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.
New Episodes drop Tuesdays @ 7 AM CST.
Slabnomics
1 Year of Selling Sports Cards: Grading (Final Part)
We wrap the mini-series with grading—the alchemy of the hobby when used correctly. I share the actual ledger: 1,127+ cards graded, $20K+ in fees/shipping, PSA (525 cards; ~$11.7K) and SGC (602 cards; ~$9.5K), and why I’d only re-submit ~21% (PSA) and ~17% (SGC) today. You’ll get a pre-grading checklist, a tier/upcharge strategy that protects cash flow, and post-mortems on failed CGC→PSA and BGS→PSA arbitrage.
You’ll learn
- When a card shouldn’t be graded
- PSA vs SGC vs BGS vs CGC—where each fits now
- How to choose service tiers
- Why speed can trump top-end value for flip cycles (compounding ROI)
- A practical pre-grading system
- Why most crossovers disappoint
- The mindset shift: buy raw as if it stays raw; grading is bonus leverage, not a plan
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All right, everyone, welcome to Slabnomics. This is episode 31, part three of three in my mini-series. That's about my first year of buying and selling, the lessons that I've learned, the mistakes that I've made, the things that I can pass on to you as nuggets of wisdom so that you can make money in sports cards much faster. So the first part was buying, second part was selling. Now we're going to go over the key component in the skill tool belt of any buyer and seller of sports cards, grading. And before we get into everything, please make sure to support the podcast by liking it if you're on YouTube or by going ahead and commenting on my Instagram. Make sure to give a follow to the podcast platform that you're on, whether it's Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. We're going to wrap up this whole series by talking about how grading is a leverage multiplier and allows a sports card buyer and seller to actually make a profit in this game. It's really the alchemy of this activity. How I'm going to go into all of that is I'm going to start with what I thought about grading. I'm going to run the numbers for you as to how many cards I actually graded, how many dollars I spent, which graders I used, arbitrage plays that I did, and other strategies that I employed, what worked, what didn't, what I would take back if I could. So that being said, let's dive right in to where I first began. When I first got into sports cards a little bit over a year ago, my thought was that I could become a grading expert very quickly. I don't really pride myself necessarily on having an eye for detail, but I thought that I could get enough repetitions quickly so that I could very easily start being able to make money. Now, first, when we talk about grading, I got into it looking at more of the vintage and pre-modern side of baseball, football, and a little bit of basketball. So I first thought that I could just get these massive lots and I could comb through them and find the cards that were in really, really good shape that I could send in and get graded. Most of these cards were in the 80s to 90s range of things. And they included a lot of superstars that we all know today, Michael Jordan, Bo Jackson, etc. Now, one thing that we all know if we've been in here for a while is that that's the junk wax era, unfortunately, which means that these cards were printed to the moon. So in modern cards, if they're rare enough, you can usually make some money on nines and maybe even sometimes in eights. That's not really going to be the case for junk wax. And I found out that lesson the hard way very quickly. The first lot that I sent in to PSA was over a hundred cards. The first lot that I sent into SGC was over 250 cards. So I had a lot of high hopes as to how these cards might grade out. When I look back at those two first lots, they're really littered with cards that today I would never send in to grade. Now, how do I know that today, but didn't know that before? Or where did I make the mistake before that now I recognize as a mistake? What I've come to learn is that when you're only going to make money on a 10, that's not going to be the card that you normally want to send in to grade. I can couch that by saying, if you're a very, very experienced grader and you're able to, with very excellent accuracy, maybe 75%, be able to figure out what's going to be a 10, then perhaps you can do that. But let's talk for all of us that are sitting more in the realm of two to five years of experience and don't have that kind of eye yet. So those first cards that I sent in, almost all of them were ones that today I would not send in, because they were cards that by themselves were maybe five to eight dollar cards. Sure, some of them might have been Jordans, but they were more like 1992 upper deck base Jordans. Or if they were baseball cards, even if they were stars like Nolan Ryan, they were later year prints like 1983, 1984, that just really don't have much of a market unless you get the tens. Because if you look at the population reports, there's just so many that have been graded. So the tens are really all that people care about because it's so easy to get them if you want to go on eBay. So that was the first thing that I noticed very quickly going back