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.
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Slabnomics
Slabnomics Episode 16: Opportunity Workshop Ft. Ryan from Cardboard Profit
-Ryan Sever, Author of Cardboard Profit is on to talk about investment opportunites and strategies in sports cards.
-Time>Money spectrum
-Fast nickels
-Anchor biases and falling knives
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Alright, guys, welcome to Slabnomics, the intersection of collecting investment, and market theory for sports cards. Today we have episode 16 featuring Ryan Seaver, the author of Cardboard Prophet. So glad to have him on today. Speaking with him is truly like speaking with someone who has the same ideas and the same logical thought processes. So hope you guys enjoy this episode. Without further ado, here's Ryan. All right, welcome everyone. Today we have a very special guest on. This is Ryan Seaver, the author of Cardboard Profit, one of the books that I highly recommend to anyone getting into the sports card investing hobby. Ryan, how are you doing today? Doing great, man. It's exciting to be here. Love talking cards. Let's do this. All right. And we've had such good spirited conversations. So I am so excited for what the listeners are going to be getting today from our conversation. So before we jump into the nitty-gritty, why don't you give me a little bit of backstory about your card story and how you got to where you are today?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Well, I uh I'm probably one of the weird folks who never gave up cards. So I got into this over 30 years ago, pretty much a lifelong collector. Never gave it up, never took a break, kind of just got more into cards the longer I've lived. And uh about 20 years ago, 18 years ago now, started doing this more as a business, trying to go from collector to all right, how do I make a little bit of money doing this? And found that it's actually more fun to me to try like the art of trying to make money with cards as opposed to just buying them and keeping them. And uh, so I really fell in love with the game and have just uh always loved talking strategy. What ended up happening though is um, you know, I long story short, my uh business went from like I started with a few hundred bucks and built it into a pretty significant side hustle. And during the pandemic, when the market went crazy, I saw all these new people coming in. It was so much fun. Like you could list anything and it would sell in minutes, it felt like. But what happened was there was no real place for people to go to learn. And so a lot of people ended up taking bad advice from people that frankly probably didn't know what they were talking about or maybe didn't have their best interests in mind. And a lot of people got burned and and kind of left as soon as they came. And uh, that's too bad. I always thought that there maybe should have been a better place for people to go to kind of get on their feet in the market. And it's the same exact challenge that I faced, you know, 18 years ago when I was trying to get into this game where there was nowhere to go to learn. It was all trial and error. There is no like book on how do you make money with sports cards. And so I certainly don't know everything, but I've had enough success in this market, and I saw that happen during the pandemic and said, all right, enough's enough. Let me let me at least try to document some of the things that have worked for me over the years, and maybe they'll help some folks just go a little bit faster, maybe, maybe skip some of the dumb mistakes I've made along the way. And it's a just evolved from that. So I ended up writing a book. I've made multiple hundreds of posts on Instagram about card strategy and stuff, just giving people hopefully a forum to talk shop. And ultimately ended up uh designing a program that I feel really strongly about is the at this point the straightest line path to getting to consistent income with cards. So that's uh kind of a very short version of how we got here. Awesome.
SPEAKER_01:So I'm taking away a lot of history coming back, right? You said 30 years of being into cards. I mean, that's that's a longer time than most people I hear. I hear a lot of COVID starts. So within that time, you've probably seen a lot of different market shifts and dynamics, right? Was COVID really an outlier, or did anything else in the history kind of echo that in any way?
SPEAKER_00:Since I've been in the market, nothing has been close to COVID. Um, we've seen some good growth. I think the market jumped real fast and then it fell real fast too. And then since then it's been pretty steady growth, and I think Fanatics is probably doing some of the right things to get, you know, athletes more involved and just to get more exposure for the hobby. But yeah, nothing has really rivaled the the well, let's say a year or so that that the market just exploded during the pandemic. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I look back at all the charts because I'm a chart guy.
SPEAKER_01:And uh they all top out at 2021. It's pretty ridiculous. But I have been seeing a pretty significant uptick in the last three months. Is that something you've had an eye on too while you're building this business and going about your activities?
SPEAKER_00:Definitely. And I think, you know, just thinking about, you know, if you get to a show anytime in the last six, twelve, eighteen months, it is crazy. Like looking at the even just the videos that people were posting about like the line is out the door around the corner, around the building to get into the national. That's I mean, this is just like such a good sign that the the market is in a good place, the hobby's in a good place. There's so many kids getting involved too. I've got people in my neighborhood that are, you know, just uh that are dealing sports cards now too. It's great. It's it's one of those things that when I was younger, I I kind of grew up in the uh you know, I was born in the 80s and grew up in the 90s, and cards weren't cool. Like there was a point where they just weren't cool in the like late 90s, early 2000s, at least for my age group. So I'm over there in high school collecting cards, and it's not I didn't have any friends that did it. So now you go to a show and you see all these kids with their cards like fanned out on the floor in the lobby, and everyone's just kind of trading and talking shot. It's just like a it's a different world, I think, now, and it's it's just like good signs that the hobby is going the right direction. So a lot of growth on the horizon, if you ask me. I'm bullish for sure.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. And I think in those 90s, everyone was doing Pokemon. They all left sports cards because of the junk wax and went Pokemon.
SPEAKER_00:And Pokemon's doing well right now too, though. And that's that's kind of what's fun to see. My my kids, I can't quite get them into sports cards yet. They're not quite that age, but they do like Pokemon. So we're getting them into the card world in some way at least. That's right. It's the gateway drugs, right? That's exactly it.
