A Sports Card Stream of Consciousness

Talking about The National, The Soco Expo, Making your own luck through preparedness, and market trends and evolutions. 

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Welcome to Slabnomics, the intersection of sports card collecting, investment, and market theory. This is episode 12, Stream of Consciousness. Now, today we're going to do something a little bit different, a little departure from the episodes that I've had recently. We've had some episodes where we've welcomed on some guests that have talked about the origins of some excellent projects such as Card Ladder and Soko Expo. Feel welcome to go back and listen to those episodes to find out a little bit about entrepreneurship and what makes things run in this card hobby. In this episode, however, I'm really just going to come on and speak to you man to man, man to woman, man to child, whatever the case may be, and just speak a little bit about things that have been going through my mind. We have the Soko Expo coming up, which is in tandem with the national, of course, the biggest sports card event of the year. I'm coming in for the first time. And then also speak a little bit to a couple things that I put on Instagram at Slabnomics, speaking about market trends, about where the evolution of the market is going, and also that rookie market cap that I've been working on. So we're going to go into that first, starting with the national. As I said, it's my first national. I'm extremely excited to walk the floor. I have some friends that are going to be there at Blowout Cards booth and also new friends over at Card Ladder and many other people just walking around, some podcasters that I've met. But just my idea of what the national is going to be, I've been to some card shows here and there, probably three at this point, which I know isn't a very big number. I've vended at one and just walked the floor of two. And some of the observations that I've had over the last six months total would be that first off, a lot of Pokemon tables. I don't know if you guys are seeing the same thing. I'm seeing at the Austin card show, I estimated it was about 70% Pokemon tables. I saw a lot of baseball and of course a lot of football, basketball sprinkled in. But what I did not see was soccer. And that's something, of course, that I'm going to be vending over at the Soko Expo. Going to have a table up there and three display cases full of the cards that I brought, as well as some cards that I have for a separate investment opportunity that I will be selling over there. So I'm going to be bringing the biggies. There's going to be a lot of rookies because that's kind of what I specialize in. And I mostly stay within the Prism and Tops Chrome sets. So a lot of Erling Holland, a lot of Mbappe, a lot of gems, a lot of messy. So come and see me over at the Soko Expo. I'll be doing it under Slabnomics slash Canary Cards, which is kind of card collecting and flipping brand. So extremely excited for the Soko Expo. I've really found so many amazing people within the soccer card community. Every time I reach out to a new person, they just always are so welcoming. Everybody's very encouraging and just generally very happy and very positive people in the soccer card community. So I can't wait to meet everybody there. I have some really good friends that I'll be able to walk around with as well. So I really look forward to that. Now, getting back to the expectations around the national, a lot of things that I'm seeing other podcasters talk about these days is one I saw on Sports Cards Nonsense, which is a podcast I definitely recommend. One of the most entertaining and informative podcasts out there for sports cards. And they spoke about if you see a card and you want it for your PC and you're on the fence about it and you think you're going to go walk around, just buy the card. He spoke about it as being a graveyard of cards. So I think there's a lot of truth to that. In just from what I've heard, it's very difficult to navigate around the national with it being so big, so overwhelming, so many people wandering around everywhere. Somebody will probably come and grab that card because if you were attracted to it, someone else probably was too. So this is a time where I think quick decisions reward the people that make them. So that's the first thing that I would say. That really spoke to me in that you have to seize the opportunities. You have to be able to make those quick decisions. The second thing, building off of that, is going in with a wish list. And this is something that I built out because through my collecting and flipping journey both, I found that my needs and my desires have evolved. So I've started out a little bit less focused on what I was trying to accomplish in both fronts. But to start with the collecting, you kind of find a lane, right? You find some sets that really speak to you. You find what type of collector you are, going back to the different collectors that I highlighted in one of my earlier episodes. You have your set collectors, your role collectors, your team collectors. And these kind of lanes that we can operate within give us clarity about what investment decisions we want to make. Because unless you have a limited budget, which I certainly don't, we're both in the same boat. And that boat is only so big. So knowing what you're going to want to buy is the first step to transforming your decisions into higher outcomes when you do actually end up in the national. It's kind of goes back to the idea of you fall to the level of your training, right? You don't rise to your highest level of performance. You fall to the level of your training. And I think that goes here when you're overstimulated, running around everywhere, the things that you prepare, this card, that card, maybe this card are the ones that I'm going to look out for at the national, because it's going to be a place where there's so much liquidity of sellers. And on the buying side, it's going to give you all the opportunities that you want to find really any card of any level that you're