that the two first lots that I had, one with each grader, were really some take back lots, if you will. And if I would have not sent those, I would have probably not felt the pain so much when I looked at the numbers. Because I went back and I looked at all the numbers for all of those lots that I sent in over the past year. I used PSA, especially in the later portions of this year, and SGC when I was first starting out. And we'll get into why that was in a little bit. But first, let's talk about the headline numbers. So PSA, the total number of cards that I sent in was 525 cards. So I went through and I looked at them and I said to myself, with the knowledge that I have today, not knowing what their condition ultimately was, but putting myself back into that time when that player was playing or everything else remained equal in the knowledge that I had then. But with the grading knowledge, the only thing that's boosted by what I know today, would I have sent that in? And out of that 525 cards that I sent to PSA, I would have sent about 110 of them in with my brain now. So that's about 21%. I mean 9% of the cards that I sent in were wasted money. And not even wasted money by the result, wasted money by the process. So that being said, of course, there's a lot of things that I would take back, but what was the actual investment that I made in all of those? In those 525 cards that I sent, I spent a total of$11,716. So PSA only, almost$12,000. And that was made up of$317 on the membership fees,$10,456 on the actual grading, and then almost$1,942 on shipping. So those shipping costs really add up. And I was surprised to see how much that was. Now I told these numbers to my girlfriend as a little funny aside for you guys. And she said, that's it. I don't know. Maybe there's a little bit of a silver lining there. She thought I spent$100,000 in grading, but maybe y'all have wives and girlfriends that feel the same. A lot of money was spent, 11.7K on the PSA side. And as I said, 79% of the time, I wish I could have taken all that back. So what about SGC? Now, before I get into the SGC numbers, why use SGC at all? Because now, November 24th, 2025, when you're looking at the entire picture, you might not even think of sending things to SGC. Maybe you do totally PSA. Maybe you send some things over to Beckend. PSA is known for their value. That is what they say to everyone. We are going to give you the cards that fetch the highest prices on the market. They don't say they're the fastest. They don't say they're the most accurate. They say that they're going to get you the highest price point. Now, SGC, you probably don't send anything into, or maybe you do. They have a brand that's very much built on vintage, but SGC was known for very quick turnarounds and for very appropriate prices, as well as no upcharges. So SGC was the flipper's dream for some time because you could send in a big lot to them, and within two weeks, you could have your cards back. I have my cards back within one full week a couple of times. So if you're sending more low-value cards that hit$100 to$150, SGC was your best friend. PSA, when you're waiting for two, three months to get those cards back, now it's four months, maybe five months sometimes. Why does time matter in this game? Well, one of the things that I like to talk about a lot is compound interest and how that can apply to whatever business activity you're engaged in. When it comes to sports cards, compound interest is what really makes flipping valuable and lucrative in the long term. Because if you flip something in one month for 20% versus if you flip something in six months for 20%, well, your ceiling is going to be so much higher on those fast flips, as long as your decision-making basis is continuously going up and up. Compound investment is very important when it comes to flipping sports cards. It's also important because if after two weeks I can flip a card and get 20%, now I do that again for that 120%, push that into my next lot. Then after two more weeks, another 120% of that. So it keeps moving up quicker and quicker. And the more times you can turn that over the year's space, the more your annual ROI is going to be. Now, that of course presupposes that you're not going to lose the bank, as one does a lot of times in sports gambling, right? You just have a bad week, you get cleaned out, now you're back to zero. So you're going to have to be able to hedge your bets a little bit, make sure that you're not too heavily invested, never push all your chips in on one thing. So, so that was a word on SGC. That speed is actually incredibly valuable and incredibly important for flipping. So that was the word about SGC. Now SGC is, they've really taken a beating in terms of their brand being enfolded under PSA's umbrella has really driven their pricing down to where it almost doesn't make a lot of sense to be able to use them for any grading, really. And they also start getting a little bit slower because PSA siphoned off their team. So I'm not gonna say SGC is dead, but it's much more niche than it was even at the beginning of 2025. So those are two of the big graders. There's a couple more. Beckett, unfortunately, is really terrible when it comes to their