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
Investing vs. Collecting Ft. Jeremy Lee of Sports Cards Live
Welcome to another episode of Slabnomics, where sports cards meet finance, collecting, and market theory. Today’s special guest is Jeremy Lee, host of Sports Cards Live and one of the most respected voices in the hobby. With thousands of hours of content logged, Jeremy brings unmatched insight into how collectors balance passion with financial decisions.
In this conversation, we cover:
- How to think about sports cards as an alternative asset class
- The balance between collecting vs investing (and why intention matters)
- Jeremy’s concept of “flight collecting” vs traditional set collecting
- The pitfalls of grading companies, PSA 9 vs PSA 10 premiums, and why eye appeal matters more than the label
- Lessons from 45+ years in the hobby, from vintage Grails to modern hype cycles
- Frameworks for diversification, liquidity, and timing your exits
Whether you’re a seasoned investor or just starting your collection, this episode will give you practical frameworks to make smarter financial decisions in the sports card market—without losing the joy of collecting.
🔔 Subscribe for more conversations on sports card investing, market cycles, and collector psychology.
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All right. Today we're going to welcome a special guest, Jeremy Lee, one of the people that has the most minutes logged when it comes to sports card content out there. Jeremy, how are you doing today? Welcome on. I'm good, Matthew.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_00:Happy to be here. Absolutely, absolutely. So with Slabnomics and what we're trying to do in our mission to help people make better financial decisions, it's really great to have you on. As I've heard, some of your podcasts have gone on about financial decisions people can make and how you can maybe not flip, but work your way into having more money through sports cards. Is that kind of an accurate way to describe some of the things that you've talked about?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's the mission of my content on sports cards live is not just talking about money. We we talk about the hobby. I'm a collector first. We talk about collecting, but I'm one of those collectors that realizes that when I'm spending money that is a significant amount of money to me, that I'm also investing that money. And I want to know what I'm going to get out of that card when I eventually sell it or my estate sells it after I'm gone, whenever that might be. So we talk a lot on my content really about approaches to the hobby, different styles of collecting, different things to collect. But it inevitably, the financial aspects inevitably come up in conversation because these things cost so much money. It's not like when I was growing up in the 80s, buying packs for 25 cents to build my complete set of tops baseball or Opeachy hockey. That's not what this is anymore. Now we are spending significant dollars in many cases to add a card to our collection. And the content that myself and my guests talk about is often framed that way. It's important, I think, if you're going to be an investor, that you love what you're investing in. And sports cards is maybe one of the very few asset classes, if I can call them that, where you're investing in versus just a stock symbol on your screen when you log into your investment accounts.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. And you can absolutely call it an alternative asset class here. We'll definitely welcome that. Believe that when it comes to those investment decisions that you mentioned, that there's a bar that you have is what's that bar that you set when you're talking about it?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, great question. And it's gonna be different for everybody, but the bar is, and it's a movable bar, I would say, Matthew, in that can just depend on my mood. But you really, your mood, like what else is going on in the world? If I just had to spend 12 grand to fix to fix something on my house, I might not be as willing to spend three grand on a sports card or even five hundred dollars. So the bar for me, I will regularly buy cards from$5 to say$200 and not think too much about what I'm gonna get out of them at the end of the day as far as money. Those are collector cards for me. But if I'm spending four, five hundred dollars or more, that's a chunk of money. And I think about where do I want that to land from an accounting perspective? I am an accountant by trade. So I always think about, you know, anytime you're spending money, you have a journal entry into your personal set of financials. And you're gonna you're gonna either a debit and a credit. You're gonna credit the cash, or if you're borrowing money on your credit card, you're gonna credit your liability, but you're gonna credit your cash and you're gonna debit something. And there's two places the debit can go. One is to an asset, which falls under your balance sheet and becomes part of your net worth. And the other option is as an expense on your profit and loss, your income statement, and then it's just runs through in the current period as an expense. So expenses, when you expense an expenditure, you'd say it's it's done. Whatever I recover, I'm gonna recover. It's like going to a restaurant, eating food. You're not that's not an asset that goes in your balance sheet. That's an expense. So to me, if I'm spending anything under, say, 250, I look at it as an expense. And once I hit that 250 to$500 threshold, I start thinking, okay, this is gonna be an asset on my balance sheet because eventually this will be sold, whether it's before or after I die, and there will be money recovered. So I'm gonna say for the sake of our discussion right now, my threshold is somewhere between$250 and$500.
SPEAKER_00:I appreciate that explanation. And I believe that I would love for you to give that talk to my girlfriend as well, because she's always getting the dinners. And I just need you to convince her that it's about putting these assets. Put it all into sports cards, babe. Sorry, we can't do dinners. We need some assets in the house.
SPEAKER_01:And you know what? I should have your girlfriend talk to my wife who can vouch that sports cards can provide you with some financial reward, even security down the road. They are, I think cards are a really strong store of value. They may not be investments to everybody, but a store of value, at least you're gonna get something out of it down the road. So you might spend$500 on a card. That's not$500 that's gone forever. You might get back$100,$500, or$5,000 for it down the road. It's tough to know. And that's where being savvy and having experience and maybe a bit of foresight, which comes with experience, can come in really handy and be beneficial.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, talk to us a little bit about when we're saying foresight and talking about planning things out as a CPA. I'm sure that you speak a lot about diversification and how you can hedge against risk with your clients. How does that apply to sports cards?