SPEAKER_01:Awesome. Well, speaking of that, with kids coming in with your history, with your experience going through COVID and seeing a lot of people get excited about cards, but then ultimately drop off. Tell me a little bit about why you feel that people fail when it comes to cards.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think that there are when you really zoom out and you look at this market, there are so many different ways you can participate. And oftentimes people try to do all of it. And it's it's like to their own detriment. It's it's overwhelming in a lot of ways. And just thinking back to my early days in the market, again, not that I know everything, but my path was basically I started off in the baseball market and I didn't do any grading. I didn't do any basketball, I didn't do any football. I stayed pretty narrow with baseball and and specifically like prospects and younger play, kind of the rising star crowd until I figured it out. And then I started to expand out. And I feel like that really served me well. And I wonder if a lot more people would do a lot better, way faster, if they also took that approach and started trying to kind of cut out the noise. I think the challenge is they don't know what's noise and what's not. And that's where, you know, again, like I've got a program where we we help with that type of a thing and give more of a streamlined system, but even a program or not, it doesn't matter. You you need to just figure out like what is the path that you can take to get where you're trying to go, and then just focus. I think focus is the key here.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. Focus. Okay, so if I am deciding that I want to pick a lane, because a lot of this sounds like pick a lane, focus in, master that lane before you decide to expand, which I wholeheartedly agree with. How do I know which lane to pick? Do you have any advice on how people gut check that?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and I think that this comes back to you got to ask yourself, what kind of business do you want to run and what are your goals? Let me frame the rest of this conversation. I'm gonna speak through the lens of you want to make money with cards in some way, shape, or form, or you at least care about the value long term of cards. There are folks that collect and good for you, do what you want to do. I'm all for you. But I'm here to make money and to try to help other people make money too. You got to decide like what is the thing that you want out of this and how much effort you want to put toward this. And what's fun about it is there are so many different paths you can take to get to your goal, but really the strategies kind of align pretty well with how much time you want to put into it, how much money you want to put into it, how active you want to be versus how passive you want to be. You can't really get to your goal without first having a goal, but then it makes it way easier to pick the strategy that aligns with that goal.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, 100%. I talk a lot about that with the investment thesis idea, right? Why am I buying this card? What's it for? How am I gonna know if I'm right or wrong? And to Brian's earlier thought about the fact that he's in it to make money, I think people assume that's a pejorative connotation attached to that. And I think of money as energy. So energy is what allows us to help our family, it allows us to save for the future, for projects and passions. So there's nothing wrong with making money in the hobby, and there's nothing wrong with running a business. Talking about the hobby landscape and where people can kind of move into these different lanes, you talk about some different strategies and you highlight high effort versus low effort strategies. Talk to us a little bit about what you found that works and how any person can get involved with these strategies.
SPEAKER_00:So it it really comes back to a question of how much time do I have versus how much money do I have? And I think of that as a spectrum. So if I had, and I'll take you back to my early days, I had very little money, a very, very uh humble beginning in this market, you know, a few hundred bucks to work with as my starting budget, but I had all the time in the world and was I was hungry. Like I wanted to win, I wanted to figure out how to do this. And so I put in the time and I did the research. I was scraping the market, trying to find those deals that I could flip instantly. And so if you have more time than money, you're probably going to do one of the more involved strategies. It's just going to line up that way. So things like prospecting, where it's a lot more research heavy, you got to stay on top of who's hot, who's not. You know, you're probably turning over more inventory. Um, things like I call it the buying value strategies. The buying value strategy is unique because you're you're paying 60, 65%, and then you're selling it for closer to 100%. Those deals are out there. It takes some work to find them, though. And that's where you see some arbitrage. If you look at different platforms and stuff, and then try to sell on on eBay or you know, at a show or something, you can do some of that stuff. But that's what I would lean on if I had more time than money. On the other end of the spectrum, if you've got more money than time, and now I've kind of it's funny because I've seen like both sides of this. Now I've got you know young kids, and uh my time is a lot more valuable to me than it was back when I was an idiot 18-year-old. So I want to get as much ROI for like my dollars per hour of time invested into my business. I want that number to be as high as possible. And so I'm looking at, you know, more plays like timing the seasons, you know, understanding the seasonal market swings, how does the market work every single year? There it tends to repeat a cycle where you know, values tend to dip on the way out of the season and they tend to rise on the way into the next season. So can you play that swing? Can you afford to tie up money for a few months and have the foresight to get into the right cards or the right types of players? I think of that as a lot of folks speculate on players. I think of it as speculate on the speculators. So you're kind of getting out ahead of the crowd and letting other people take the risk on gambling on player performance. I'd rather just hit singles and doubles and take the sure, easy profits rather than swinging for the fences and striking out. So that's one of my favorite plays. And in the middle of the spectrum is grading. To me, grading is like the the big unlock. If you understand the process, you're able to basically proactively create profit margin with the grading process just because it's it's something that's additive to the market rather than being a zero-sum game like some of the other strategies are.
