1 Year of Selling Sports Cards: Buying (Part 1)

In this opener to my “Year 1” mini-series, I break down everything I learned on the buy-side of the sports-card game—what worked, what wasted money, and how to buy with exits in mind. From the Spain/Messi spark to my first PSA submission (and why it lost), we cover pre-grading, avoiding “rarity for rarity’s sake,” the meaning of liquidity, negotiating bulk discounts, timing buys around seasonal cycles, and using hype as a catalyst—not a crutch.

You’ll learn

• Why pre-grading and note-keeping beat wishful thinking
• How to identify motivated sellers and structure bulk discounts
• A clean framework for liquidity-first buying (picture the exit)
• Seasonality: offseason entries → on-season exits
• The “Sleep On It” rule to avoid impulse buys

Key Takeaways

• Liquidity beats rarity: buy what you can actually sell
• Spend $3 on pre-grade to save $22 bad subs
• Bundle to capture extra 10–15% discount
• Sell into visibility; don’t chase the top
• Track predictions vs results—process compounds edge

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• Instagram: @slabnomics
• eBay: The_Canary_Cards
• YouTube: Slabnomics

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:13

Hello everyone and welcome to Slapnomics. Today we're going to have an episode, the first part of a mini-series that is focused on the first year that I've had of buying and selling in sports cards. And the reason that this is prominent is because I did celebrate my first year anniversary of eBay sales. So I have data, I have lessons, I have do's, I have don'ts. So if you do any buying or selling of sports cards, this episode is going to be for you. Before we get started, if you're on YouTube, make sure and take one second, hit that like for me. If you're listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thanks for being here. Make sure that you're subscribed. That definitely helps out Slab Gnomics. What we're going to do today is go over my first year of selling and focus on the lessons that I've learned. I'll take you through where I first started, where I went to, the things that worked, the things that didn't work, and then just give you some concrete takeaways that you can bring into your own selling businesses that you have, whether that's full-time or just as a hobby. So that being said, here we go. A year ago, I came into sports cards because I figured out that I love to hunt. Now, I think sports cards collecting and selling takes many different forms, but for me, the love of the hunt has always been what fuels and motivates that collecting activity. I've always been someone that likes to complete things. So I love set building, but I also just want to hunt down things that I find valuable and be right about that value, in that the market is looking at it a different way than I look at it. And hopefully I'm going to be on the right side of that historical outcome. So I came into sports cards because it's a market that I had not challenged and that I knew was going to be difficult to solve. I had just been doing something vastly different. I was in these Facebook groups doing EDM jersey collecting, and it's very random. And I know that y'all might glaze over when I say that a little bit, but bootleggers basically put out these jerseys, and I went out and I found the most rare ones, and I built up this crazy collection really quickly. So did that, and then I realized that moths were going to come and eat all my jerseys, and I needed something a little bit more lasting and a little bit more challenging long term. So somehow I remembered sports cards came into my mind, whether I was looking on the internet here or there, but I was like, how have I not got into sports cards? So I started investigating, I started reading about it, I started going down rabbit holes when it comes to things like Wikipedia or just searching up articles of the most valuable cards, learning about sets. I started with vintage baseball. That's of course the classic here in the U.S. That's the one that's been around the longest since the late 1800s, when they put cards into tobacco and then to gum and then subsequently into their own packs. They were used as a way to draw people in, first adults and then later on kids with the gum. And from there, the collecting appetite took on its own nature and its own and its own real life. So for me, when I first started looking into sports cards, I was actually on my way to Spain, funny enough. If you've been following along, the last episode that I put out was about going to Spain very recently in the last few weeks and hunting down messy rookies. That was very full circle for me after a year because I first went all around Spain Bilbao, Ronda, Abiza, Madrid, Barcelona, Seville. And we were spending a couple days in each city. And while we were in Barcelona, I came through this marketplace outside of a church on a Sunday and I saw cards. It was the 2004 Autograph Barcelona set, Lionel Messi number 89. And I saw that Cardano Marketplace. I got really excited. I was like, I know who Leo Messi is, and this is his autograph. That's crazy. It's