SPEAKER_01:Hedging against risk and diversification. Yeah, I think there's a point though where you have to not be too diversified in sports cards. First of all, we're talking if we're talking about diversifying sports cards versus other types of assets, I'm not the right guy to ask because I'm heavy in sports cards. My net worth. I hear my a good friend of mine, Greg, does a show called Midlife Cards, and he says he does not consider his sports cards to be a part of his net worth. I certainly do, because my sports cards are worth more than anything else that own. So they're definitely a part of that. But to be over-diversified might mean spreading yourself too thin or investing in certain cards that you don't know much about, or sports, or segments, or players. So you I think you always have to lead both with your heart and your head. You might not love Michael Jordan, but he's the most blue chip investment in the sports card hobby that's out there, followed by maybe Mickey Mantle and Tom Brady and Wayne Gretzky, LeBron, Kobe. So I don't want to, I don't give investment advice on my content on my YouTube channel, Sports Cards Live. I rather I prefer to say to people, you can collect what you're nostalgic for. And if what you are nostalgic for is, I don't know, pick a player, Kirby Puckett, but you can invest all your money into Kirby Puckett, but you're not really investing in that case. You're that's not gonna, you're not gonna see crazy returns. So you have to balance loving what you're investing in or collecting along with what you think is smart to buy and will have a good financial result down the road. So diversifying, like I it's a tough one to really address because what I do is I collect vintage Hall of Famers that I enjoy, and I collect modern goat type of players. Picking the player is only one piece of it. Then you have to pick the right cards. And it's easy in the world of vintage, it's easy. There's not a lot to choose from, but in modern, it's much more complex. There's so many more layers and nuance, and you have to sometimes get lucky to pick the right card. Here's something I can tell you, Matthew. What I used to, when I used to open up an open product, I used to go to the LCS on a monthly trade night. I'm talking about the late 2000s, early 2010s. I'd spend$1,000 on packs and boxes, and I'd feel like I just wasted$1,000. So I would force myself, I'd say, if I'm gonna spend$500 on breaking wax, I'm gonna spend$500 on a single that I think will have good lasting power to balance myself out. Now I just don't open wax at all because it's literally gambling and a losing, unless you get really lucky, you're gonna lose your shirt. That's the best advice I can give everybody is buy specific cards versus opening product if you really care about the financial results.
SPEAKER_00:And to call out another point when you were speaking about collecting versus investing, those are two different dollars. And you can only put one dollar into one thing. So trying to figure out what do I really want, what's my aim, what's my purpose here? Do I want to collect? Do I want to finish something? Do I want to show my loyalty to a team, to a player, to uh certain do I want to collect offensive linemen, or do I just want to complete sets? They're all very interesting things to think about and to get some kind of picture of who you are through the card collecting or through the card investing. I think we all go through that journey of finding out who we are, what cards we like. You get a card in the mail and you thought it was going to be awesome. You see it, you don't feel anything, and you're just like, ah, I guess I'll just sell it. I don't know if that ever happens to you, but it happens to me all the time. Get it and just move it right back out. But uh yeah, I think putting the heart and the mind together is something that I preach a lot about with my investment thesis. And one of the pieces of advice I give a lot of times is just to sleep on it because we do get caught up in the emotion of things a lot of times. And the hobby can be very nostalgia, but also emotion driven. So is that something that you ever talk about on channel? What are the hype circles that you're seeing these days as well?
SPEAKER_01:A couple of things you said that I'll touch on. You mentioned identity. I think that's one of my favorite topics because a lot of collectors do look at themselves within the hobby based on what cards they have. And especially if you are sharing your collection on social media like Instagram or X or YouTube or Facebook, you can be known based on the what you collect, which will just open doors for you and bring more people who will send you, hey, I saw this, or do you need it, or that kind of thing. So, first of all, I think being public with what you collect is helpful. And we all have our identities in our within our circles of influence, our families, our friends, but within the hobby, you get to pick another, you get to create a new identity. You are still who you are as a person, but your cards help signal to people what your approach to the hobby is. And I love that about the hobby. There's no two exact same approaches or identities out there, and that's so cool. Another thing off topic is that the hobby, we all have a shared love for collecting cardboard and sports cards. Doesn't matter what your background is, race, religion, skin color, political affiliation, favorite sports team. Doesn't really matter. We all can find some common ground with our love for sports cards. I used to be a set collector. I don't collect sets anymore because it forces you to buy cards of players you might not care about. You care more about the set than the players. So I stopped doing that. The other issue I have with set collecting is that when you do decide to sell, you're almost always gonna take a loss. No one is going to reward you for your time and effort. They're gonna pay you for the best cards, and the rest are gonna look at it as a throw-in. So set collecting is collecting, it is not investing in my mind. And then your question, hype cycles and stuff. So can you clarify what you meant by that by the hype cycle question?
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. And first, just very salient point about set collecting that really is just about for you, and you're not going to get very good value out of it. And small tangent, but it's so much better in vintage, I feel like. I'm a vintage baseball guy, actually, to my heart. So when I look at what collector, what sets I'd go and collect, it would mostly be those old baseball, the black beauties, things like that.
SPEAKER_01:Let me Matthew, sorry, I have to jump in here because I'm very passionate about this. So, what I talk about a lot on my channel, and like my show is Saturday nights, it goes for about three hours, and I bring on different guests throughout the night. This Saturday, I think I have five people coming through as an example. And we talk about all sorts of different things. But one thing that is often talked about and has recently been talked about, because I'm really passionate about it, is are you familiar with type collecting? Maybe not by the name. So type collecting, and I'm it's newish to me too, but you'll recognize it. It's when it's a collector who just wants to have one card of each set that's ever been made, let's say. Every one type of each card made. So maybe 133 Gaudi, 148 Leaf, one M101, one E90-2, one T206, that kind of thing. That's type collecting. You only need one card from each set. I've expanded the concept of type collecting into something I call flight collecting. When you go to a pub and you can order a flight of beers, you'll get a sample of five different beers, right? Two to four ounces each. So this is my compromise between type collecting and set collecting. Again, I don't want to have to collect all 50 cards from the 48 Bowman set or however many there are, because I might only care about five or six of them. The rest I don't need just because someone decided to put them on the checklist back in the day. So what I've done now is I've resorted to what I call flight collecting based on that beer model, where 1948 Bowman or 1948 Leaf, a beautiful set. I think I have three cards from the set right now. I think I'm going to acquire one or two more and I'll be done with 48 Leaf. I don't need to see all the other cards from that set. 33 Gaudi, I've got three or four cards from that set. I'm done. That's my flight collecting. And to me, it's a really nice compromise. It stops me from having to buy cards of players I've never heard of because I don't need to complete the set. And it allows me to now go by, take that money I would have otherwise spent and go buy cards from 49 Bowman of guys like Satchel Page or Jackie Robinson or Yogi Berra or whoever, usual. Cards I love, talking a lot lately in my content about not what I call not being a slave to a checklist.
