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
The Future of Sports Cards: Data, AI & Discovery Ft. Tyler ‘TPott’ Nethercott
In this episode of Slabnomics, I’m joined by Tyler “T-Pott” Nethercott: Senior VP of Product at Sports Card Investor and one of the key minds behind the Market Movers app.
Tyler walks through his journey from banking, risk analysis, and SAP data projects into building one of the most important sports card data platforms in the hobby. From there, we dive deep into what actually separates successful investors and collectors from everyone else: critical thinking, probability, and good decision-making frameworks.
We talk about:
- The early days of Market Movers, beta testing, and building a massive card database
- Why critical thinking & problem solving beat “knowing every checklist”
- Using floor, ceiling, probability, and opportunity cost to guide card buys
- How Market Movers thinks about roadmapping, parity vs differentiation, and user feedback
- The future of AI, exploration, and augmented discovery in sports card apps
- How to find mispriced opportunities by understanding why certain cards are expensive and applying that logic to overlooked segments
- The difference between collecting what you like and investing in what others like and will like later
If you’re serious about sports card investing, want to get smarter with data and tools, or you’re curious how AI might change the way we search for and value cards, this conversation will give you a ton to think about.
This episode is for you if:
- You want to level up from beginner to intermediate (or beyond) in the hobby
- You care about sports cards as an alternative asset class
- You want frameworks, not just “buy this card” calls
Connect:
- Follow Tyler on YouTube: @MarketMovers
- Follow me and Tyler on Instagram: @Slabnomics, #drummondcardcollector
- Watch full episodes on YouTube: Slabnomics
If you enjoyed this episode, please:
- Follow the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
- Share it with a friend who loves data, tools, and nerdy hobby talk
Whether you’re investing or collecting…
Keep building.
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All right, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Slapnomics. I'm very excited to welcome our guest today. You know him as Teapot, Tyler Nethercott. He is one of the people that is most influential when it comes to creating content. One of the people that I first started listening to and following when I first started my journey about a year ago. Tyler, how are you doing, man? Thanks for being here. Yeah. Happy to, Matthew. I'm I'm excited. Uh I'm really good. Fantastic. Yeah, you're holding it down out there in Atlanta. It's probably getting colder out there. People are probably starting to freak out a little bit as they are in Texas here.
SPEAKER_01:Starting to cool down. It was, you know, I think it's uh 60 degrees today, so low of 40. I had a hoodie on at one point this morning. I'm not gonna lie.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, my girlfriend's starting to freak out already, acting like it's 20 degrees. But uh so it is. Uh yeah, man. So today what we're gonna do, just to let the viewers in on the plan here, what I'm most looking forward to do is helping everyone understand how we can use kind of an augmented reality as sports card investors and collectors in the future. We're all concerned about AI. We're all looking at how AI can help us in business aspects and personal lives with ChatGPT. Let's talk a little bit, maybe indirectly, maybe directly if we get to it, how AI can help us or how we can better prepare ourselves for the technological revolution as sports card investors and collectors. Sound good? Sounds great. Yeah, let's do it. Awesome, man. So let's get started and talk a little bit about you. I always like to ask about the collector's journey. I know you're a drummond collector. You know, that's your Instagram handle for everybody. So tell us a little bit about how you got into sports cards and what led you from your kind of what was it, financial, not financial planning, but product management background into where you are today.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I uh collected as a child in the 90s, like so many other people, and uh collected really from like 93 to 99. And then once I went into high school, just pretty much stopped, lost interest in it, as did a lot of other people, and got through high school, college, actually got into my career. Uh I majored in international business and French in college and then had a failed stint as an Air Force officer because of a bad knee, and then wound up in banking, then got into like credit and risk analysis and portfolio management for a food service distribution company, and I jumped around to a few different roles there. Um toward the second half of my time, nine years there, I moved into like special projects, project management, kind of um lean innovation hub type stuff, and then spent two years working on a huge AP integration project as a customer data management lead. So I got into more like um working with SQL databases and ETL and a lot of other data type stuff. So I've always kind of had a penchant for data, numbers, but also innovation and thinking about uh new ways to do things. I'm big on continuous improvement, and that's kind of one of the things that I focus on a lot in my personal life and in at work, especially. So that's kind of what I did. And then I found the hobby again back in 2019, I'm in the summer of 2019, when I found my childhood cards and binders, and my wife was trying to get me to help pack things because we were getting ready to move into a new house. And I instead I was sitting, you know, Indian style on the floor just looking at these binders, you know, as she was like cracking the whip. I mentioned it at work to a friend, to a coworker, and