on this card. I looked it up. At first, I saw that it was a rookie card. Got super excited. A rookie autograph. Oh, that must be really valuable. That turned to momentary disappointment when I saw, oh, it's a facsimile autograph. It's not his real one. Is it a fake? What's going on here? They printed the card like that. I looked again at the card after going through all of this crazy new information, kind of jumping both feet into a pool and learning how to swim and decided not to buy the thing. So I passed on the messy rookie a year ago when it was in that marketplace for probably 50 euro. Now, after that, what I was doing was I was going on Facebook Marketplace. So that's how I started my journey. My thought was I have heard of these people that have gone and bought storage units. I hear that there's sports cards in there a lot of times. But there's a lot of other things that these storage unit buyers are looking for within those. So maybe I can focus totally on that aspect. And I can go to the people that have bought these units and I can say, look, I know you don't want to go through thousands of sports cards. I'll handle all of that. And then my strategy is take those them, develop a really good eye for grading, and then just cut out profits that way. So that was my first idea of what to do. And alongside that, just looking on Facebook Marketplace for people that were selling cards and trying to get acquainted. So I was in Spain starting those conversations with people, starting to learn about what to look for and what cards were valuable. And to me, I first thought that I just need goats, right? So Michael Jordan was an easy one. I know who Michael Jordan is, I know his cards are valuable. Oh, Michael Jordan cards have to be all good. If I just get, even if they're common cards, if I get really good condition Michael Jordan cards, I should be able to turn quick profits and really build this into something quickly. And I understood that financially speaking, if I'm able to flip it quickly, then I'm able to then build up bankroll quickly and then push that forward. So one thing early on that I came to understand was that making decisions in the right way and honing your decision-making process is how you can make each decision in the future more impactful and more valuable. Now, let me give you kind of an example of what that means. A CEO is paid on the expertise of their decision making. That's at the heart of it. Because you see CEOs that jump from company to company, and the only thing that follows them in that historical trail is the fact that their decision making is highly valued. And if it's by 1% or 2% better than other CEOs or the benchmark of CEOs, they can get paid millions and millions of dollars more. Another way, in an even simpler fashion, a gambler just wants to be right 55% of the time. If you're able to do that in, say, sports car betting, you're going to be a very, very good gambler over a long period of time. So that's something that I latched on to very early. How am I going to make my decision-making process better, quicker? And to me, that was through grading because that's where I saw the leverage being I can take this$5 card, I can turn it into an$80 card, a$90 card. So I started doing that. I started reaching out to people that obviously had a bunch of sports cards and didn't know what to do with them or didn't want to rifle through them. Hey, here's$400, here's$500. Let me take care of these$10,000 cards. You know, I go through, make sure that there's going to be stars in there and that everything looked like it hadn't been run through a washing machine and then go from there. Now, what I quickly found, and by quickly, I mean I sent those into PSA after going through and having that disc and having that first thrill of discovery of being able to pick through cards and look at this one. Oh, I like this set. Oh, this feels cheap. Look at this. Oh, Carl Malone, he was big, right? This card must be valuable. And then looking up thousands of cards on alt. That's my toxic trait is that when I get involved with something, I will look up every single card because I don't want to miss anything. So I'm looking through and I end up having 300 cards that I want to grade. And I don't know yet that it's really hard to get PSA 10s. I've heard about Gemrate a little bit, but I think it must be depressed by bad decision making. So I think I'll just double triple check these cards and everything will be fine. So the first part of my seller journey is deciding that grading was going to spin straw into gold. Now, I found out very quickly that wasn't the case when my first lot came back. It was a lot of sixes, a lot of sevens, some fives, a couple fours, maybe two tens. And those two tens were 65, 70 bucks in value. And the rest of it, some of the time it paid for the grading costs, most of the time it didn't. And with those 200 cards that I ended up going through and after my final check submitting, not a lot of those made me money, and most of them lost me money. And it was a big grading expense. Because even then it was about$17 a card. So going through and