SPEAKER_00:The reason that I like that is I think it does speak more to being very purposeful about what you're doing and not just drawing within someone else's lines. As you point out, the manufacturers, they would love everybody just to set collect because then they drive up values of all the players that maybe are less desirable in those sets. But I love that flight collecting because it manifests some activity within you. I think it's very personal versus tying your identity into something, you're tying it into something more particular. What would you say are certain characteristics or aspects of your flights that you find repeat themselves through your collecting?
SPEAKER_01:Fun question. I don't need every single card. That's the whole point of this flight collecting or my new style. Listen, I also just want to say that I told you before we start, I've been collecting for 45 years. And I'm always things are changing. This whole flight collecting thing is literally new in 2025 for me, and I love it. I'm super passionate about it. It gets me off. I I just I'm so excited and passionate about it that it's re-inv not like I needed reinvigorating, but it's true, it's up invigorated me this year, and I'm just so excited by it.
SPEAKER_00:Spiced it up a little bit for you. You gotta keep it spicy. So does it make it just a different framework for you to hunt within?
SPEAKER_01:Really? My jam right now is low grade, high eye appeal vintage. Okay. These cards I showed you, they all present. I mean, that right there. Look at that. It's a PSA. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Nice centering on it. I can't see enough detail to see the corners, but just with the centering alone, integrated.
SPEAKER_01:They're not sharp, but they're evenly rounded. The backs is clean. The problem with this card, there's the light wrinkle that comes down right over here. You can't even see. But this card, what I paid for, I bought it a year ago, like right now, a year ago, like right now. If this didn't have that little wrinkle, this is now goes from a one to a five or a six. This card would cost me, I don't know, dollars. What I don't know exactly, but a lot more than it cost me. Instead, I got a beautiful example for less. So to me, it's that 33. Is that 33 Gaudi? 33 Gaudi, yeah. And this one here, too. Look, I paired, I bought this at the national this year, the Lou Gehrick rookie. This is a PSA one as well. It's beautiful. There's nothing wrong with the front. The back has a little bit of paper loss, little bit of paper loss.
SPEAKER_00:But it's always the paper loss for me. Just the tiny little corner that has paper loss, and then it's down to a one.
SPEAKER_01:And say it can save you a I'd say paper loss on the back and micro wrinkles on the front are my best friend because they save me tens of thousands of dollars. And PSA, I think, unfairly penalizes for them. Like I appeal is catching on as a value generator versus just what PSA says the grade is.
SPEAKER_00:Very true. And there's many avenues we could go down that route. I believe that the PSA dominance isn't going to be here for too much longer. I think they're getting a little bit top-heavy, but of course, I also can't call tops and bottoms. If I could, I would own an island somewhere. Exactly. I just think at some point someone else is going to pop up and there's many people vying for that position, many companies. But uh, you bring up a valid point, always buy the card, not the grade. And that's so salient today with PSA nines a lot of times going for less than raw.
SPEAKER_01:And there's no difference.
SPEAKER_00:How do you feel about that having been in the hobby for 45 years?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think it's silly. First of all, I think the PSA 10 premium is just a it's Kool-Aid. It's a spell. The hobby is under a spell. PSA has put the spell on the hobby, and people are sheep and they don't think for themselves. They don't even look at the card, they just look at the number on the slab. You see it all the time. A PSA 10 Wilt Chamberlain just sold on Heritage on Saturday night for just shy of a million dollars. They also had a PSA 8 in the same auction that was a lot nicer than the PSA 10. The PSA 8 sold for 50, or actually it sold on Sunday. I don't know what it ended at, say 50, 60,000. So you could have saved yourself$900 and something thousand dollars and had a nicer card and then bought yourself a house or a vacation property or a small island somewhere. It's just, to me, it's just stupid because not all tens are the same. Grading standards slightly change, adherence to grading standards change all the time. How many of those PSA 10s used to be in a PSA 9 holder? And how many PSA 9s used to be in PSA 8 holders, etc. If I'm buying a card for six figures or seven figures and it's in a PSA 10 holder, but it used to be in a PSA 9 holder, but somebody resubmitted it to finally get the grade they wanted? How would you like that? How would you like knowing that your card on another day, another grader at PSA thought it was a nine, but now they say it's a 10? It to me is just wildly silly. And I think the hobby's going to mature past that soon for the better. And investors will start to realize that the grade is only one piece. How does the card look? Especially in vintage where it makes more of a difference. But in modern, the difference between a nine and a ten is negligible. You can't even see it half the time.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And most of the time when I send things in and I think they're a nine, they get a ten, and vice versa, especially on that ten to nine. So yeah, I do think condition is incredibly important, but to your point, you do have to grade the card, not the holder. And we fall into that all the time. And I wonder how many cards are resubmitted to PSA. They just have this factory going where you send it in, you look at it for 15 minutes, and you're like, this is a solid 10. There is no fleck on this thing. It's perfect. And then you get it back in. It's like an eight. I sent in an order the other week, and I don't want to rant about this, but I sent in an order that I vetted, and every single card in there came under by one to two grades. And I've sent in a decent amount of cards. I'm sure you've sent in more than I and many people have. But I've seen enough where sure you're going to get a good amount wrong, but even getting half wrong by a grade makes sense. But I think I ended up getting 12 grades lower than I thought in 10 cards. And I was just like, what is going on here? And uh it makes you distrust the system, as you should distrust the system.
