Liquidity 101: When To Get Out of Sports Cards

In this episode of Slabnomics, host Matt Worley breaks down one of the most misunderstood concepts in the hobby — liquidity — and why it separates collectors who profit from those who get stuck holding bags.

You’ll learn how market velocity, price discovery, and consolidation cycles drive card prices across every tier — from high-end grails to $20 slabs — and why understanding liquidity is the ultimate advantage for sports-card investors.

Matt explains how sales velocity, buyer pools, and timing exits determine whether your portfolio compounds or stalls, drawing parallels between the card market and financial market theory. If you’ve ever wondered when to sell, when to hold, and why the whales always move first, this episode is your blueprint.

Whether you trade soccer cards, football cards, basketball cards, or baseball cards, Slabnomics teaches you how to think like a market operator — not a speculator.

👉 Topics Covered:

• What liquidity really means in sports cards
• How high-end sales spark mid-tier and low-end market movement
• The link between sales velocity and compound returns
• Why consolidation is a natural part of every collector’s journey
• Frameworks for smarter buying and faster selling

🎧 Listen to Slabnomics — where collecting meets investing and market theory for the modern hobbyist.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:13

All right, everyone. Welcome to Slabnomics. If you've been here before, you know what we're about. If you are new, welcome. What I'm here to do is help sports cards enthusiasts make better financial decisions. Now, a lot of times recently, I've had some people on, some guests, to speak about different aspects of the hobby, how we can make things better. Today it's just me, guys. So what I want to do is just talk mano or mano a woman about three main things. All right. We're going to talk about liquidity, high-end market versus low end market, and consolidation. After this episode is done, you should be able to know these concepts a little bit better. I'm going to simplify and make them practical for you. And in return, I just ask one thing. If there's ever a moment during this podcast where you go whoa, I want you to immediately share this with a friend. Okay, that's all I ask. If you get a woe, share it with a friend. So that being said, let's dive right into liquidity. We're just going to touch on this from a high level, guys. And again, this is going to be a very short podcast today. I'm pretty tapped out. So liquidity, when we talk about it, we talk about it in two main ways. People talk about liquidity with how fast things move. How fast are sales made with cards? The second way liquidity is talked about is when people are saying how many people make up that market? How many people want that player's card, that sets card, etc.? That makes up the total pool of buyers. See liquidity, pool, liquids. So in those two things, they're kind of two sides of the same coin. When we're talking about how fast things move, we're actually talking about sales velocity, but that's a measure of liquidity. The more buyers that you have, and the more sellers as well, those two link up and you're going to see more transactional volume. Now, this leads us to a concept called price discovery, which is something that a lot of people don't talk about. Price discovery is a comp. So when a sale happens, there's a buyer, there's a seller, they came together and a price was discovered into the market from those two. Now, why is price discovery important? Because that's how we value alternative assets that are commodities. Technically, they don't have any real valuation. So commodities can be valued by what other people have paid for them, adjusted by the market demands. So a lot of what we do here is we triangulate when we try and find values. Now, if you've heard my podcast before, you know about MLD valuation, market, legacy, and design gives us a framework for how we can value cards in a more objective way. What is the player's and the set's market? What is the legacy of that player? And is that set going to be one that's in demand for a long time? And then design, this is mostly a set thing. Is there a good picture of that player? Does he have a derpy Eli face? Or is it a great photo that's timeless in a timeless set, like a first set, say 2012 basketball prism? So these are all things that help liquidity. When you have a lot of people trying to buy something, when you have something that is regularly traded with volume, those combine into this beautiful little ocean of liquidity. Look at the second thing, which is going to be the broad player market, and how many participants are there in that pool of that player's liquidity or that sets liquidity? Because remember, a lot of people collect sets. It's not just players. So liquidity is really the two sides of the same coin. People rap in a lot about velocity, but really it's a matter of how fast is something selling. If I get this, what is the normal turnaround time if I put it at a fair price? Why is that important? Well, if you've heard the phrase, I'd rather have a fast nickel than a slow dime. You understand that if you turn something for 5%, but you do that three times when someone else did 10% for only one, you make quite a bit more money. When we talk about compound interest, we talk about how there's interest on the little bits of the interest. And at first that's tiny and minuscule and we don't see much, but you know, over time they stack up. So that's why velocity is such an important deal. The faster you can flip things, the faster you can get them into different carts. Now, this concept moves us into our second discussion. And this is some really cool stuff, guys. So before I get into this, make sure if you're liking the video so far to go ahead and hit a like on that YouTube. Go ahead and subscribe on whatever platform you're at. That really helps the channel. So thank you very much. Now let's talk about the high end versus mid-end versus low end and how they act that's different from each other. What I've found in certain markets, the first price movement happens at the high end. Now, why is that? Well, human beings tend to like seeing something happen before us. That probably goes back to our ancestral days when there was a lot of risk around every corner. Literally, go around a corner and there's a jaguar. Let's let my boy, much as I love him, go around the corner and just make sure everything's safe before I venture out. And we do the same thing now because we know that if someone else takes the risk first, that lessens it for us. So we watch the high end and we see when those biggies make those big sales, right? We see that messy rookie go, go, go. We see those Tom Brady gold prisms go, go, go. And we take our cues from that. We say, oh, wow, that Brady gold just sold for 20% more than the last sale in only a month. Whoa. And we start to wake up a little bit and we start to look around, like, whoa, what's happening that I