customer service, pretty terrible when it comes to turnaround times, but they are very cheap and they don't do any upcharges on you. So if you want to put yourself into a bunch of headaches, or if you're the type of person that can totally tune yourself off, throw cards to them, not care about it at all, and not worry, then maybe you can do Beckett. But if you're investing in your sports cards and it might irk you if they take a long time and don't respond to anything when you send them emails, Beckett might not be the place for you. And I think a lot of people that send sports cards in for grading have found that to be the case. Sadly enough, because PSA can't handle all of the volume, and we really do need another grader to take up some of that slack. Beckett, I don't think is gonna be it. They were historically, but I don't see them changing anytime soon. Hopefully they do. Other graders, you have CGC and you have tag. I think those are the other two big ones to mention. There are a couple other ones, mostly for PC stuff. But if you're going to be sending in things in PSA, SGC. So to get back to the numbers, I said PSA about 11.7K in what I sent in to grade. On the SGC side, I sent in 602 cards. So more than that 525 that I sent to PSA. And if you're doing quick math on it, you know that we're over 1100 cards that I sent in over the past year. Isn't that crazy? Oh, 1,100 cards and I sent$9,500 with SGC. You put that together, I spent over$20,000 in grading in my first year of buying and selling sports cards. How that broke down? Shipping was a little less. I'd say about half, actually, if you look at it that way,$104 for SGC. And the grading itself was just over$9,000. So the cards that I'd send again versus all the ones that I sent, the 602 cards number that I gave you, I would send 105 again to SGC. Overall, I was a little bit surprised when I looked back through that SGC because I used it so early on in my grading experience. Whereas PSA, I went heavy into it more recently. But it turned out that the cards that I was sending to SGC actually fit in pretty well with what you should send to SGC. Cards that if they get a PSA 10 or SGC 10, excuse me, are going to be 100, maybe$150. That's what you should have sent to SGC. You shouldn't be sending a card that can get$1,000 on a PSA 10 because you're going to get hit with an SGC 10 being like 700 bucks a lot of the time. And now, probably even worse. People look at those SGC 9.5s as being worse than PSA 9s now. A lot of the safety that you could look at with an SGC 9.5 versus a PSA 9 is totally evaporated in the last six months. So there you have it. Those are the numbers. PSA I spent over$11,700. SGC, I sent I spent over$9,500. Cards that I'd send again for PSA were at 21% of the total that I sent, which was 525. And then SGC sent 602. And the reason that I'm doing this is one, to help anyone who's getting into this game who doesn't know much about grading, two, to hold myself accountable to where I've been and to be able to learn from my mistakes to grow for the future. So I encourage you to do these little exercises for yourself. This preparation took me about an hour and a half just to get all of those numbers together and to find where I won consistently, but also where I lost consistently. I don't know about you, but a lot of times I feel like money just slips through the cracks. It slips through your pockets into the graders' pockets, it slips from your pockets into eBay's pockets. And it's just so hard to keep the money that you're expecting to come from your decisions. Because at the end of the day, like a computer, you're putting in the inputs and you're expecting the outputs. And if you're not controlling for all the variables in between, you can really be caught with your pants down metaphorically. So, so some things that I've learned just top-level stuff here for you. If your card isn't worth more than 50 bucks or so, probably not a good idea to grade it. It's secondly, I would say the higher value cards that you can go after are going to be better in terms of the leverage that you can get out of grading because it's actually better to pay more and get into that higher echelon of grading tiers and costs. And I know that sounds crazy, right? But paying more through PSA is actually going to get you better value if the card is worth that. Let me give you an example. So I went to Barcelona, I got a bunch of messy rookies, and most of these rookies are going to be at least$1,000 if they grade to like a five or higher. So I know that on the base level, they're about$1,000 on the floor. On the ceiling, they could be$13,000. They could be$30,000. So when sending cards to PSA, here's a little practical lesson. I have these cards that I'm pretty confident are all going to be at least$1,000. But I know that on the ceiling they could be$30,000. Do I pay for the$30,000 level? Do I pay for their absolute ceiling when I set them up with PSA, get them back in five business days? You can, but PSA doesn't refund you the difference for you being wrong. If I my range is from a five to a 10 and I pay for a 10, anything that I get below a 10 was an overpay in that grading submission. So what you want to do is you want to pay for the lowest