just said, Oh man, I found all my old Penny Hardaways and Gary Payton's. I gotta figure out if I have anything that's worth anything. And he was like, Oh, you should talk to Eric, uh, another guy that I worked with. He's been flipping cards on eBay and he really likes it. And I just started chatting with him basically right after that. Found Jeff Wilson, who's my boss's uh podcast on SportsCard Investor, like first or second episode. It just showed up in my YouTube feed, or I might have been searching for something. I think I was within the first 50 people to subscribe to that channel, and now there's hundreds of thousands. I don't even know what the current count is. So I got subscribed there. Jeff started a Discord, he got into the Discord, I became a moderator, and in December of 2019, I messaged Jeff and said, Hey, you know, you're making all these charts and graphs manually, it looks like, for these card trends that you're covering. Why don't you build an app? You got a software development agency. So, you know, by he said, actually, I'm working on something right now. I'll let you know when beta testing is ready and would love for your feedback. And that's just how we got connected. So I started immediately getting into the app, doing beta testing. He realized that I knew how to submit proper bug reports, how to look at things, and he pulled me in to help him like part-time. So I was kind of moonlighting, helping him grow the database, scale it. And I did that for a few months twice. He said, Hey, how about a full-time job? I said, No, I have several kids and at home, and I'm the you know, sole income earner. I can't afford to leave my almost 10-year time at this other company. And then when COVID hit, it shut everything down. That company took a big hit. I got laid off, and I went back to Jeff and said, Hey, how about uh how about that job? And the rest is kind of history. I've just been working with him ever since, since day one on uh market movers, uh, through multiple iterations, the building of a web version, massively growing the database over time, growing the team, now opening cards HQ, doing content, and everything's just continued to grow and grow uh for the last five and a half years.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, very eclectic history. Throughout all of those things, you you bring such a varied skill set into market movers and into sports card investor. Do you think that's really helped you through that period of being able to adapt as the changes come and make yourself valuable to wear many hats during the early phases of what you guys were doing?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I'm definitely kind of a jack of all trades master of none guy. I don't like to push the final 5%, you know, into mastery of something for 95% more effort. That ties back to my French degree when I was in college. I had originally intended to become just like a polyglot interpreter and had studied multiple languages, studied in France, and came back and was like, I don't want to spend all of my time going to get like a doctorate so that I can just do this one thing. I'd I'd get bored. So I like to spread myself out into a lot of different areas. And I feel like I have at least one moment a month, if not more frequently, where it's kind of a pinch myself moment of just appreciating the fact that somehow a lot of my background, as diverse as it really is, dovetails into the work that we're doing to not only on market movers, but just to grow the company in general. And I so there's a lot that I've worked on that has helped with that, and it's something that I'm really grateful for. I I never thought I could find like an intersection of something that I truly have so much interest in, an industry and a hobby, with a skill set and knowledge base that um dovetails really well into that.
SPEAKER_00:Especially the risk assessment piece. I found that to be I don't know if you've ever done Gallup builders or any of those assessments where you can see what your specific skills are within a workplace, but I'd imagine your risk assessment would be really high in terms of your skills.
SPEAKER_01:I'm thinking skilled assessments and personality tests, I I love those.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I probably have 10 or 12 that I've taken over the years just to, you know, know thyself as they say. Um yeah, being able to assess risk and and understand is this going to give me enough ceiling and am I gonna have enough floor simultaneously? What does that look like? I think can be really important. It can be very difficult when you have so many skills, such a broad skill set, to put it into one. But where would you put your claim to fame?
SPEAKER_01:I tend to think my biggest strength is just critical thinking and problem solving. Those two things go a really long way. And um it's putting together the pieces of what you've learned along the way and being able to leverage those things while also trying to intuit outcomes, potential outcomes. So when I talk about sports cards and prices and looking forward, I think about things a lot in terms of probability. And then you said like floor and ceiling and you know, potential. Those those things matter a lot, as well as just opportunity cost, and that's a big thing that gets people stuck. Sunk cost fallacy, they don't realize that just sitting on a stack of stuff that they're like down on or maybe they think is gonna pop off, but they don't know when, you could be missing a big window if you were to let that go today, take the money, put it back into something else, and kind of go from there. So, but yeah, I think critical thinking is kind of all-encompassing. It's somewhat of a generic phrase, but it goes a really long way into not just how I hobby, but also especially like just the types of things that we have to solve for at work. And it's it's not easy.