going to be looking for. So go in with the wish list. That's number two. Number three, I would say prepare yourself for the long haul. A lot of times, if we're not fully prepared mentally for something like this, we just see it as kind of a, you know, maybe a big event, but not something that we actually have to prepare for, hydrate for, have good shoes, etc. We end up getting really tired out, we get mentally fatigued, and then we might miss some opportunities that arise from just being in this place. One of my favorite kind of philosopher and venture capitalists, his name is Naval. He speaks a lot about making your own luck. And he speaks about four different types of luck. And one of those is wherein you are active, and just having a high level of activity brings along more chances for luck to find you. And I think this opportunity in the national is one wherein a higher level of activity is going to lead to more chances for good things to happen. Make sure you're rested, make sure you're hydrated, make sure you know yourself and you know how many hours you can have walking around on the floor when you need to take a break, uh, when you need to go back to the hotel and maybe take a nap. Just be easy on yourself and be understanding with yourself so that you can go and make the most of your opportunities. So those are my three tips for the national. Uh, of course, you're listening to someone who hasn't been there giving you tips. But what I can say is I have done a fair few EDM festivals that go for a very long time. So I can tell you I've been on the edge of death many times. Oh, the Soko Expo is going to be its own deal. I can't stress enough how exciting it is and how much you guys should give it the opportunity, even if you're not into soccer cards, to go over there, wander around, talk to people. This is going to be the last Soko Expo before the World Cup is hosted here in the United States next year. I think we're going to look at that as a watershed moment in the soccer card collecting industry. And I think everyone who is into sports cards is going to be affected by it and caught up in it, especially for a window of two to three months. So right now, go and familiarize yourselves with some of the dealers that specialize in the soccer realm and go make some connections, build some relationships, see how that world operates and how it might operate in line with the kind of stuff you already buy, whether it's basketball, baseball, or football, there's going to be a lot of similarities and there's going to be a few differences. So learning about those things ahead of time is going to have you better positioned when the time comes, whether that be as a flipper, whether that be as someone who more looks to expand their collections as new things happen. Some people stay in one lane and they're collecting activity for a long time. Some people tack on some things as their interests develop and evolve. Speaking of evolution, I put up an Instagram poll about two different things I could talk about here. So I will get into both of those. That's right. They were close enough where I'll just talk about both of them. So you guys got me. I didn't put a both option in there, but y'all bastards got me at talk about both, anyways. So let's talk a little bit about market evolution, just right off the cuff. There are many different submarkets that come about. And the one that comes into my mind most is going to be Gary V's V Friends, right? Is it Pokemon? No. Is it sports? No. It's really just a fictional character line that Gary thought up, designed, attributed all the different card card market dynamics into and built into a product. And I think one of the telling interviews that he's had while talking about his own investing activity is he said he's buying a lot of old Disney cards. And it's just very interesting, right? Like Pokemon is going through such a massive growth spurt right now. And what I found is things do trickle out into these alternate investment appetite vehicles, if we want to be really wordy. So something like Pokemon, but isn't Pokemon. You know, fictional characters that still capture our imaginations and spark that same joy that we had as a kid. You know, when I look at a Pokemon card, I think about being nine years old and seeing Pokemon cards and going through grade school and trading a scorpion for a fossil Dragonite hollow and a girl that had a crush on me giving me her Charizard. We're transported back into those moments, and I talk a lot about portals, you know, sports cards being portals into the past and portals into emotion. And as men, we need those. Well, those ancillary markets also do the same thing because they operate in the same playgrounds, if you will. So maybe get into that. Like look at things that people are really interested in. Find out if there's cards that are attached to them. And maybe that's something that'll bring you a lot of joy. Maybe it isn't, but it's always fun to just explore these things and see what sparks your imagination. So that's a word about market evolution, a word then about the trends that I'm seeing along the different marketplaces. I did a little bit of an exposition of this in one of my posts on Slabnomics Instagram. I looked at baseball versus hockey versus soccer versus the stock market over the last three months, and we found that the stock market was doing very well. This was coming off the threat of the tariffs from Trump. So it was up 11%, if I remember correctly. The soccer card market was a touch above that, 13 or 14%. And then baseball was at about 1% and hockey was down. So why am I saying this? Not just to push soccer as always, but it is just to say that not all markets are going to rise and fall at the same time. So talking about market trends, one thing that I've touched on a little bit, but maybe not delved into too much, is the seasonality of markets, right? I can probably explain most of that price movement simply from seasonality. Baseball had its little spurt through March during opening day and then kind of filters into a little bit. But as the midseason comes, everyone