SPEAKER_01:The system is not consistent or reproducible or accurate. So it's pop control, it's quotas, even if they're not formalized. It's also, this is the common thing people say, but it's true. Graders are making 23 bucks an hour in many cases. They don't have nearly as much experience in the hobby as I do, or many, I don't know about how long you've been in, or many experienced collectors. They're not their cards. They don't necessarily care. I'll never call grading a scam because it's not a scam. If you look at what a scam is, it's more of a sham. It's because the public just gives it so much credibility, and really they've proven that they don't deserve that much credibility. I don't think. Now, I will say I do love graded cards, and I have I love all my vintage, I like it in a PSA slab, but I don't submit to PSA like I used to. I don't anymore. I haven't for years. I'd rather just, I'm not gonna take that gamble because your tens could come back eights because they gave out enough tens that day or that shift or whatever. I do believe that. So I buy pre-graded cards, and then like I said, I buy the lower the grade the better for me, because that just means I'm getting great value. And I still think it's their investment worthy as well, because they I believe that in the long term, discerning collectors and investors will be willing to give more value on a card that looks great versus one that's just in a holder that shouldn't be in that holder.
SPEAKER_00:Let's talk about that a little bit because when we ascribe value to something, you're right. When you say a lot of people are sheep, humans are herd animals, if you will. We're meant to be together. We get clues from each other, and we want someone at the end of the day to tell us what to do and to validate us. And that's what grading is, in a way. Before all this grading back in the 80s, when you started, there weren't any graders, right? So it was just a matter of maybe Beckett was going in the 80s, but PSA started in '93, right?
SPEAKER_01:PSA started came first. I think G AI might have come first. But yeah, PSA came first in the early 90s. Beckett came around a few years later, mid to late 90s.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So before then, it was all just there was unanimity, there was agreement, right, between people who saw I appeal. And if you get a hundred people to look at something, they're going to find the median average. So that's how it used to be. And it makes so much more sense in vintage where you have such a capped supply and there was one release of most cards. Yeah. Before we get into all that modern stuff. So nowadays, when you have all the hypermodern 18,000 different parallels, and the only difference is a serial number, I think it's trained us to be hyper-reliant on PSA and on any grading company to tell us the difference between all of these. It's almost like they're the gatekeepers of what is different and where values should be held. I don't know your thoughts on that, but as someone who's been around pre-grading, I'd be interested to hear your perspective as to how the community values have shifted through your collecting life experience.
SPEAKER_01:You're right. Like it's before grading, before PSA caught on and BGS came out in SGC. I had a card shop from 91 to 94 before I knew about grading, even. And I used to get a card into my shop, I'd put it on the shelf and I'd say mint, near mint, whatever it was. I just looked at the Beckett magazine, what they had, and came up with what I thought the card was. That's how it worked. Everybody just was a cowboy. We could do whatever we wanted. Hopefully, you're not trying to mislead people and over-grade your cards. That's why grading became a thing, was because there were too many opinions out there, and the internet became a thing, and people were buying cards sight unseen remotely. So having a third-party grader became key to the hobby getting to where it did, and the hobby embracing the global economy, which is where we're at. Now we don't even think twice about it. And so I don't think grading first came about to ascribe value, it came to make the community a safer place to transact. But what ended up happening is it became the source of value. People are so blinded by that 10 on a slab, they don't care what the card looks like. If you knew that every PSA 10 you're buying used to live in a PSA 9 slab, how would you feel about that? Now some people are gonna say, I don't care, it's in a 10 now, that's all that matters to me. Okay, I just don't get that. Fine, that's great. So you're not collecting cards, you're collecting PSA slabs. And some people I think readily will admit that. So that's something I just take I just don't respect that. I collect however makes you happy. That's fine. I don't have to respect it, but I can at least respect you. All the power to you. Doesn't mean I have to respect it or think that it's smart. Sure.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I I think all men hunt. And we love collecting as a manifestation of that in some way. People do it different ways, they have different flavors, if you will, of what they're hunting for and how they do it. But we want to find maybe some people hunt for credibility, some people hunt for completion, they hunt for identity, they hunt for status. But at the end of the day, it's good to be knowledgeable about what you're doing and to be self-aware around why you're doing what you do. Because I think that can be part of people's journey in self-awareness in kind of a broader umbrella, right? If I'm collecting these things, I'm sure you've done this. Well, you shared that the collecting flight idea is very new. So I'm sure you've done different things through the past, but I've changed how I collect multiple times. And I've only been in this for a year. And I started with just Packers, and I'm like, at my heart, there's more to me than just being a Packers fan. So, how do I manifest that with where this dollar goes? So I've had multiple evolutions to the point where now I collect things that I think are truly iconic, not just like I'm going to get every goat. It's more like when I think of a card and I think of what it represents, if it can be displayed to me with one card, then I go buy that card. You know, for instance, Ricky Henderson, his 1980 rookie card. I have that card with an inscription that says Man of Steel, S-T-E-A-L. And I love that because that is who Ricky Henderson is. And it's such a cool little tagline, and it's something that I think will never be replicated forever. Whenever I talk about it, I get goosebumps. So having that card means a lot more to me than having a Mark Chamura card from 1998. So I love when people have different journeys that they go through in the cards world, and then they come to a full realization of something for themselves through cards, because I think that's really important for us as human beings. I I agree.