trying to pick out these junk wax cards and spin them into gold didn't work out. And that became very clear to me. So I said to myself, okay, well, these weren't the cards that were going to do it for me. And maybe it's just I need to get better at grading, and maybe I need to be a little bit more choosy with what I get. So I started looking up most expensive cards within sets because that's how I decided I would hone in the focus a little bit and not just take whatever was coming to me right off the bat. The second problem that I found ended up being closely tied to the first, which was overestimating my own abilities. My abilities were not based on anything, they were based on a pair of eyeballs and a brain that I thought would be able to ascertain true value based off of what I could see. Well, I should have learned my lesson after the first one that it takes a while to get good at grading things myself. I'm going through and I'm trying to buy sets based off of what great I think they are. Now, I'm throwing darts at a dartboard here because I'm looking at things and I'm thinking, oh, that's probably at eight. I'm just guessing completely. And as I talked about last time when I first sent in those results, my guessing wasn't very good. So I had a little bit of focus, but I was going through the wrong channel. I was learning which cards were more valuable and more desired by the market, but I didn't understand nuances of grading. I didn't understand that if you sent a card to a PSA that had a bent back or paper loss corner or a crease, how much that would affect the grade. So it can be very hard starting out to understand the nuances of grading and how that affects value. So for anyone that's first beginning, I would say before you start throwing all your money into putting graded card, into putting lots out to PSA or any other graders for grading, first maybe put them out to services that are going to pre-grade them for you for a fee. Some companies charge you$3 for that. I know at first you say, well, I don't want to spend the$3. I get that, but I can tell you almost 100% that it will be in the long term and the short term a better use of your money to use those services so that you can understand before you put the entire now$21,$22, if you have a PSA collector's membership at risk, that$3 is much better to understand if that was a yes or a no. It gives you a little binary signal on if you're right or if you're wrong. Now, if you want to make sure that your risk is less in grading, have a pre-grader. That's a basic thing that you can do. Here's a more intermediate thing. Take notes on the cards that you want to send in. And then if you do end up sending them into grade, compare those against your notes and what grade you thought they were going to get. That's quickly going to let you understand where you might have been going wrong if you keep examining those afterwards. To that end, the equipment that you're definitely going to need is a jeweler's loop or one of the gooseneck ones that you can put on a desk. Get the magnification around 15x or more if you can, and just scrutinize the cards. You know it's going to be the corners, the edges, the surface, and the centering. So all of those things score it to 10. And then I can tell you, from my understanding, PSA is going to take the lowest grade. And then other graders are going to do more of a conglomerate grade or an aggregate grade, where if you have a 10, a 9, an 8, and a 7, they average that out and give you the average of that grade. So that's a little bit of a shooting the breeze kind of estimation of different graders for you right there. CGC and Beckett are going to do more of that aggregate grading. And I believe PSA is the only one that does kind of the lowest grade grading, lowest common denominator grading, if you will. So have the tools that you're going to need. So there's a little bit of the grading on this side. I'm not going to go into too much more on that because we're just talking about the buying side right now. So we know that grading is important for leverage, but it can be difficult to figure out the right channels to buy from based off of what you're trying to do. I want to make money on something. So at the end of the day, what do we say? You buy low and you sell high. Well, that's pretty simple, right? Case closed, podcasts over. Well, how are we going to buy low? That's the question we always have to be asking ourselves. Because when I next got into things, my next play or my next idea was I'm going to arbitrage different auction houses. Looked around, I saw sometimes when you have items that maybe aren't in the most demand on some auction houses that people aren't on as much, prices can go a little bit lower. They can slip through the cracks. Now, it doesn't usually happen for like a Mickey Mann, a Michael Jordan, because people are keyed into those, and that's one of the first things that they're searching. But when you have second rate stars and good cards for them, a lot of times you can find them. So I looked on sites like Hybid. I looked on sites like Heritage. And what I was trying to do was