forgets about baseball and moves into other things. So baseball's up a little bit, but not much. Hockey's down because it ended and now it's fully in the offseason. Soccer is up because there were the Euros and the women were still going on, but it's kind of cooled off a little bit. Market trends sometimes don't have to be that mysterious. Maybe sometimes they just break down into what are people paying attention to right now? And then what can we see them paying attention to in a month? I mean, an easy way to look at that might be NFL football, right? Training camps just opened. Card prices are probably going to start going up a little bit as you start seeing Instagram reels about your favorite player wearing shorts and running really fast. So I would say NFL is a pretty easy one to kind of jump into and see where you might have some opportunities. But again, you got to make your own decisions here and figure out what's going to be the best opportunity for you. So that's a little bit about market trends. Last thing on this episode, I just want to touch on the new metric that I've started to develop, the rookie card market cap. Now, I started out looking at a little bit more of a complicated name, the RC2MC. And the reason that I wanted to do that was because I wanted to put Mint Plus into there to kind of tell you what cards I'm using. But let me give you just an overview here. So what I want to do ultimately is I want to be able to tell you how LeBron James compares to Michael Jordan, compares to Wayne Gretzky, compares to Killian Mbappe, compares to Mickey Mann. And it's so hard to do that because they're really in different sub-industries. These different card markets are really different industries and they behave differently. They have different history and different metrics and parameters. And then within those, you have different subsets as well in terms of time. The vintage market, or if you want to go further back, the pre-war market, the vintage market, the junk wax era, the modern market, and the ultra modern, they all behave differently in terms of what a nine means, just using that one, right? Think of it like this like a pre-war nine versus a vintage nine versus a junk slab nine versus a modern ultra modern nine. Like those nines mean a lot different things. So the rookie market cap needs to have some kind of boundaries on which cards are going to be included within it in terms of the entire graded population. Because if you use all of them, if you use everything from authentic through one all the way up to 10, and you do that for Beckett, PSA, and SGC, the data sprawl gets crazy. And what I really want to do is find out a way to provide this to you so that constantly updates, so that's a live feed. But for now, it's on a spreadsheet. And if you can imagine how many numbers that's being inputted, because we're taking the current value of each grade and then multiplying that by the current population. So, how it is now when I provided for you the Messi versus Ronaldo comparison, I took the 11 Messi rookies, and that's the different rookies from the 2004 Mega Cracks, thrown into their different variations and to their different languages, and then added the one sticker that Messi has in the collectionas, and then compared that. I only used the nines, the 9.5s, and the 10s out of SGC, PSA, and Beckett Pops. Took all those out, multiplied them by their current values. So now we have if I went and I bought every Messi 9, 9.5, or 10 from his 2004 sets, how much would that all be worth? And then I took that, compared it against Ronaldo, who only had one card as 2002 megacks and one sticker, multiplied the same thing, the 9, 9.5, and the tens times the population counts. Now, if I bought all of the Ronaldo 9, 9.5s, and 10s of the sticker and the card, how much would my Ronaldo pile be worth? And how's that compared to Messi? And I know what you're gonna say. You're gonna say, well, Messi has six times the amount of cards slash stickers. And that's true. And Messi is worth more right now. But I think most of the people that have been collecting soccer for a while, most of the people who saw that their values were on par with each other up until about 2021, would tell you that they should be pretty close, that people have forgotten Ronaldo's true greatness and Messi has been maybe wrongly put on a pedestal many tiers above him. Let's look at what Michael Jordan's look like. Let's look at what Greski's look like. Let's look at what any player's looks like so that we can actually find out how much more these players are valued or less valued against one another. Don't you think that'll give you a pretty good idea about how the market may be devaluing certain players? Then of course the question comes up, what's going to make that change, right? I mean, at some point, markets can be inefficient for a very long period of time unless there's some kind of catalyst to wake them up a little bit, but that's for another show. So let me know what you think about the rookie market cap. If you think it's stupid, if you think it's a good starting point, if you think that there's ways that it can be made better, let me know. I hope to see y'all at the national walking around the floor, and I hope to see y'all at the Soko Expo vending at my table there. So feel welcome to stop by, say hey. And with that, I will sign off on Slabnomics episode 12. I think I've given enough things to think about before you go, but one more thing to think about before you go. People are always looking for the next big thing. And what they do is they try and say, who is the next Michael Jordan? Who is the next this? Who is the next that? And what they're really doing deep down is trying to build an archetype. So that's what the rookie market cap does is it builds you an archetype that you can compare against and for. The more we do this, the more we strip out the biases of this versus that and look at the math, the better decisions we are empowered to make. This has been episode 12 of Slapnomics Stream of Consciousness. Thanks so much for listening. Keep building and talk to you later.