SPEAKER_01:So a couple things you said there. First of all, the Henderson rookie is one of my favorite cards. It was it was one of the I bought my first Henderson rookie in April of 1991 in Los Angeles. I was on my way home from Australia just out of high school. And I and then I got rid of it years ago, probably when I opened my shop a few years after that. I just reacquired my Henderson rookie back in in April at the Sport Card Expo in Toronto. I got a gorgeous, I think it's a PSA 7, but it looks like a nine. Again, just a good value card there for me. But you talked about evolving. We touched on it earlier, too. And it's something that I think some people get caught up in the headspace of this is who I am. This is my identity. It can never change. And I say, let it change. There are so many cards out there to discover that if you put yourself into a vacuum, you're gonna miss out on so many things. There's no shame in changing course. There's no shame in not liking it and falling out of love with the card. You mentioned it earlier too. I've ordered cards on or bought cards on eBay or wherever that I hadn't seen in hand. I think they look good, they land, I see them, I'm like, oh, this isn't what I thought it was. I don't like it. Like I thought I was gonna like it, gone. Don't I don't need to keep it just because I liked it at one time or I'm gonna feel bad about selling a card. I have found the giving myself permission to fall out of love with cards, move on from projects, whether they're completed or not, if I just get bored, do it. Don't like chase good money after bad or good time after bad because you feel like you're too far in. I think that's liberating, very liberating. And then I want to also mention this goes back a few minutes in our discussion, but you talked about doing research into cards. You mentioned when you're looking at what to buy, how much research, I think you might have asked me even how much research do you do or how do you approach it? I don't think I got a chance to answer it. But you mentioned about sleeping on it. You said sleep on it, right? Do you sleep on things? I think that's really good advice. And so much so that it depends what the where you are, like what the landscape of the purchase is or the card acquisition. But if you see a card that hits an auction on eBay, let's say that's gonna last a week, you've got a week to make up your mind and do your research. Yeah, there was a card that hit Fanatics Collect Premiere Auction back in March, and I had 10 days to decide what I wanted to do. And it ended up being the biggest transaction of my sports card life. I ended up acquiring this card and did a whole consolidation on it, but I spent probably 40 researching this card. What did it sold for in the past, what other copies look like, the difference between the two sets that it appears in? It's a 1914 Cracker Jack Joe Jackson. So it's a Grail card and it there it appeared in 1915 again. Talked to people about it, learned about more about Joe Jackson. I did a ton of research into it to decide what I was willing to do. I still went above my maximum in the auction. I got caught up in an auction in a bidding war, but ended up being one of the smartest things I've ever done. My point that I slept on it for 10 nights and I did a ton of research. And you don't always have that luxury. If you're at a card show and you see a card you like, if you don't buy it, someone else might within five or 10 minutes or 30 minutes or two hours. So you don't have as much time. But this is also the most I'd ever bid on a card by seven times. So I put in a ton of research into it. Yeah. But if you're just walking your the Florida card show and you see a card you like or you see something that's ending that day on eBay, you don't have a lot of time. Not all cards deserve or require the same amount of research or sleeping on it. Depends on your threshold again. But my point of this, Matthew, is that I agree with you, what you said before. Sleeping on things if you have the luxury of that time can really help you maybe see things differently the next morning. I referenced mood earlier. Your mood can change your willingness to spend your hard-earned money. How are you feeling about things? Did you just hear you're getting a bonus? Did you just get a raise? Did you just start a new job? Or did you just lose your job? Or did, you know, or did your bonus fall through? Whatever. Did you just have to spend 12 grand, which I had to do earlier this year on something on my house? Spending 12 grand on on something on the house I wasn't expecting. That's right out of the card budget.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. We just lost a three-year-old roof. So I know. I know what it's like. So some random thoughts there, Matt. Yeah, no, I love that thought, Jeremy. I love that there's this balance that we have to strike between action and in action. And you can have active inaction, and you can have, but I don't think you can really have inactive action. And maybe I'm just pumping out too many words here. But when you walk the floor of the national, I told everybody going in one of my tips, and this was a tip that I'd never walked the national. I'd done other sports card shows and just wrapped that knowledge in. But I said, know what you want to buy before you go in. And that seems really simple, but it keeps you from just going ADHD braining your way through all the tables of the national because there's so much and you can't just buy something from every table. But when it comes to sleeping on things and making good decisions, oftentimes when you've agonized over a decision, you put in all the research. You said you put 40 hours in. When you come to the end of that, you feel like you've you also mentioned time as money. So not to tangent onto that, but I love how you framed that and to bring that back here. You spent all those hours in order to make sure that your investment was going to live up to what your expectations were for that card. And I think that's so salient in today's day and age when you have eBay and you can find any card anytime. And you can easily, to go back to the ADHD thing again, get caught up in just buying the new flavor of the month. When the more direction you have for yourself, the more powerful a sports card investor or collector you're going to be because your focus is much more strong. And the more time you put into that, people just don't put enough time into things anymore. We've been trained to only get short-term, short form video content and grab them with a hook within the first two seconds when the real power comes from focused long periods of time on one subject or self-reflection, in my opinion.