SPEAKER_00:I will tell you, it's not easy. 100%. It makes me think of the James Clear Atomic Habits, where he talks about getting just one percent better every day. And that goes hand in hand with decision making. If you get 1% better in your decision making every single day, that's one of those things where CEOs get paid to basically make decisions. And the better you make decisions, the better company you're gonna lead, as it were. I think about this a lot. Like, how can I make my decision making just a little bit better every day, prepare myself better, and then also execute every day. Going back to when you were first getting into the DMs or the Discord of Jeff, I know a lot of people, they look at, hey, I want to be involved in something, but I don't really know what I can bring to the table. You know what I mean? I know that I can do these things. I know that I have all these valuable skills. How do I get someone to notice me? How do I get how do I get a door open? Do you have any kind of pieces of advice for that since you were so early getting into market movers and working with Jeff?
SPEAKER_01:Well, you touched on the personality assessments and skills identifiers. I think it's really important to know what you bring to the table and how you could, you know, make an impact, whether that's just you're trying to get an elevator pitch out to somebody or if you're trying to bring a product, what is it? Why does this matter? Why do you matter? You have to understand your own brand, not in an egotistical way, in just an intelligent self-knowledge kind of way, but to make an impact. I also am a big fan of a book by I think it's Bob Berg called The Go Giver. And in that book is kind of this idea that if you it I wouldn't call it like karmic, but like if you're just going out and intentionally trying to do certain things to help other people, what goes around does tend to come around. You go out and sort of unsolicited just goes tell somebody, I believe I can help you. Here's how I can do it. So in my example in that case, I jumped into Discord and I said, I'll be a moderator. You know, this is gonna take a little bit more of my time, but I'm gonna get plugged in. And that helped me. And I would leave comments, you know, like I told my wife in the fall of 2019 when I first started following Jeff's content, like, you know, I'm kind of getting that sense that I need to spread my wings, build my network, like beyond this company where I've sort of put all my eggs in one basket. I need to spread out and see what else is out there, and maybe I can get connected to this guy, seeing that he worked in the digital, you know, uh digital space. And I didn't have a lot of expectations going into that, but DMing him and saying, like, hey, here's something, and having just a little bit of an exchange. It wasn't overly drawn out, but letting him know I can help you. I have experience with this. I didn't say, hey, I'll do beta testing for you if you pay me, you know,$150 an hour. I just went to him and said, I'd be happy to do this. This is a really cool idea. And we built a relationship that way. So that self-knowledge is really important. And then if it comes to like, we get a I get a ton of uh messages now. I think as the market movers channel has grown, I get a lot of people trying to get access to Jeff through me, whether it's LinkedIn, Instagram, other just people have had my cell phone, they've you know gotten it's at uh card shows and other things, just any possible method they can find, their messaging trying to get to Jeff through me. And what's probably most, I don't know if disappointing is the right word, but just like the biggest oversight I see from people is they come and they go, I have this great idea. I have a great idea, and I really want to talk to you and Jeff about it. I have this awesome idea. And so sometimes I I kind of field those calls with people to hear what their idea is. And like 90% of the time, they don't have an idea. All they've done is identified a problem. They don't actually have a solution. So they're like, fees are terrible, fees are so bad, we just need to come up with a way to get rid of fees to help people. It's like that's not a solution. That's not an idea, that's not a profitable business model. Like there's a whole bunch of things to think about. So if you have an idea, come with actual idea, a solution to a problem. Identifying, you know, friction and other pain points is valuable, but have an actual solution. And then the second uh piece is to know to really know yourself.
