, and I was excited to be a part of this episode.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you for that, Ryan. And so great to talk to you. Usually when we talk, we end up going for hours because we get to go back and forth on this stuff in or not. So it's always fun for us. All right, man. Well, again, if you don't know where to find him, he's on Instagram at GenRate at Gemrate. You can also go to his website, gemrate.com. If you don't use it, what are you doing? This has been episode eight of Slabnomics. Thanks so much for being on again, Ryan. Keep building and we'll talk to you later.