SPEAKER_01:I want to ask you a question that kind of builds into both the time and money spectrums. So when you send in a card to be graded, let's say with PSA, do you look at how long is it going to take for me to get this back and then sell it? And do you calculate annualized ROI based off of that and maybe pay more for a faster grading, even though you can get it cheaper at a cheaper grading tier?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's a really good question. Definitely to the understanding like where we are in the year, I think that if I was just playing the seasonal swing strategy on its own, I would likely target already graded, you know, PSA 10 copies of rarer cards if I was just buying them to, you know, throw in the in the safe or whatever, or vault them and then sell them a few months later. But if I'm grading, then this is where you can start to stack strategies and this is where you can get some outsized returns if you know what you're doing. So yeah, adding in that extra, you know, three, four month turnaround with PSA right now for the bulk submissions. But I I think you you raise a really good point because one of the most underrated and probably underappreciated variables in this market, if you ask me, is the value of time. Like people are so concerned about did I win or did I lose, but they they they miss out on like, man, how much is it costing you to hold on to that card? Like, would you rather have a hundred bucks today or 120 bucks in three months? I don't know. I can do a lot with a hundred bucks if I had it right now. I can go buy a card, grade it, and by three months from now, it could be worth$250,$300 if I get it the right grade. So, you know, you kind of kind of see the whole picture there and big fan of paying up as long as the numbers make sense to get that faster turnaround so you can keep things moving. I think of it as like money velocity is a term I talk about a lot in my group, but it's how how many times can you recycle that same dollar so you don't have to think about if you're trying to get off the ground still, you know, pulling from next month's mortgage payment to invest in cards. It's like, no, let's use that same money so that the business fuels itself. Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01:And listeners of Slabnomics are going to recognize that one. The velocity of money. That's something that when we first spoke, I told you I was like, yes, this is something people don't talk about, and that's so important because you can run annualized ROI on any play that you do. Just as an example, if I get a hundred dollar card, I grade it and sell it for 150. What's the difference if I do that multiple times, you know, over multiple cycles versus if I take four months to get that? And if you can tell Chat GPT, hey, what does this look like? And it will show you what the annualized ROI goes out to. The compounding of interest and the time value of money are your best friend for making money for real. So if you guys are interested in that, hit me up, hit Ryan up, happy to talk to you about that. Very, very powerful stuff. But uh, when it comes to money versus time, I think correctly you talk about how if you have a lot of time, you can do these more high time intensive strategies. If you have more money, you can do more on the money end of the spectrum. So how do you recommend to people which one they should be doing within your program? Is there some kind of evaluation you do with people, or how do you figure out where they should be at within the spectrum of activity?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, thanks for asking. I think there is once again, there are a lot of ways you can win in this market. There are a lot of ways you can participate in this market. What I teach in my program is let's do the strategies that we can actually control. And to me, there's three. It's the buying value thing where you're going out and you're scraping for the deals. You know that you're going to be able to turn a profit basically the day the card arrives in the mail because you've you've bought at a big enough discount. It's grading, which is very additive. Again, you can you can control proactively what cards you send and when you send them. And then it's the timing game. Because if you understand big picture what the market does, you can put yourself in position to just get some nice injections of cash during the the peak, what I call selling seasons of the year. So for baseball, for example, going into February and March, great time to sell baseball cards because everyone's all excited about the new season. Football, right now, you know, we're getting excited. It's preseason, everyone's picking their guys. Who's it gonna be this year that that pops off? That who's that guy that's gonna take the leap. And so there's there's all kinds of that speculation going on, and that fuels the market. That the added demand just pushes values higher and higher this time of year. So, you know, it that's the game that I like to play is to again speculate on the speculators and let them take the risk. And sometimes I'm gonna lose, sometimes a player will pop off, and I could have made more, but you kind of have to understand you don't have to retire from the sale of every single card. Like when you're trying to do this at a high level, I look at how much can I turn over my inventory? I want to be as consistent as possible and just continue to lock in wins throughout the year. Hell yes.
SPEAKER_01:We want fast nickels, guys. We want fast nickels. Yeah, I think that's a salient point because in all seriousness, when you grade, what you're able to do is you're able to turn something from one price point to another accepted price point. Whereas when I'm sitting here with all my Anthony Richardsons, I'm kind of I'm speculating, is what I'm doing, right? I'm hoping that he is going to recapture the heights that he once had because he is a very hype-worthy candidate, because he's really big, really fast, and he has a cannon arm. And that's a speculation, whereas grading is a much different play because it's saying, I have this asset which now is worth this. This is what the market says. If I send it to someone and they send it back and it's this, then it's going to be worth this, right? So I think that's why grading is such a powerful play because you're not waiting for something else to happen. You're just waiting for the value realized that's implicit in the card. Is that something you'd agree with or any other color you want to put into the grading?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no, I completely agree with that. And that's that's why it's so powerful, if you ask me. The other thing that I think is interesting is when you look at, you know, the Anthony Richardson play, like a lot of times when you're you're making that type of a speculative play, just by default, you're gonna be trying to squeeze every possible penny you can out of those cards when the time comes. What's nice with grading is it takes such a it, you know, it's let's just say three months on average for a bulk submission with PSA right now. It is such a quick jump that a card can go from$25 to$185 that you don't necessarily have to be the one that's holding out for absolute top dollar. What if you sold that thing for$170,$175, you're still gonna net what one$160-ish or so after$155 or so after your eBay fees and everything? And cool, you just made over$100 to grade a card and just sit there and wait for it to come back for a few months. Like that is where, again, getting back to money velocity, it unlocks so much when you don't have to be the one that's like, you know, going back and forth, you know, uh arguing over uh that last five dollars with someone on eBay to try to hammer out a deal because you've got so much margin built in thanks to the grading process.
SPEAKER_01:That's a hundred percent right. And that also brings an anchoring bias, right? Because we were at$25 or$20, now we're able to let it go at much higher price point because we're anchored so low. And the same also happens. And that's why we make a lot of mistakes, I think, as collectors and investors, in that you're anchored at this$200 you spent on this card, you watch it go down to$150, and we have the sunk cost fallacy where it's like I need it to go back up to my$200 price point for me to feel okay about it, to fill that hole, that$50 hole within me. Um and Oftentimes despair just to take it. You know, take it, put that 150 into good money and stop chasing into bad money.