find cards that weren't as in high demand and then buy them at low prices and then sell them on eBay. So it was an arbitrage play, feeling like there's more volume on eBay. And if I can find weak spots in the volume in other places, I might be able to buy at really good prices. So I started down that route. One thing that I learned really quickly is the importance of liquidity. Liquidity in the demand side. So if there's a card that hasn't sold for a year, it's going to be very difficult to sell that card to people. Why? Because people check comps. That's the first thing you do. Has this card sold in the last year? Well, if it hasn't, and I don't really want it, I'm going to move on. If it hasn't and I do really want it, then it's really going to be hard for me and you to agree on a price unless the market hasn't moved much. If the market's pretty flat and stagnant, then the person buying it isn't really going to make money anyways because it hasn't moved in a year. And so they probably bought at that same level that it sold at a year before. And so it kind of doesn't work for anybody. The seller isn't really going to make money. And the buyer had to put in extra effort to try and figure out where the cost of it was. And every time you have to put in extra effort, you're going to lose people in the buying process. That's why these days you have to make it as easy and as frictionless as possible. So learning that liquidity is super important and learning that the right cards to buy is really important. I learned that trying to buy these second-rate cards that people didn't really have interest in in these secondary auction houses just ended up with me having a bunch of inventory sitting around. So that goes back to the idea earlier of me wanting to flip things quickly so that I can compound my gains. Well, if you're buying cards that aren't really liquid and aren't really in high demand, you're not going to be able to do that. I promise, you're not. You can sit on it and put that money out there, and maybe in three months you make your 20%. But the time value, but the opportunity value of that time and being able to deploy that capital elsewhere is a loss for you in your seller journey. So that lesson took me a while to find. This is one of the biggest mistakes that you can make. Rarity for rarity's sake. If this player has a card that's super rare and only two people want it, well, you're waiting for at least one of those two people to have the funds, have the motivation, and discover that you have that card. If you have only one person that wants the card and only one person selling the card, you're probably not going to get much of an increase in the price point. So rarity for rarity's sake is not important when you're trying to sell cards. That's a big lesson, guys. I don't care if it's out of five. I don't care if it's a one out of one. If you don't have a market that's going to fill that demand for that card, then you're not going to have different price movements for that. So that's a note about rarity and buying. While I was buying these rare cards, I was also discovering that my eBay store, which had been taking off, taking off is a way to put it, but a store that had been doing pretty well in increasing volume of sales, getting up to maybe 25, 30 sales on busy days, just ended up costing me a lot more time in terms of shipping. And my profit margins weren't very high. Now, if you've sold on eBay, you're going to hear a familiar story here, but you discover very quickly that eBay has a lot of charges and fees that just add up. Now, first off, it's the fees that you get on the seller side. I'm going to leave a detailed discussion for this for another podcast because I do have others in this mini-series that will deal with selling. When you think about the fees, if you do promoted listings, when you buy supplies, that all adds up. And so does the time that you spend when you're sending out cards that cost$5 or even$10. At first, I was selling a lot of cards that were like$2.50,$5. A nice card would be like$8,$10. But I was moving volume and I looked at it and I said, oh, well, I made$120. Well, you made$120, but after all of the shipping supplies and after the three hours you just spent getting all of that together and all of those orders, where does that all shake out to in terms of the time that you spent and the money that you were cooped after it? And oh has come as well. If I'm going to be able to scale, I'm going to have to drive up the price tag of what my items are that I'm selling. Because yes, you can go out and you can just sell bulk$5 to$10 cards. At some point, you're going to have to get to where you're going to have to bring other people in. You're going to have to buy a warehouse or a second garage or a storage unit. And you're just going to be spending so much time sending things out. And you're going to run yourself ragged just packing up envelopes and sending them out. This did give me a lot of experience. So I'm thankful of being able to go through that process and learning a lot about what it takes to ship safely. But at the end of the day, you're