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. So I think that applies in many cases. Now, I want to go back to what you said about going to the national. You were giving advice of know what you're going to buy or what you want to buy before you go in, because there's so many shiny pennies in there and distractions that you could just go off in so many different directions. So that is advice that I think is good for someone who's new into the hobby, because otherwise you're going to make mistakes. But so for me who's not new in the hobby, and a lot of my audience is quite experienced, I think I have new people too, but I give different advice. Say, I, and this is for me, this is what I sort of advice for the right people. It's not the right advice for everybody. But for sure for me, I've been collecting so long, I've had different cards a lot in my life. I go in with an open mind. I people always say, Is there anything you're looking for? And I snicker because I like, I'm looking for a lot, I'm looking for so many different things. I'm looking for things that do catch my eye. I'm looking to discover new cards that I'm gonna love. I didn't know that I would love the 1958 Topps John Unitis card, second year card. I didn't know that I would love that card until I saw one of the national this year in a PSA 5 holder that was perfectly centered for 60 bucks or 100 bucks, whatever it was. So I'll take that card. I love it. I it wasn't the most expensive card I bought of the national, not even close, but I love it. I love it just as much because I didn't go in looking for that card, but it caught my eye. Going into a card show open to things that you're not expecting is a really fun way to collect. It doesn't mean to toss all judgment aside. It doesn't mean to make stupid purchases. It just means I like collecting that way because I love discovering new things. Now, I'm also not a collector who is I do have cards on my want list, but I'm not only buying cards on my want list. I will add cards that I just discover at a show. The other thing is opportunities can arise at a car, especially from an investing perspective. You might see a car that's you didn't go to the show knowing you wanted to buy, but it's just too good of a deal to pass up, or you just decide that the card's amazing. Like I wouldn't tell anybody to just stick to your list because there's too many options out there. Another thing people often say at a card show is oh, go to the card show, walk the floor, find the three or four cards you want to buy, then go sit down and do your research, and then go buy the one that you want the most. Chances are that card's gone by then. You don't have the luxury at card shows to just wait and spend all this time. Sometimes you have to move quick to get the card. I once walked away from a card that I wanted to buy. I got three tables down. I'm like, you know what? No, that's the I gotta go back. I went back, it was gone. The guy's yeah, the guy standing beside you bought the card after you walked away. I'm like, ah, damn it. You know, I wanted that card. So we've all done that. We don't always have the luxury of time, but if you're new and you don't want to make mistakes, you don't know much about different cards out there, then I think your advice is really good. I think it's more apropos, but for an experienced collector, I don't do that, but others do for sure. People who are they have their list.
SPEAKER_00:It's like a strong opinions weekly held kind of philosophy. Here's my list. And for me, it wasn't usually cards specifically. There were a certain set of cards I was looking for or certain holders that I wanted to look at. So it was very specific and nuanced for what I was doing, but that's because I had a specific play in mind that I was trying to capitalize on and I was going to use the national for that. So that's more of, I'd say, a flipper's viewpoint for what you're trying to do in there. But um yeah, I think decision, it is good to have creativity. It makes it more fun. It's like when you go to Vegas and you know you're gonna lose money, it's way more fun than trying to make money in Vegas. So it is all about mindset. And speaking of mindset, because you are a CPA and you're a finance guy, you're very structured and organized about finance, I'm sure. Yes, I am. How would you give advice to people to reflect those kind of ideas? Or do you have any kind of things that keep you grounded financially when you're going out and doing this?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and I think I've said one of them earlier, which is how do you look at your expenditure? There's only so much money out there for everybody has, unless you're filthy rich, but it comes back to what I said before. We talk often about like, where do you are you a collector or are you investor? I talk about this on my channel all the time. Are you a collector or investor? And I always say it's a range, it's like a spectrum. We all fall somewhere on the collector-investor spectrum. Whether you're all the way on the right, you're a pure investor or a pure collector. I think there's very few people that are at the at those extremes. I think we all fall somewhere. If it's out of a hundred, most people fall between five and ninety-five. Very few people are going to be on those extreme ends. But the beauty is that you can approach some of your collecting as an investor and some of your collecting as a collector. Not every card you buy has to fit as an investment or as a pure collector card. I'm a good example. I've got cards that are I collect my investment cards, but some cards are investments because it's significant money. If I'm the card that I bought in March was a six-figure card. I'd never even I'd never spent, I've spent money on cards. The most money I spent before that was$20,300 on a card, which I subsequently sold for$50,000. So I made a lot of money on that card. But this card I bought was$150,000. I'd never come close to that before. Huge amount of money. I didn't have that amount of money ready to buy a card. I ended up using a funding service, fund your cards, who's a sponsor of mine, and I basically gave Him 330 cards of mine to go sell to pay him back for what because he bought the card for me. So it wasn't like I was out of pocket 150. I put in a bit of money, but 95% of the money came from cards. My point is that is a card I'm collecting. It's also obviously an investment because it's worth so much money. And I guess the advice I give is whenever you are, when you're spending money that is significant to you, and it's gonna be different for all of us. Like for me, I said earlier,$250 to$500, I start thinking about am I gonna be able to recover this money? Because if not, that's money that can go towards a family vacation, my kids' summer camps, school supplies, all these other things, putting food on the table. But if I'm spending 50 bucks, 150 bucks, I'm not worrying about it too much, even though those do add up over time. But I'm a collector, I need to be able to buy cards regularly. It's just who I am, it's in my blood. So advice-wise, you need to think about what the exit is gonna look like. What's it gonna look like when you get out of that card? If you're buying now, it's really important when it comes to the flavor of the month. Like you mentioned earlier, the flavor of the month is the best way to lose money on a lot of it. John Moran, Zion Williamson, Luca, Connor Bedard, and any rookies are just a real fast way to lose your money, unless you get lucky. But my advice has always also been when the rookie class comes out, wait a year before you buy any player from it. If you're somebody who wants to own all the rookie cards or the players each year, wait a year. You're gonna save yourself a ton of money because people, the hobby moves on from one player to the next so fast, it's just a matter of time. Ellie de la Cruz. I don't hear no one's talking about Ellie de la Cruz anymore. Yeah, very few people are, and he was the flavor of the day. Jackson Holiday. I don't see people spending tons of money on his cards right now. P. Crow Armstrong, how long is he gonna be the guy for? Paul Skins. These guys have cards are going for good money. I know Paul Skins is a great, he's a great pitcher, but he doesn't win games. He can have an ERA of two and still lose. People like Paul Skins because he looks like Josh Allen.