SPEAKER_00:Man, I think I knew there was a reason why I wanted to come on here and talk to you. This is it's it's music to my ears. My one of my favorite posts that I've made on social media that I it's probably one of the only few that I've actually repeated over and over and over again, and every few months you get it again. It's some variation of nobody cares what you paid. Absolutely does not matter. No bearing on the future value of that card. It's just a past data point. And yet, you bring up such a valid point that we are so anchored to that. And no one wants to take a loss, but we don't realize how much holding on to that card is actually costing us. I can give an example where I got crushed a couple of years ago on I had a couple of Juan Soto PSA 10. Uh, it was like the Topps SP from TOPS Update 2018, the one where he's in the dugout. And I bought those things thinking, man, Soto is a beast. These things have come down from their COVID peak, and they just kept coming down after I bought them. I was completely wrong on that one. Uh, had it not, I thought that the mod the market had kind of bottomed out already. Not even close. So ended up losing over a thousand dollars on that play per card. So ouch. Um, but you know what ended up happening? Those cards went even lower after I sold out of them. And guess what I did with that money? I went and bought other stuff, I graded it, and I, you know, I didn't get all of my money back, but I'm and at this point I probably have. So you're you're staying on a seeking ship when there's a lifeboat right next to you. There are so many cards out there that we could go after, and why not do it? We like ignore it because it doesn't feel good to take that loss. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Emotions can be the enemy of most smart buys and smart sells. And then uh catching falling knives is usually a bad idea. And that's me with Anthony Richardson. So uh that's okay. We all make mistakes. Now I have to go put it all up on eBay. So if you see Anthony Richardson big cards, it's probably me.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I've still got my scars from trying to catch the the Ju falling knife. So, you know, that's the that's the whole message here, though, is take it from us. Don't do this. You know, you learn from our mistakes so you don't have to get those scars on your own. Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01:I like your point about speculating on speculators because you have full information of where Juan Soto's performance is right now and where his trajectory is right now. But what you're kind of betting on is where do people think it's about to go in two months. So that's where the edge is and that's where the contextual value is. Speak to us a little bit more about context and how that's a a hidden driver of value when you're trying to make money in this space.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, this is probably a good segue from your last point there. But what we're doing is it's not trying to predict when you're playing the speculative game. You're not trying to predict the player that's going to go out and be the best player. If but what you're trying to do is you're trying to pick who is the best value, considering where the market thinks that they're going to be. If you if you really look at the card values and on any level, there is going to be some performance expectations priced in. People are expecting Patrick Mahomes to go out and throw for 40 touchdowns this year. So when he does that, are his values going to rise? Probably not too much because people are already expecting that. That's what they're paying top dollar for right now. If he goes out and throws for 60 touchdowns, okay, well, he's exceeded expectations. And all of a sudden the market ends up, you know, rising until it matches that new expectation for what people believe he can do. And the same goes the other direction, too, by the way. So because the expectations are so high for so many players, and then they fall off of a cliff when they don't actually meet the superstar level of performance that would be required to maintain and and push those values higher. So I'm not sure if that exactly answered your question around context, but um any thoughts on that? No, expectations are huge.
SPEAKER_01:And that's I think I called it the hidden leverage of value was expectations. And then um demand was kind of the nost. So I talked about Wemanyama when he came out. There was so much demand in the market that the manufacturers could print all of these different cards. And so we had this just overwhelming sea of Webanyama cards. And then, as you say, expectations were there that he's gonna come out and just be the best, be the best there's been in what, 10 years since LeBron. And he didn't come out that hot. And so it quickly evaporated because the expectations were so high and the supply in the market was just ridiculous. So I think that leads into the question I was talking about context, and that's an apt example of trying to figure out where the market is and what are the contextual pieces of evidence that the market might not be thinking about, and how can we make plays based off of those things? Another one is is probably rarity, and that's something that we try and figure out a lot of this card's super rare, but then the second piece is do people care? Right? So do you what are your thoughts about rarity and when is it valuable and maybe when is it not?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think rarity has become less rare in general lately because of so many new sets are coming out. And of the sets that we've had for years, your Prism, your tops chrome, the kind of the big ones for uh the the grading game and and just what people look to when you think about a rookie card for a particular sport, there are now 7,000 different parallels for each of those. Like the did anyone really need the cherry blossom prism parallel? I don't know, like fine, but come on now. That is where you know it really you have to kind of hone in, in my opinion, on what are the cards that people actually, one, know exist and two, care about because if I know that a fast break blue whatever like exists, but I don't like that card or I don't see it as being like a quote unquote true prism parallel, then I don't really care about it. And I'm not gonna uh see that as being as liquid of a card if I'm someone trying to invest in a card for that player. So the way that I would look at rarity is it's definitely an advantage over a common card because when you go to sell, you're not confined by everyone else that's trying to sell and what they're willing to take for the card. It's you can have way more control over the value. If you have a card that's numbered out of 25, um, I'll give you an example from this past baseball buying season. I had a couple of uh, I think it was uh Wyatt Langford, like tops chrome orange PSA 10s. There were only three of those cards, and I had two of them. So I was able to get whatever price I wanted out of them, well, you know, within reason, someone's still got to want to buy them, but going into the season, he was really hot. And so, you know, there's no problem with moving those types of cards for the price that you want. Whereas if I had had, you know, let's say the equal amount worth of base tops chrome PSA 10s of him, you know, I probably could have had 50 or 100 of those cards for the same amount of money, but would I have been able to dictate the price? Probably not, because there are so many other copies out there on eBay right now. So rarity definitely can give you an advantage in that way. I will say that if you go, there is, I think of there being kind of a sweet spot where if you think about the number of people who are willing and able to afford a card that is$10, just about anyone in this market's gonna be able to pay$10 for a card. What about$100? Well, there's probably more people that are interested, but less that are actually willing and able to buy it.