going to have to sell cards that are that have more value so that when you get 20%, that 20% isn't one dollar. So all that being said, I went through a lot of things that didn't work. Buying sets, buying illiquid players, buying rarity instead of liquidity, buying bad condition. I didn't talk about this, but damaged cards don't do that. And I want to add to that something that's very well known, but I want to reinforce this because it's really hard to stay on this track. But buying wax. And ripping it is almost always a bad investment. More often than not, in the long, in the grand scheme of things, it's going to be a bad investment for you. That's just how pack odds work. So if you rip at, so if you rip wax, just understand it's going to be for fun, not for profit. Understand that it's almost like collecting. If you're a true collector and you're just collecting and will never sell that, that is for fun. That is for you. That is not for profit. Ripping is like that too. You're pretty much just ripping the money away. You might get something back. You very much might not. So, all that being said, let's talk a little bit about some wins that I found. A lot of the wins that I found in buying low and selling high didn't come as 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x. Every once in a while you will get that. But more often than not, you're going to be able to get 10%, 15%, 20%, and hope that you can do that quickly. Now, how do we find those opportunities where we're going to be able to quickly move from 10% to 20% or 15% in profit? Because we are in this buying section of this podcast, I'm going to tell you that there's a few main things that I look for when I'm purchasing. One, can I buy things in bulk? Bulk discounts are going to be your best friend when making deals with sellers. Now, what does that not mean? That does not mean that you need to go out and buy 10,000 cards just so you can get to 10 of them that you want to sell. That is going to end up being much more work than you want to do in order to get those 10 cards. That's a danger of getting things lumped in to where you're paying for that value that you're not going to be able to squeeze out. So if I buy 10,000 cards and I know only 10 of them are really going to sell very well, the rest of those 9,990 cards are going to either sit around and sop up my time as I go through them and pick through them and find things that I want to sell from them. So what do I mean when I say bulk discounts then? If you find someone that has a few cards that you're very interested in, and this goes from a card show or it goes to eBay or it goes to any platform really or any account, even Instagram where a lot of people sell, start talking about one card, start kicking around price points, and then rope in a couple other cards that you're also interested in. So this gives you much more leverage when you're making these negotiations. And that leverage will usually turn into 10, 12%, maybe 15% extra off, depending on the cards that you're looking at and how motivated the seller is to sell. So bulk discounts, number one. Number two, I've won a lot through being able to find motivated sellers. This is really key because there's buying and selling cycles that everyone goes through. And it has a lot to do with psychology around how we view these things that we possess or want to possess. So if I'm on the selling side and I possess a card, usually the anticipation for me getting this card that I purchase is going to be the highest level of excitement that I have surrounding a card, followed by when I get it and unpackage it and look at it, gaze at it lovingly. Very nice, very enjoyable. It's beautiful. Look at the colors, look at the condition, so perfect, etc. But as you have it, the value is probably going to decrease from there in your ownership bias of it. If you first get the card or if it's on the way, very unlikely that you're going to sell it for much of any price. Now, of course, everything has a price, but you're probably going to wait to get it because the excitement is so much there. As you go through the process, say I've had it a couple of weeks, the shine wears off a little bit, right? Maybe I take it to look at it every once in a while, but these things are, these things are just that. They're just things. They're objects of our fascination or objects of our excitement or fandom or identity. So over time, usually these things dissipate unless they're tied to something that's very core to us. But even those core things can change. I'm a Packers fan, a big Packers fan. Early on, I bought a lot of Aaron Rodgers. As the months have come and gone, I've sold a lot of that Aaron Rodgers. The shine wears off. And when you look at these things, you get less and less attached to it, if you will, a lot of the time. Not all the time, but a lot of the time. And you start floating the idea of selling it. Maybe you put it out there, you wait for it, but you put it out there and maybe after three months, you look at it and you start to feel a little irate when you look at it, like, man, that hasn't sold. Then you start thinking of