SPEAKER_00:You have to know yourself, otherwise, what are you pitching? Yeah. So knowing yourself, recognizing pain points, and also being able to go out and actually do something, take action on something that you truly believe in and provide value for. I definitely agree with that. That if you can come and you can say, this is a problem, this is what I've been thinking about as the solution, would love to talk to you about it and see from your perspective if you agree with this goes a lot further than saying this is what I see as being a problem, because we all know what the problems are. It's about solving them where you need to really do some critical thinking to go back to career strength. Exactly. So, okay, so I love that kind of inroads into providing value to the marketplace. I I felt that way myself when I was first getting into what I was doing with Slapnomics. I didn't know how I could really help people. Was that similar to how market movers developed? You had beta testing down the road that you were working on for the app. But how did things progress? Did was everything roadmapped or was it one day at a time?
SPEAKER_01:So we're kind of living now in the digital product space in what I call a post-agile era. Agile product development has been like a buzzword for 15, 20 years. It's all about moving away from excessively pre-planned, what typically is called like waterfall project management, which is just it's that's more like how you build a house, right? You know what the specs are and if a process makes sense and you have to align on it with the contractors and the timing and the you know buy home buyers. But when it comes to product development, you can't afford to lock yourself into something that's gonna take forever and just expect to hit all those. And you run into road bumps. You have to be able to adjust and to pivot. But why do I say it's more of a post-agile era? People are also kind of like getting sick of that buzzword and that terminology and that structure. Developers are looking for a lot more stake, a lot more opportunity to ideate and innovate themselves. And because technology is changing so fast, it's not just the product managers and the product owners who come with the ideas. We look to our team also to say, hey, I've been studying AI in my own time. I've been studying these other this new emerging version of JavaScript or whatever. And in order to do X, I think we need to do this. Or they look at the app. I want them to understand our user experience and why people value things that they do and say, hey, you know, maybe we should move this around over here. I have a couple of developers on my team who are exceptionally good at that, and they tweak our designs and go, this is better. And I'm like, you know what? You're right. So it's more of a team collective, you know, around that piece. And so that's kind of been the dynamic that we've evolved over the last five years. It we've never had a roadmap that's like two, three, four years. We have a huge backlog. I will tell you that the most frustrating part about my job is that we can't go faster on things. And I hate it. I absolutely hate it. When I have an idea, especially if it's an idea that I think is kind of unique, and then somebody else comes to market with the idea because we're stuck working on the last three things, or we, you know, just can't get out in front of ourselves with infrastructure stuff or other things, all of the pieces that matter to good, strong, um, resilient, well-maintained digital products and and apps. So, but I'm kind of a bottomless pit of ideas when it comes to what we could be doing with the apps. And so it's just about prioritization and getting really good customer feedback and understanding the mind of the hobbyist, which it certainly helps when you yourself, as somebody working on an app, you know, are one of the people. You I have to be more careful not to like let my own biases or desires overly impact the roadmap. And um, that's something we've started to put a lot more emphasis on. My uh director of product, Dan, has uh really brought that kind of mindset to the group since he joined us about a year and a half ago, almost two years ago now, when to say like, we have a lot of good ideas, let's make sure we're talking to our users and prospective users about what they want to so that we don't roll out something that only eight people are going to use with us being two of them, you know. Right.
SPEAKER_00:So when you have that big laundry list of development and products that you're trying to test and get off the ground, how do you make sure that you keep your priorities shifting when they need to shift, but also not shifting when you want to just get things done so you don't end up having 12 unfinished products going at the same time.