$1,000, probably way more interest, but way fewer people who are willing and able to buy it. Same goes for$10,000 and certainly up the chain from there. Like as you go up in value, there are fewer buyers in the potential buyer pool for that card. And so there, in my opinion, there is such a thing as too rare if you're dealing in players, especially that aren't super liquid. If you get that like secondary tier of players where really strong players, you know, everyone knows their names, but they're not like they're not, their cards aren't going to fly off the shelves, even though those rare cards, you'll find a buyer eventually for it, maybe, but it's gonna take you a lot longer to move that type of a card because there are so few actual legit serious buyers at that range. So I think that you can almost go too far up the spectrum if you if you're not careful with that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that was one of my three favorite takeaways from your book when I first read it was about how you kind of get a drop in liquidity when you move up into a tier. And it reminds me a little bit about the stock market, as most things do, because what do stock um companies do once they get to a certain level? They split, right? They do a 10 to 1, 2 to 1, whatever. And they don't have to do that. It doesn't change any dynamics of value. It just changes the perception of value. Perception equals reality in a lot of ways, and the perception of something being at a higher level, maybe two out of my price range, unless I'm a serious collector, is a really interesting point. And that's what makes the high-end market and the low end market almost two separate entities, right? It's like, unless, well, even so, Michael Jordan, right? If I'm a Jordan collector, do I have to have high-end Jordan to be a Jordan collector? It depends on which pool you want to play in, because that high-end pool gets pretty deep. So it's a very interesting point and one I think that doesn't get talked about very much.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Well, and even going back to your example of Wimbin Yama, if you look at some of his rare PSA 10 Prism cards right now, some of those exam-there's examples right now that where you can look up the comps and they're up from where their all-time highs previously were. If you look at his base prism as a PSA 10, there are over 25,000 copies as PSA 10s already. Absurd pop count for a card that's only what a year and a half old now. And they have basically the curve is like the what the reverse hockey stick, I guess, where it's exactly what you don't want to see if you're a card investor. But that play to me is better for like grade and flip the base cards, hold the the rarer stuff if if that's your game. I'd I'd focus on just the rare stuff that's uh you know, best card, best player, highest grade if you're thinking like longer term. Typically that's the stuff that has the most upside. Um, but you're to your point though, yeah, I definitely see that being almost two separate markets within the same player pool for sure.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And I think it depends on what that player's legacy is gonna be at the end. Like how many collectors are gonna be going after that player, how many collectors are trying to get through, squeeze through that tiny little door that you hold of their of 50 or of 10, whatever it is. So yeah, it's a very interesting point to think about. Like who is gonna end up buying this card from me? Who am I gonna sell to? That's that's something I've been thinking about a lot when I've been selling cards and vending at expos. Like, who's buying this? Is it a collector? Is it another flipper? Is it a speculator? Yeah, yeah, no doubt about it. So speaking of tracking the players and trying to figure out who you're gonna go after, how do you do that? Because there's a lot of cards and there's a lot of players. So how do you winnow it down and narrow it?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, well, I first of all, I want to focus on the top, let's say 10% of players in each league or players who are perceived to have the ability to potentially rise into the top 10% of the league. There aren't that many players that over time will actually rise in value longer term, but in the short term, in the first few years of someone's career, you know, there's gonna be a little bit of a game of hot potato. If I'm looking at one of the strategies that I prefer, which is the buying value, I just want a super liquid player so I know I can move that card right away. I'm buying it at a discount. I get that card in the mail. I basically want to sell that thing the day I get it if I can, so that I can keep my money moving into the next one. If I'm grading, it's all right, what are the cards that are gonna be easy to move on the back end? And so we don't have to guess at this. We can just look at the market and use a tool, your card ladder, your market movers, whatever your your comp tool of choice is, and go and look at what players are actually selling. Like you can look at the sales volume and just see, okay, this name is actually selling a lot of cards right now. So it would follow that this is probably going to be an easy card to move because there seems to be tons of demand for this player. And so that's what I would start with is don't overcomplicate it. I and I think that when I'm looking at players to invest in, almost always it's someone who scores for their team. So in baseball home runs or OPS, like those offensive stats that everyone's looking at for basketball, like points per game. Like you can have a guy that's filling up the stat sheet. So football, a lot of times it's quarterbacks. It's who's throwing for a lot of touchdowns, who is winning games for uh football. It seems to matter a lot more than other sports if you can win or not. And I think it's just because quarterbacks have such a stranglehold on the football market in general. It's so top heavy where people are spending the bulk of their money on quarterbacks, and that's probably the one position in all of sports that has the most influence over the outcome of the game. So there's my little thesis on that, at least for why that might be the way it is. But at the end of the day, it's just, you know, what are those stats that matter?