what you can do with all that money. Now in your seller's cycle, you're primed to have a buyer come in and buy that at a lower price. If I had come in as a buyer and tried to buy that when you first got it, you probably would have asked me to give you 40% more than you had paid for it. But now, when you've been waiting for it and three months it hasn't sold, probably let it go for 85% of what you paid for it. So buyer and seller cycles are really important to understand. And in negotiations, you can save a lot of time if you know where the prospective seller is at just when you start talking to them. They might say things like, Yeah, I don't really want to sell it, but I'm just putting the idea out there. I mean, I just told you where in the cycle that person is, right? They are just floating it out there. They probably just newly listed it. So language is a big key for understanding where someone's thought is behind something, which is going to give you a good clue as to where you might be able to get in discounting for it. Then you add on bulk after that. Now you're looking at 80% of the count, maybe 75% of the count if you did it really strongly. If you make those kind of purchases for cards that are very liquid and for players that are going to get the hype shined on them in the near term, that's where you can make those quick flips and money. Because hype is really the nos, the accelerator of demand. Supply and demand is usually pretty consistent with player performance and legacy when they get later on in their careers. Supply and demand goes far beyond that, but focused mostly into that. Hype is kind of the attention, the white hot spotlight that is pushed onto that player. And that's when the money follows in, is when you have that big spotlight. So another key to buying is understanding where that hype is going to be. What are the impetuses that are going to lead to that player be marketed heavily? What is the narrative that's going to be spun around them? If you can get good at forecasting that and look through the cycles, that's very strong for you in your buying. So looking for ways to discount, looking for the right players who are going to gain that extra juice from hype. And then thirdly, being aware of market cycles. Buying in the offseason, selling after the season is just starting, rinse, repeat. You'll see players, good example is Shoheo Tani, buy Shohei Otani in the offseason, sell him during the season when he's going gangbusters, and then his market will filter down a little bit after the summer. I can't tell you that 100% that it will, but usually it does, even after an MVP season, because it's a matter of expectations. And when the expectations have been realized, so has the profit. So those are three critical things to be aware of when you're buying and to make you a stronger buyer. I always say buy strong is going to make you sell profitably, but the most critical thing for buying is relationships. Okay, so I'm going to end with this, guys. Building strong relationships with people starts from treating people well from the get-go. First impressions are really important. Hand up, I've messed this up in the past, but I try and get better and better at it. I'm very conscious of it. People are going to come to you when you're trying to sell things. And sometimes they can be very short, very direct. Sometimes they can be flat out rude. It's up to you how you're going to respond to that. Mostly, not even just that one person, but building the habit of being very professional and being very good about your responses takes time. It takes practice. Treat everything as an opportunity to be the man or woman that you want to be within your selling. And that's going to build relationships, which are going to lead to better buying opportunities because I can tell you those people will look out for you. That's how good business is done in every facet of things, not just sports cards, but all around the world. So build those relationships, be kind to everyone, but also be firm in your buying. I'm going to leave you with one big piece of advice that I usually give new people, which is sleep on your decisions. The card is probably going to be there. Nine out of 10 times, the card will still be there in the morning. Five out of 10 times, probably, maybe six out of 10 times for me. When I wake up, I no longer want to purchase the card, or my enthusiasm has dissipated, or I found a different one that's maybe meeting my investment thesis a little bit more of time frame and what I want to purchase. So sleep on it. It's not going anywhere. And you need to know when you're going to buy and when you're going to sell and what is going to meet those goals. So I hope this has been really helpful for you guys. Make sure you're subscribed to the channel of Slabnomics on Instagram. Give me a follow. I'm always doing stuff out there and trying to make everything really entertaining for you guys. So this has been Slabnomics part one of the mini series of my first year of selling. Hope you guys have had a good time here. Thanks for listening. Keep building, and I will talk to you later.