level that you're comfortably assured your card's going to get. Now, of course, I'm not saying anything that's rocket science here, right, guys? I know you most of you are already going to be doing this, but this is more for the newbies who are trying to figure this stuff out. So pay for the lowest level that you're comfortable with the card coming to. And you want that to be higher than the value level. Because if you're sending value, you're going to be waiting four months to get your cards back. And going back to those lessons about SGC, you want to be flipping as quickly as possible. So you want to wed these two concepts together of not overpaying for your grading, but also getting cards back as quickly as possible. So if you're getting cards that are most valuable at these low levels and submitting them at those levels, then you're going to get them back usually within a month if you're into those higher grading stages, maybe even less, and you're going to be able to flip them quicker, but also not overpay PSA. In fact, you're probably going to be upcharged more often than you're going to be overpaying. That's actually a good sign. And maybe that's why some people like Jeff Wilson say I was happy to be upcharged, because that means you're not giving PSA more money up front than for the time that you're paying. Hopefully that makes sense to everybody. I'm not saying overpay PSA. I'm actually saying the opposite. Try and pay them the least amount up front as possible. And then if you get upcharged, well, it sucks because more money is out of your pocket. I can't really weigh in and say it's wrong or it's right. It just is what it is at this point. Unfortunately, we don't have another option. Because if you've sent cards with Beckett, you know what that's like. So that's a little bit of a summary about using different graders, what I've found in terms of the price points that I've set them at, why I use different graders for certain things. Let me get into a couple strategies that I've utilized and what I found to work and not to work, because this this might be really key for you guys to not do the same things that I did. So here's a few things that I thought about. Arbitrage play. I was looking into Pokemon, especially 1999 Base Pokemon, the first set that came out here in the United States. And I was looking at the values which were going up and up and up, and I noticed that CGC and Beckett to some extent had their values for the same grades at much lower than PSA. So a CGC 9 for a Blastoise first edition was going to be much less than a Blastoise 9 and PSA. And I f and the crazy thing is, a lot of times it was even lower than a PSA 8. So the thought was that this could be a money-making machine. If you buy 10 different Blastoise first edition CGC 9s, and even 60% of them are going to come back as just the same grade that CGC9 as the PSA 9, you're printing money. And you're printing money quick while the market continues to go up. So I got very excited about this. I ran the numbers, I plugged things into an algorithm to see if I was crazy, to see floor versus mid versus ceiling scenarios, to crunch all the numbers and make sure that it made sense to try it out. It really did. But the supposition was that the grading would be consistent or at least within a range of being consistent. Say about fifty, sixty percent of the time, even hit the same number, and we should be good. I went out, made some deals, I cracked all of those 12 CGC cards, shot them off to PSA, and got ready to roll in the dough. Well, my supposition that the grading standards were the same was proven very incorrect very quickly. I came back with the grades all being about two lower. One case it was one lower, the rest of them were two, and one was even three grades lower as CGC to PSA. I was very bummed about this, but I also thought that this might be a little bit more of a grading error than anything. Because it's very possible. Sometimes you get those orders back, and if they're similar cards, it just seems like that person had a bad day and they took it out on your grading. So it's possible that this was the case and I just got a bad grader, but it's also very possible that PSA standards are just much tougher than CGCs, especially for the new CGC labels, which all but one of these were. So those suppositions that I made were correct, but only if the grading standards were the same. Now, luckily for me, I just trialed that out with 12 cards. I didn't go off and get nuts and, you know, take out a second mortgage and put it all into it. But it's important to try. It's important to have these hypotheses, try them out, fail, understand why you failed, see if there's other ways that you can do it, see if maybe you were right but had the wrong grader. I thought about that and sent some over to BGS, the esteemed BGS, sent them the same cards and tried the same play. Because I thought maybe CGC with their subgrade system would translate more favorably over to BGS with their subgrades. Well, that wasn't really the case. BGS is BGS, and the dream died with the resending over there. So I tried to double down, but unfortunately didn't work out. So there's a strategy that didn't work on arbitrage. I tried arbitrage as well