SPEAKER_01:A wise man once said to me, chicks dig the long ball, and so do middle-aged men who collect sports cards. So it's hard to know, right, like why the market is undervaluing something that we see. As you say, these players can be very important for their teams, but the card markets lack that oomph. You know, an easy example is Messi versus Ronaldo right now. It used to be they were neck and neck with value. And now Messi's market by some accounts is 4x to 3x, what Ronaldo's is. Are they the same archetype? Well, Ronaldo lacks that like good guy Messi vibe. Everyone loves Messi. Like kids adore that guy. Ronaldo maybe doesn't have as much of the heart and the soul of the people. So is that something you ever look for? Maybe the goodwill, the intangibles of a player's market.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think it's really tough to measure, but there's definitely something to that, the likability or lack thereof of a certain player. Um, I think in my book, I gave the example of Manny Machado is a guy who's been an unbelievable baseball player. You know, his cards sell fairly well. Like he's it's not like he's cheap necessarily, but relative to what he's accomplished, I mean, he has a a very realistic, like a non-zero chance at ending up in the 500 home run 3,000 hit club without using steroids. So that that matters. Uh and yet he doesn't sell nearly the way that you might think a player like that would. I think a few years ago, especially, he was kind of getting a bad rap for being the, you know, he stepped on someone's foot at first base and wasn't apologetic. He's kind of taking the, you know, I just I'm gonna go wherever they pay me the most amount of money. So, you know, I I don't I have no problem with that guy. I actually like him quite a bit as a player, but I think it rubbed a lot of people the wrong way about his character. And so is it fair that his cards sell for probably less than they should? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. How how much how do we put value on that? That's a really difficult one. I do think that people in general overvalue in this market, they overvalue age, and that's a big part of this. Is sometimes there's a confusion of youth being equivalent to potential, and that's not the case. It's oftentimes viewed that way, though, where someone's young, so surely that means that they could be the best player of all time. No, not that many people have the best player of all time upside. Even I mean, and and any given year, there's probably only one or two guys that even could be in that conversation, yet we want to assign these giant values to prospects in all the leagues. And sometimes you'll see prospects outselling these established stars that are definitely going to the Hall of Fame. Why is that, right? And it's because I, in my opinion, I think it's because people are trying to get in on the ground floor. They think there's more potential for the card's value to rise even higher. And a lot of times that comes back to well, this guy's young, so he has time to figure it out. Yeah, big dumper.
SPEAKER_01:Big dumper is gonna be the one. Um, yeah, I think the another point to that is I believe that when they're young, they have less cards. And I don't just believe that I know that. So when they're young, they've had less cards printed. So people can only buy a certain amount of cards, right? Because they've if they're a rookie, they only have one card, or if they have their prospect card, Bowman Chrome, and they have their tops rookie. And so it's like all the demand gets focused in on that, and all the hopium gets thrown into just those two cards. I mean, now we have 18,000 parallels as you brought up earlier. But I always think that's really interesting too. Most of the time, the card supplies end up getting larger and larger as the player's career goes and their opportunities or their end paths become narrower and narrower to what they're eventually going to be, right? But when their first rookies, they have all the potential in the world. They could do anything. They could be the next Mark McGuire, they could be the next Mickey Mannell, they could be anything they want to be, and it's focused into those few cards.
SPEAKER_00:Now, I love the way you put that about the the you know potential path to where they're ultimately going to end up narrowing over time. Because I think of it the same way I would, I think I've used uh different words to describe the same phenomenon, though, where it's like the more we know about a player, the less volatile they're going to be. Because we are basically going back to what is the card market's expectation performance-wise for this player, it becomes more accurate over time because we have a bigger sample size of performance to look back to. So, okay, if this guy has been a 30 home run hitter 10 years in a row, I'm gonna guess he's gonna hit somewhere around 30 home runs again this this upcoming season. So we have more to go off of when we're trying to get speculative and predict what's going to happen next. Probably unlikely that that guy goes out and hits 60 home runs. So, you know, that's that's the way I would look at that. The one thing I'll push back on a little bit is just the uh the card supply. As a card investor, I'm primarily looking at rookie cards, and that's one of the beauties of the card market, is there's so much desire for rookie cards, even beyond their rookie season, that I rarely even go after veteran cards. There are times where it makes sense and certain grading plays that make sense. Um, but for a lot of the stuff that I'm looking at, it's rookie stuff, and that is a fixed number of cards once all the products have been released. So yeah, I definitely can see it because some of the money will get spread out a little bit as more cards come out. But I think the the investing crowd is more focused on rookie stuff than any other year.
SPEAKER_01:That's a very key point. Uh when I think about things and I talk about these things with guests, we always talk about how there's a rookie pool and then there's all the other pool. Right. Because the rookie pool is at least limited, whereas they can print everything on the moon now.
SPEAKER_00:Well, and what's the difference? Like, what's the I'll I'll pose that question too. Like, what's the difference between an eighth-year card and a third-year card, or a fifth-year card and a let's say a 20th year card for LeBron James or Tom Brady or one of these guys that's hung around for forever, it seems like. I don't know really, unless they got traded to a team or something. Like, but even then, you just don't typically see that big of a difference from your 18 compared to your 14. Like it's it's just it's rookies and then it's everything else. So I like the way you put that too.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and the way I think about those different cards, which I also mostly play in the rookie sandbox, I find it to be a small sandbox, and I like that. So I think of the difference as only being which player, which people, which types of collectors are going to collect this card, and I try and limit it to that because the the flipping strategies are gonna be constant, I think, but the collecting appetite varies. So if you look at Tom Brady, if I'm a set collector, it's not really gonna change much. That's pretty consistent. But if I'm a player collector or a team collector, my team collecting is gonna vary. If I'm a Buccaneers fan, then I'm gonna get that. So the market changes from a New England fan. And then also like if I'm An iconic moments collector or a photo collector. You know, maybe the photo is a little bit more iconic. It juices the demand a little bit. But I think all in all it's all very marginal. And I think that's reflected in the price. Most of the players are pretty consistent year three versus year seven, except for those differences of who collects what. Okay, so let's wrap up a little bit here. Thank you so much for elucidating all of your ideas that you have in your book and also that you share with your clients. Let's cut through all of the complex stuff and give me the simplest way to win with cards.