might not be aware of? Because human beings have so many things going on. But these whales, when they're hunting, they're seeing all these things before us. They're seeing market trends from boardrooms and they're seeing tailwinds that we might not be aware of. They're having conversations that we're not privy to. So that's why high-end starts moving first. And if you followed the soccer market, you saw that. Who started popping off first? It was Messi, and it was Messi's big cards, his rookies. All right. We saw appreciation from the 300K levels that were two years ago into 500K, into a million, into 1.5 million on that gold PSA gem. So okay, those high-level movements start happening. And now we look around, we're like, oh man, I don't want to miss the boat on this. So we start making our plays and we venture out and we start with what we're comfortable with. And at first, it's a little bit at a time. We want to just not push all the chips in. We just want to build our stack, if you will. But as these things progress, as the sales get bigger and bigger on the high end, and we keep seeing that repeated. Now, now the probabilities and odds go up in our mind that this is a real thing and not just a blip on the radar. And so now I'm making bigger and bigger moves about what I want to purchase. So that's the trickle down from high end to mid-end. The guys that are on the mid, we start looking at these things. Now there's more liquidity in the market because people are making more and more purchases in order to make these bets on the price movements they're seeing on the higher end. If Messi's doing it, I'll bet Ronaldo's next. When Ronaldo starts going, now I think it's going to be this. So we start placing our bets with more and more rapidity. And everything goes quicker and quicker and quicker and quicker. That's what we have right now across pretty much all sport industries. We've moved from the higher end into the medium end. You're seeing that liquidity trickle down, especially in soccer, football, basketball. Those are starting to pop off a little bit. Baseball, you have some instances like Shohei Otani. Again, we start with what's almost guaranteed Messi, Shohei Otani, Kobe, LeBron, MJ. These are the guys that pop off first. And then we're like, oh, well, if they're popping off, we should probably look at this. So as liquidity filters down, the question is, is it going to go to everything? Is it going to go to all those players that we're prospecting for? Is it going to go towards all those low-end cards that we're crossing our fingers on? The answer I would say most times is no, it's not. But sometimes it does. And when it does, we call that bananas. Okay? That's the word that we use for it. Bonkers, bananas, whatever you want there. I'm going to give you an example on that. It's a soccer example, so bear with me for one second. The 2014 Prism World Cup, Leonel Messi, is the first Prism set for soccer. Okay. The base card, they made many of the base cards, right? The base card is now about 160, 170 bucks, and PSA 10 for 160, 170. During COVID, that went up to$1,200. Okay. So I use this to illustrate. You guys are seeing a lot of price movements right now, but what it hasn't done is it hasn't filtered down into that low-end stuff where it's$1,200 for a PSA 10 of a base card. You saw that with Luca as well, or with Zion, right? When the base starts popping off, that's when you need to really take notice and really start evaluating things to make sure things aren't crazily out of whack. There's a saying that's borrowed from the stock market. I believe it was Peter Lynch that said it in his book One Up in Wall Street. He said, when the Shushine boy starts giving you stock tips, that's when you sell. It's the same thing here in this market, guys. If base bullshit starts going up, that's when you get out. So do we have any woe moments yet? If any of that was really cool, stuff that you haven't really heard before, please share it with a friend. Like this video. Thank you. Now we're going to get into the last thing. All right. I'm going to tie it all together for you, wrap it up in a nice bow, guys. We're talking about liquidity, and then we moved on to how high-end filters into medium, filters into low. And I think it does that with players as well. But go and check out on card ladder right now. Put in the high-end index, check it out, compare it to the medium end, compare it to the low end. What happens then during the market cycle, during the bull run that we're in right now, is that people start getting more velocity. They start getting more sales. So I've been holding on to these cards. It used to take me like a month to sell this kind of card. Now it's getting snapped up in two days. People start getting really excited. Things start heating up. And what we want to do then is natural. And it's this. We want to sell everything we have that we've been holding on to, and that's been hard to move. And we want to get the good stuff that's at the high end. And why is that? Because it all started with the high-end stuff. And we're thinking we want to be there. Maybe this thought isn't really substantiated in our mind, but deep down, what if we're the guys that are kicking it off next time? What if we're the high end next time that's sparking the bonfire? So we start selling off that little stuff to get to those big pieces, those grails, right? That's the consolidation cycle. And this consolidation cycle is something that a friend of mine, Tyler Nethercott, you may know him as Teapot, talked about the collector's journey, the cycles that they go through. And I'll share that when I share this podcast because it's amazingly accurate. You start with just casting around and getting all these random things. You end up consolidating and you do it through waves. You get to know more and more what you like, and you get less and less attached to this big volume of cards that you had. And you just want to focus your investment appetite into things you truly love. It's the same with food. The more food that you eat, you're going to more and more develop your taste and you're going to find things that you truly love, like this ice cream. I just really love this favor, it's flavor of ice cream from this Ben and Jerry's. I just really love this grilled cheese from this shop. We do that as we get older because we've tried the other things and we've found what really sparks our engine. So the consolidation cycle is natural. It's something that is fed into by our desire to get into those high-end echelons, and it's fueled by the liquidity that comes from bull runs. So that's all I have for you guys today. Hopefully, these concepts of liquidity, high end to low end, as well as consolidation helped you understand your own activities in investing in sports cards a little bit more. If they did, again, please share this with a friend. It helps the channel so much. You're welcome to come into my DMs, talk to me about it. Thanks so much, guys, for being here. Keep building, and I'll talk to you later.