from Beckett to PSA in sports cards because I figured, well, Beckett has good grading standards. Everything else aside, Beckett has good grading standards, but I found the reason Beckett subgrades are so telling is because more often than not, PSA is going to be grading off of the lowest sub. Now, definitely don't just send in a BGS slab and try and cross it because I can almost guarantee you they're going to do that. But even if you crack it and cross it, found pretty consistently that whatever that lowest sub is in BGS, that's the grade or worse that you're going to get at PSA. So we say at some points people thought that PSA standards were easier than some of the graders. I found that to not be the case. And that's sending in 525 cards to those guys. So learn from me. Don't make my mistakes, save yourself some money. So going forward, when we talk about grading, I've learned less is more. I would rather talk myself out of grading than talk myself into grading. I don't start with the presupposition that I'm going to send this batch of cards in. I would rather go through, analyze very carefully, and then send in the ones that I feel I have to send in. You're going to have to look at these things through a loop with a light. All right. Some people say that you don't need a loop. Those guys are crazy. Get a loop, get next magnification, and just don't make it difficult on yourself for no reason. Have a light so that you can see the gloss on the front and the back of the card. Have a ruler, measure the borders, do all the things that you should do to as closely as possible pre-grade your card because every time you do that, you get a little better. And then secondly, write it in a journal before you send it off to PSA. I know it seems like a pain in the ass, but I can guarantee you the results that you're going to get and that you're going to be able to see as you progress are going to be so worth that investment of time. So get the right tools, be hard on your cards, and keep yourself a grading journal. And within a year, you will look back and you will say that was one of the most important things that you did. When I grade cards now, generally I get batches of cards. I don't buy as much raw as I used to because I'm not really looking to send in raw cards to grade. When I buy raw cards now, I'm assuming that I'm not going to grade them. That sounds crazy looking back a year ago. Like hearing myself say that sounds crazy because I had the total opposite thought before. I thought I was going to buy all these cards at big badges and I was going to shoot them all off to the graders and then squeeze out the money. But it ends up being your money is tied up. And a lot of times you're not going to be able to get that money out at all. But if you keep everything raw and you buy it as if you're going to be able to resell it raw, then grading becomes a bonus. And grading becomes something you actually leverage instead of something that ties you down. That was a big mindset shift for me. Maybe it strikes a chord with you. Feel welcome to pop into Instagram at Slabnomics and leave a comment, shoot me a DM, whatever you like, have a conversation with me. I'm happy to talk about those things. Really interested to hear what you guys think about your own grading experiences. We've all seen all of the things on Instagram about grading being a scam and PSA being inconsistent. But at the end of the day, grading is a tool. And if you're using a tool incorrectly, it's going to hurt you more than help you. But if you use it correctly, it can be vital for any business activity. So to sum everything up, keep in mind that when you send money into the graders, you're not necessarily going to be getting that back in the sale of the card. Make sure that you have the tools that you need to do the best pre-grading that you can, which is both in things like loops and cracking supplies, but also in keeping a trading journal. Make sure to be considering the time investment of your cards at the graders and how that's going to affect your yearly RO.
SPEAKER_00:And always remember, guys, it's okay to make mistakes.
SPEAKER_01:If there's anything that you can take away from this podcast, this entire series of parts one, two, and three of my year of selling, I made a lot of mistakes. And I found that you just need to own those mistakes as quickly as possible, and then find out how you can act differently. And that's the key to being able to grow and have more fun in doing what you're doing and also do it more profitably to support you and the ones that you love. It's been awesome being able to put this together for you guys, looking inwardly, turning the mirror on myself about these$98,000 of sales that I've had in the past year and things that I've learned from buying, selling, and grading. Hopefully, you guys found some nuggets in all of this. Let me know in the comments on Instagram what parts you found most helpful. And now, going forward for Slapnomics, we're going to be getting back into the intermediate and high level stuff that we started out with. We're going to go back to how to make you make better financial decisions using data. Thank you guys all for listening. Keep building, and I'll talk to you later.