SPEAKER_00:Grade cards. Grade high upside cards. And this is probably the one hill that I will die on in the card market. If you learn nothing from me but this one thing, please target higher upside cards to grade. It's just math. You will win bigger. You can be objectively worse at grading, get a lower gem rate, but still get the same or better results if you target higher upside cards. Just to give you an example of that, if you are targeting a card that's$25 and sells for$85 as a PSA 10, not bad, right? You pay$20, you know, you're into it for$45 and you get$85 out of it as a 10. All right, not bad. But what if you targeted a card that's$25 and sold for$175 as a PSA 10? And by the way, those cards are out there. Um built a software that will find them for you. So they are out there and it's it's one of the things that will make you more money than anything else because it takes the same amount of time, it's the same risk. You're you're paying the same grading fee. You're just getting way more on the back end for the work that you're putting into going and identifying cards that are clean enough to grade. So if you're going to grade cards, target high upside cards. It's man, it's one of the biggest unlocks. You'll go so much faster than when you're splitting hairs on the low-end stuff. The the cards that look clean enough to grade, so you send them off and it's 32 bucks as a 10, and you you might be able to scrape three or four dollars after all your fees. And it's like, don't waste your time, guys. Go out and make big money. There is so much to be made if you can just find some of these cards that have the big time upside attached to them. Well, Ryan, don't be shy. Tell us more about the software. We launched this this year, and this is something that I've I've just lived through the pain of having to do this the long way for long enough. And I was like, man, there's got to be a way now that we could we could automate this process. But it's called the card opportunity and investing navigator or coin for short. But effectively what it does is it shows you a ranked list at any given time of the top cards to target for grading purposes, and it uses all the key data points. So we're not just looking at upside, we're looking at like the gem rates and the nine rates and the you know, we're filtering out outliers. So there's a whole algorithm that goes into this. But um, it's a you know, we've it's a patent pending software where we have uh basically created a uh a shortcut for finding the cards that at least have the biggest upside, so you don't have to manually check every single card on the entire market. This software will do it for you. And then it's still your job to go out and find the clean cards, which is definitely a challenge sometimes. You I mean you you it'll take effort to do that, but we can at least shortcut the research step. So you can effectively do five hours of research in five seconds using the tool.
SPEAKER_01:Is it going to be cost effective for me to use this coin?
SPEAKER_00:Uh it depends. I mean, if you are someone who grades cards regularly, you're buying cards to grade every single month, then yeah, it's probably going to be more than worth it because it'll save you all the time and the uh it'll help you find objectively higher upside cards to target. And one of the things that I found was I would do all the research manually and I'd find a play where I could make, you know, 2.4x if it got a PSA 10. That's a pretty good turnaround, um, you know, pretty good ROI on a uh card. But what I didn't realize is that there would be a card that was the same price raw that was selling for 4.5x. And I could have been targeting that similar gym rates and everything. And that's where, all right, the the software will make sure that you're not overlooking opportunities that are out there. Now we I will say uh if you don't grade cards regularly, don't buy it. You're not gonna get it's a it's effectively a grading tool for today. So I would not don't waste the money on it if if uh that's not something that you're actively doing right now. Awesome.
SPEAKER_01:Uh, where can people find that? Where can people find you?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, uh the the software is the cardboardcoin.com. If you want to find my best stuff though, so I run a program, I call it Cardboard Profit Ignite. It is again the straightest line path to get to, let's say, 500 bucks per month and then scale from there with cards. We've streamlined everything. We've got custom built tools, you get like a member rate on coin if you decide to subscribe to that. We've built structure in. So if you're not sure what to do, you want to make money in this space and you don't know where to start, we're gonna help you get there. And it's not one of those things where you're paying thousands of dollars. It's it's pretty, pretty affordable where you're you're you're getting a lot for what it is. Uh, I'll just put it that way. So, but it's it's like the community. So you have a place to a sounding board if you have questions like, hey, is this card centered? Can I get a second opinion from someone? You have structure. We do live coaching calls every single week where I'm hopping on, helping folks with questions and just talking shop with the group. We have a full system that's built out that that breaks down my exact strategies for how do we get to X dollars per month and a tool that models that out for you. So it's effectively it's everything you need to get where you're trying to go with cards. And um, we I'm just this is I'm excited about it because we're we're launching all this new stuff in the past week or two here, but just announced a grading partnership as well where we can get you better than direct to PSA grading cost. Um, so there's there's a lot of good things going on in this in this space. It's again cardboard profit ignite. The easiest way to find me is probably just go on Instagram and it's card at cardboard profit. Link in my bio has all this stuff. But uh, if you don't want to buy stuff, that's okay too. I'd put a ton of free content out there. Just started a YouTube channel to do some more long form stuff that I'm excited about. There's a lot of topics to talk about here, Matt. So we gotta get some space for that stuff. Uh and I I have a mailing list to put together a big guide that's some of the the costly mistakes that are out there in the market and how to fix them fast. So all that stuff is for you. Hell yeah, that's a lot of resources.