SPEAKER_01:So uh a big part of it is actually just understanding your brand and product identity and what you're trying to do. This also could apply to content creation, but it's like what are my goals? It doesn't mean they're locked in forever, but sort of having your North Star and knowing at least at that fixed point in time what it is you're trying to do, and then betting everything that you're planning up against that. So we sometimes look at things and go, you know, we we talk about competitive parity and competitive differentiation. So parity meaning, you know, having the same offering the same types of features that are important to users, and then differentiation would obviously be having big differences that you know make us better or or offer something different that other apps don't have. With market movers in particular, we want to be we want to be so good that you can't afford not to use our app that for everybody, whether you're just a pure collector of raw sub-20 dollar cards or a high-end investor that you know wants to collect million dollar cards. We want to serve everybody. It's a noble goal. Some might argue it's kind of a dumb goal because you how do you be all things to all people? We're trying to find the sweet spot of like app simplicity for people who don't want something overly complex, all the way up to tools like our intelligence report ratios, where you can compare PSA 10 to PSA 9 grades, or compare all of you know Ronaldo's cards to Messi or compare different variations within certain sets and get ratio numbers to like extrapolate and do it's real like nerdy stuff. You know, I love it. Um a lot of people don't care about it. So finding the intersection of those two things is really important. But we look at all of this, we look at what our product offers, we look at what we can potentially do while we try to stay circumspect and see just how is the overall hobby landscape shifting as well as other apps that are coming to market, because it's changing all the time, even just with like manufacturers taking over, with tops taking things over, there may be new stuff, new technology coming out. You know, you obviously alluded to wanting to talk about AI. So there's everything shifting all the time. You can only do so much at one time. And so every, I will say every four months, every three to four months, we're reevaluating our roadmap. And then within every month, we're constantly looking at what we planned for that, what we call like a quad and just saying, are we still working on the things that make the most sense? Sometimes that does admittedly drive my team crazy, you know, because they're like, hey, can we just lock in on what we said we're gonna do? But I'm like, yes, as long as it still makes sense to be the most important thing for us to be doing.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I'd imagine you could get some project ADHD at some point and kind of run after the new thing. I I'm curious how fast things usually change. Do you find that the grounds change very quickly within the hobby? You alluded to a lot of different competitors coming online, especially in the past year, I've noticed, but when you have some big things happening with Kevin O'Leary and and big money coming in, do you find that maybe during bull markets versus bear markets, you have more innovation happening as well, which causes you to have to reassess the roadmap with more rapidity?
SPEAKER_01:I would say we've stayed steady, steady stream the whole time, regardless of kind of what's going on over the last five years. Obviously, we saw the big COVID boom, and then we saw about two years of the market kind of coming down, and now we're seeing it going back up in some cases, especially the high-end market, like exponentially so, and with specific athletes. But none of that has really impacted how we work. I will say that good times lead to good revenue, which leads to scaling the team and growing the team. But we've tried to be really measured with that too, and to take the big picture in. And, you know, to Jeff's credit, he hasn't, for the last six years, you know, he's self funded and bootstrapped everything that we do. And we've tried to be really intentional about staying profitable, but not like as a huge, huge cash grab, right? Like I'm in a fortunate position where we have an owner who's able to. fund the company even on years where again the market was coming down and we were dipping overall. So you're you're taking into into account just how are we doing run rate wise year over year with our with our profit and loss and just steadily, steadily growing the team, which we've done. So he could have taken a big capital injection and we could have grown our team 4X, you know, several years ago. And I maybe that would have worked out well, maybe not, you know, but we've just been really intentional about how we do that, who we go after, what skill sets, and then we, you know, just adjust as we as we need to. But I would say our focus on different things has been pretty stable. And at like at the end of the day, you understand there's like a core set of functionality that the hobby needs, depending on what they want, right? Like comping is a really big thing. It comps, for good or for bad, drive what people are looking to pay for cards. And so having meaningful access to that comp repository is important. Tracking their collections is something a lot of people like to do digitally. Not everyone, but a lot of people like to do that. And then you know the other big thing is just like charting, visualization of the data. And those three things I think we've done really well with with market movers. And so then you just start to layer in all the other smaller things that might be more niche features and functionality for different audiences and how those might come into play.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah you mentioned intentionality and I see in your content a lot of intentionality Tyler. A lot of um uh especially the production value going up and up that's really cool to see and really great to hear that you guys have everything so well organized. Since we're talking about market movers, I'm going to give you a little opportunity here.