SPEAKER_00:That's my hot take. That's all I got.
SPEAKER_01:Quarterbacks are a great example, too, of just how you can lose in a short period of time. Oh man, don't get me started.
SPEAKER_00:But yeah, I think rookies and busting wax are probably the two best ways to lose money consistently. And on the flip side, I would say investing in wax that's going to grow in demand over a long period of time is a great way to make money. Yeah, there's so many sets that I wish I had like 1980 tops. You probably could have got that for pennies and just sat there on all of those boxes.
SPEAKER_01:86 Flear basketball. They were giving away the boxes. You could have bought box after box for 20 bucks. In each box, there's three Michael Jordan rookies. The one thing about collecting unopened wax is to me, is I just don't find it fun, especially if you're buying cases. Now it's funny. I do uh shows for MC Sports cards. They have a big eBay store and for Fanatics Collect. I cover their premiere and their weekly auctions. And I will when it comes time for one of those items, like a case of exquisite basketball, I'll put it on the screen. I'll share my screen. I'll say, All right, guys, next up we have a big brown box. Big brown box. That's what you're buying.
SPEAKER_00:I don't full of little pieces of cardboard.
SPEAKER_01:Right. I you don't even you can't even see them. I don't collect big brown boxes. Now, would I invest in them? Possibly. But now you and the one thing about that versus picking a single rookie to invest in is at least you're getting the index of the year for all the rookies. So that is that's a diversification tool right there, is the unopened product. I don't do it because I just I've got a couple boxes here and there, but I don't that's no fun to me. I want to look at my cards and love them.
SPEAKER_00:It's not fun, it's just math though. It's just the demand goes up and the supply goes down with every year, and it's it's just an easy kind of mathematical way to win. It's a way to make money. It's funny that you bring that up because when you were speaking earlier about stores of value, I was thinking about Bitcoin and how you have to have an exit strategy. You were saying that. And it's like a lot of people I've seen that I respect at least a little bit, I think they've made some savvy financial decisions. They're like, I'm gonna keep all my money in Bitcoin and then I'll just peel it off as I need it for USD because Bitcoin is a deflationary asset, whereas the dollar is very much an inflationary one ever since the 70s. So it's a very interesting way to look at it, and I extend that view to sports cards a little bit because you have an alternative asset that if you pick the right ones, the demand's going to keep going up and the supply should be fixed. And when you start thinking of all these different asset classes and how they bleed into your net worth, I think that's what kind of blurs the line between investing and collecting on that spectrum that you said. So if you had to define the investment activity versus the collecting activity and just put them in different camps, how might you define those?
SPEAKER_01:I don't know that I understand the question really. Like I let me just take a stab at it, Matthew. Intention. I think it really comes down to your intention. That's why I can invest in one card and you can collect the same card and not care about the investment potential of it, and vice versa. So I think it's defined by your intention when you go into it. That's why some people say, I've heard people say cards are not investments. You're being projecting. They may not be an investment to you, but they can definitely be an investment to somebody else. Then I've heard people say cards are not investments because they don't pay dividends. Well, either does gold. Gold doesn't pay a dividend, and capital assets don't necessarily pay a dividend, but you can buy a building and it'll spin off rental income. So that's an investment, but the building is still an investment too. Cards can be an investment. Anyone who says they cannot be is just not very smart. Seriously, that you're just not very smart if you don't see that. And I know for a fact because I've been doing this for 45 years and I have made money buying and selling cards. They have acted as investments for me. So I've heard people say cards are not investments. And then the other day, during my show, a good buddy of mine in my live chat, he says, all cards are investments. If you're spending money on a card, you're investing in your card. I said, Well, I don't know about that, Tony. Good smart guy. He was just giving me something to talk about, I think. But sure. I said, I don't know about that, Tony, because some cards are not investments. Then I went into my whole balance sheet versus PL statement analogy about it really comes down to your to your intention. Every time I buy a card, Matthew, I keep my own personal financial statements, just as the accountant in me. Every transaction, I'm dealing with debits and credits every day, and I decide is this going on the income statement or is this going on my balance sheet? And some cards I collect just to collect, because I like how they look, they go on my income statement. Other cards go onto my balance sheet. No, neither of those guys are right. It's up to you to decide if you are collecting or you are investing or what percentage it is. I figure for myself, I think I'm probably I'm like almost right in the middle. I collect, but I also I think I'm just a bit to the right of middle, a bit leaning towards investor because I do think about it a lot. But I feel like I hit the lottery that I love collecting what I'm investing in. I think other people in the sports card hobby feel the same way who put significant money into it, but I have enough of my net worth tied up in cardboard that I'd I'd be a complete idiot not to consider these investments.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah. Man, I love the idea of putting everything into one of those buckets when you buy it, because it's so crystal clear what your activity and, as you said, your intention is around that. And I think the investment for me is around do I believe that this card is undervalued because of something the market is not seeing yet? That's what that's more of a financier's term, like an arbitrage play, because I believe that we're working with a pretty inefficient market because it's so new, especially certain submarkets like soccer, which is one of my playgrounds. There's just inefficiencies of value all over the place if we're going to be making investments, which sizable card purchases are usually going to be investments unless you're going to take that to the grave.