SPEAKER_01:And uh I will also plug your book myself because I bought the book and I read it. So cardboard profit. You can find it on Amazon. And I have also uh subscribed to Coin. So I've looked at the platform, I can tell you it literally says, here's your expected ROI, this is the gem rate, all the information you need to quickly, if you decide, hey, I have a$5,000,$1,000,$500 budget. Where can I make some money off of this and maybe try it out? Try it for a month, just see what happens. If nothing else, you'll learn a lot of lessons and you'll probably make some money. But even if you break even, knowledge is the most valuable asset. Ryan, I appreciate the knowledge that you've shared with us, and um, it's been so good to talk to you always. So before we let you go, why don't we do one last segment? We'll do a quick rapid fire. Yes or no answers, put you on the hot seat. So first one, who's the most overrated player market right now?
SPEAKER_00:Bryce Young hasn't done enough, way too overpriced right now, in my opinion. Could be wrong, but a lot of hopium on Bryce. He's had like two or three good games in his career so far, and his values are up by 90% since the end of last season. Not sure. I don't know, guys. That's a math. That's a math.
SPEAKER_01:Short king power. All right, number two, better long-term sport for investment, baseball or basketball.
SPEAKER_00:I'll say basketball has some interesting cards because the stars are huge stars in pop culture, but baseball probably has the wider market, so I'll go baseball longer term.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, I like it. Going back to the old faithful of baseball. A better short-term play, UFC or soccer. You better get this right.
SPEAKER_00:I am out of my realm on this one, and I don't pretend to know things that I don't actually do. So I would defer on this question completely, but the one thing that I'm aware of is that the World Cup is coming to the United States next year, so I see that as a big opportunity for soccer cards in the short term here. Other than that, I don't know either anything about either of those two sports, so I won't pretend to.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. We're gonna take that as a hundred percent certainty for Ryan. That's going to be soccer. Thank you. Will the parallel system be the same in 10 years?
SPEAKER_00:Oh man, that's a good question. Let's just zoom out and say fanatics takes over in the near future here. They are they are heavily incentivized to continue to pump out more parallels because they can sell more products. So why would they not? Is kind of the question there. What I think will happen on the secondary market, though, is there will be a consolidation of where people's money goes because they'll realize over time that some of these parallels really don't hold value as well. And sometimes when the numbering changes or they remove a parallel from one year to the next, it can actually really hurt values. So it'll be the parallels that have been around for a long time that stay consistent. So the true gold refractor numbered out of 50 for Topps Chrome, the blue refractor autograph numbered out of 150 from Bowman Chrome, you know, a prism gold numbered out of 10. You know, some of these like just cornerstone parallels that have been around for a long time. I imagine those will be the ones that longer term will do the best. That was not a two-word answer, by the way.
SPEAKER_01:That was no, that was good though. I absolutely agree with that. I never buy orange waves or anything like that. It's just there's too many.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. You can make money in anything, but you know, the numbers gotta be right. And I think longer term, I just wouldn't hold that stuff necessarily.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And there's already a discount. Orange versus orange wave. There's already a discount baked in the market's telling you something. Because you brought up Topps versus Panini, do you believe that this shift that is coming will result in a bigger bump for Topps or a bigger bump for Panini past cards?
SPEAKER_00:Another good question. I don't actually know that I see it having that big of an impact at all. Because if we look at what happened the first time when Topps lost the license, you can look at a Topps Chrome Steph Curry rookie card right now. Like a Topps Chrome refractor as a PSA 10 is like a$90,000 card. They're doing pretty well, even though Topps does not have the license. The Bowman 2,000 Tom Brady rookie card, those do really well. Like, so there are examples where we've seen cards hold value and continue to rise pretty endlessly. That one.
SPEAKER_01:It's a big, it's a I could see I could make arguments either way for it. I could be like, hey, Panini, everyone's gonna be like, oh, they lost the license. Maybe they'll never have it back again. So now prisms become more expensive. Or it could be like, oh, Tops Chrome, Tops Chrome. Everybody's talking about it with all the marketing now that FNAX puts out. So could go either way. I'm really interested to see which one it does. Last one, what's the biggest problem with the card industry right now?
SPEAKER_00:Biggest problem is that there is such a push to turn the card world into a casino and it's all over social media, trying to get dragged into breaks, you know, pushing the highlight reel that's on social media. What you don't see is all the packs in between those monster hits. Go to your local card shop, buy a box. I'm all for that stuff. It's fun doing packs and stuff. It's just not a good investment, though. Like objectively, you're likely going to lose a lot of money playing that game. And what I would like to share with the world is that once again, I don't know everything, but there is another way. It's proven we've got people doing this that started from zero. Like you can win with cards once you learn the key strategies and you just know where to focus and can kind of cut out all the other noise. But yeah, short answer is I'm not a big fan of the gambling culture. I'd rather create my own luck.
SPEAKER_01:Well said. Well said. It's just there's too many things going on. Um too many variables, right? And we want to eliminate as many variables as possible to get down to the math of being profitable. So uh well said. And with that, to usher us out here, uh, thank you so much for being here and upgrading our investing IQ. That's what I feel like this session has been. So I hope so. Thank you, Ryan, for coming on. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. It's been a real pleasure. Tell the people one more time where they can find you and where they can find ways to increase that IQ even more with your products.
SPEAKER_00:Probably the easiest way right now is go to my Instagram. It's at cardboard profit. You can follow all the free tips on there. If you want more than that, there's links in my bio. You'll find it. Amazing. All right. Thanks so much for coming again, man.
SPEAKER_01:We'll talk to you later. Man, let's do it again sometime. All right, guys. Hope you enjoyed that interview with Ryan. He's a down-to-earth guy and also looks at a lot of the same things that I look at. So that's really nice for me. We'll have him again onto the podcast at some point in the future, I'm sure of that. So thanks so much for listening today. Keep building, and I'll talk to you later.