SPEAKER_01:That is a playbook that I was using exactly what you're talking about, Matthew. I was using that from 2016 till about 2021. I was buying cards that the hobby hadn't caught on to yet. And they worked out very like financially, it worked out really well for me. Some of those cards I still own. I one card I paid$900 for, I just turned down$75K on it. So that was a smart I had that foresight, but I also had 35 years of experience and seeing all the different sports and the cards within them, I think it gave me a bit of an advantage where I could be savvier than most. And not that any other people couldn't, but I was acting on it. So I did do that, and it worked out very well financially and for my collection. So I think you're right. I will tell you though, I think it's harder to do that now than it was back then because so many people are doing that exact same thing. But if I can just go back to the collector versus investor thing, and you can invest in the hobby and not have any passion for it. It's all numbers. You are really to the far right as an investor.
unknown:Right.
SPEAKER_01:Where you, I think where you can beat those people is if you add the passion. If you have, like I do, if you have the passion on top of the financial wherewithal, on top of some experience, now I think you can be on somewhat unstoppable in the hobby as far as making money. I've had I've had people seeing what I do and friends of mine who aren't in the hobby saying, here's five grand, go buy me some cards. I want to, I want a piece of what you're doing. And they don't have the passion for it. All they want is the money. They think it's cool, but they don't have the passion for the cardboard like a lifer like me does. And so my point is if we talk about that collector-investor spectrum thing, but if you then layer on a level of passion and love that you have for these little pieces of cardboard, I think it it's not like the spectrum is a it's two axes, right? Collector or investor. You layer on passion, it's not gonna you can invest and also collect at the same time. I think is what I'm trying to say. And I think passion is the thing that draws the line between someone who's just an investor. If you're only collecting unopened cases of national treasures or prism or whatever, you're not a collector. You're just not. You're an investor, and I'm okay with it. Go ahead, invest. Or a speculator, even if you want to. Which is a type of investing. But yeah, you're looking for a return. So you're you're speculating, you're investing, you're prospecting, but there's no passion because you're collecting big brown boxes. How can you have passion for a big brown box? You really can't, I don't think. Maybe you can, but I don't know.
SPEAKER_00:I hope I people have some weird passions these days, Jeremy.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. But I I hope my point is coming through that collecting, investing, it's all good. Do it how you want. But passion is the secret sauce that I think is going to give you an advantage. So a lot of people are coming to the hobby nowadays because they see dollar signs, not because they have passion for it. Those people aren't going to be making decisions for themselves. And if they are, they're probably going to get it wrong a lot more times than they'll get it right.
SPEAKER_00:If you just purely want to collect, like you're saying on that ultra collect spectrum, then it doesn't really matter what the decisions are. But if you're ever going to sell a card and you start thinking, what's my family going to get out of this? Or what's my real goal with this in the end? Then it's good to have those thoughts in your mind so that down the road you don't have to sell off mistakes because that's where you lose a lot of value. And you can't really be passionate if you're looking at all these things as a loss to me.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Oh, I yeah. That makes maybe a roundabout answer, but that makes perfect sense to me though. It does. Yeah. Yeah. You don't want you don't want to just waste your money. There are people who will tell you though that, oh, I buy my when I once I buy the card, it's done. I don't care what happens to that value. That's my entertainment budget. I wish that I was in a position to spend the money I spend on cards and not worry about that money in the future. But I don't, I'm not that wealthy where I can go drop five grand on a card and who cares what happens to the value. No, I want it to at least maintain its value. I want that store of value to not lose. I don't mind losing on inflation. That's fine. If I spend five grand now, I get five grand out of it 10 years from now. I'm okay with that. I know I've lost time value of money, but I'm not that particular or specific. I just don't want it to go from$5,000 down to$100. And like it's happened to me. I've lost a lot of money on cards too. But that doesn't happen that often to me. Most of my decisions are have proven to be pretty good in the hobby as far as when I go to sell them and what I recover.
SPEAKER_00:What's a slabnomics podcast if someone says time value of money? So I appreciate you putting that in. That was not a plan. So yes, that's it's very aptly said. And at the end of the day, if you're rewarded for your good decisions, and that brings you validation in its own way, in a more pure way, I think, than just a PSA set registry or whatever other external validation.
SPEAKER_01:My YouTube show has a jingle song that you know at the opening of every episode. And I think one of the lines is sports cards is a lifestyle. That's one of my taglines, sports cards is a lifestyle. For me, it is. It's I've got my family and my sports card hobby. That that's my life, literally. That's awesome. And now I'm now I work in it full time and I don't, I'm not a practicing CPA anymore. I was for 25 years. I'm retired from that, literally. Now I just do sports card content and I do a few other things in the hobby to generate some income, but it literally is my life and absolutely love it.
SPEAKER_00:It shows your knowledge and your experience and how you've moved through different evolutions to use that term again, through your collecting journey. Definitely shows. And you've shared with me some of your wins and everything, and that's always cool to hear too. So before we leave, anything else you want to plug?
SPEAKER_01:I like I said, I my YouTube channel is called Sports Cards Live. And I do live streams every Saturday night, just unless I'm traveling or sick. I do live streams every Saturday. They're a lot of fun. Very chat integrated. My chat is one of the guests. I talk to them throughout the show, bring their questions up on the screen, comments, and address them with my on-screen guests. Check it out if you haven't. Again, sports cards live. My Instagram is J Lee underscore sports cards live. I appreciate the opportunity, Matt.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, thanks for coming on. Always good to get a finance guy in here, especially one who's more collector bent as well. It gives us unique perspective. So thanks for giving us your time, your experience. I appreciate you coming on. Pretty short notice as well. With that being said, we will catch you guys later. Thanks for tuning in. You can find me at Slapnomics or my podcast anywhere on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify at Slapnomics. And then Jeremy, you can find him at sports cards live.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, sir.
SPEAKER_00:So thanks very much. Y'all take care.