SPEAKER_01:Is there anything that you'd like people to know about market movers that maybe they don't yeah I think the number one thing that separates market movers from other apps is our database of cards. And so the way our data is broken up is into two overarching categories. One, I mentioned that comps repository. So you can go into market movers you can actually download the mobile app for free and go into market movers and use our comps repository and it'll show you you know like not a full duration not the full sales history that we have in there but a you know subset of that but for any transaction that's sold. And so you can just download it and use it. And so then not only are you searching eBay comps and getting all the best offer data, but you're also searching across Fanatics Collect and other you know all golden all the all these other auction houses. So we have 11 auction houses. We actually have cards HQ retail data in our database too that's you know kind of an interesting data point to look at and we're continuing to grow that. So that's the comps piece. And that's some people just like to jump right into that and just start you know looking up their card values. And then we have our cards database and what does that mean? It means that when you look in there you see the specific Shohei Otani card with the set description and the variation and the grade and my team writes queries like specific strings that match up sales transactions to those cards with 95 to 100% accuracy so that you can look at charts over time. And if you're trying to forecast and you're talking about floor versus ceiling and you're trying to understand context with a given card or a given player that is critical. Could you do it just looking at comps? Yes I have people all the time say like I don't need market movers I just use eBay or I just use 130 point or whatever. Like you can do that. But I'm telling you like scanning your eyeballs through transactions isn't as meaningful as having it visualized. There's a reason why you know stockbrokers and other people they want to see it on a chart not just like line line item transactions. So that's the big advantage and we have I mean by a landslide the biggest database right now we've got I'm looking at it we've got 6.1 million cards that we're tracking prices on. We have um I think almost 1000 sealed wax products that we track and every day that data's updating there are mistakes there are sales that get missed misattributed or missed depending on listing titles and what people do or don't appropriately put in those titles but it's very powerful and that spans across all sports it spans across all eras it also includes non-sports cards trading card games a lot of people don't know this but we actually have the largest and most comprehensive Pokemon graded like Pokemon database of any app. So people obviously use TCG player a lot for raw TCG but um people who are into the grading game now in Pokemon which is a lot of people really should be using market movers. I mean we I have a buddy who's into it and he texts me like once a week and is just like dude I can't believe this database like you guys have it nailed down. So that's a testament to a guy named Alex who's on my team and Parker is our guy who focuses on sports and um they do a great job and we're gonna take the lid off of that honestly we are very close to scaling that to having every card in existence in market movers. I mean every card tracked pricing it's gonna be really powerful it's ambitious a lot of cards it's ambitious it's been a lot of work it takes a lot of infrastructure planning but I'm really pumped about it.
SPEAKER_00:Awesome man I think you guys have a really great UI and I kind of bounce from one to another when it comes to what I use to comp things but I feel like we only need one you know it's hard to have multiple of these things but yeah maybe that's something you want to speak to really quickly do you think it's possible or beneficial to have multiple of these apps like market movers.
SPEAKER_01:So you know that kind of comes into the problem is that there are multiple it's the same problem of multiple marketplaces. There's pros and cons, right? The one the good news is if you don't like one you're not locked into it. You talked about UI. I know a lot of people who prefer our UI and they really like it. I know people who prefer card ladder's UI I know people who prefer card hedge's you know UI or collects or whatever app they use and depending on the functionality. So that's a personal preference thing just like people have personal preference for their grading company or their consignment company of choice or their auction house of choice choices in general I'm a big fan of and I don't get cranky that there are competitors. I think it's kind of iron sharpen sharpens iron in many ways. At the same time it is frustrating. If you're looking for a card and you've got to figure out how to shop across a dozen different marketplaces to find it all with different save search functionality or no save search functionality at all and some of them support Boolean operators in your search and some don't that's a lot of frustration too you know so there's and I'm I'm aware we talk I talked about competitive parity. There are a handful of things that other apps do that we don't do and so it's raising the bar for our own app to make sure that we tick the boxes on those most core functionalities so that at the end of the day somebody can come and say I don't have any other any reason to use anything other than market movers. I trust the data I trust the reliability I love being able to track my entire collection seamlessly I love the charts and we're working on significantly improving a number of other areas so that at the end of the day I can go out and say take the challenge you know take the Pepsi challenge and show me why you you think you should use this other app that at the end of the day is more expensive and is not doing half of the things that our app can do.
SPEAKER_00:Well said well said are you able to look at different you said you had 11 different marketplaces am I able to see how one card has sold in different things? Let's say I wanted to I had a very liquid silver you know refractor and I wanted to be able to put that up against selling at Heritage, selling at eBay, selling at Alt and see maybe how average prices are different amongst those is the capability?
SPEAKER_01:We have a marketplace filter on our charts that you can look and like filter out different things and then obviously when you scroll through the comps you can see what the marketplace is. It's really interesting when we match sales transactions that come in every day to our cards, we have a you know, I'll call it an algorithm it's probably not the right but like a calculation that comes in and says you know is this an outlier by how much how much to the last sale on what price of a card and it's so it's kind of a tiered system to help us evaluate sales that might be incorrect, you know, or shill bid or something else. We get several thousand of those transactions coming in every day. And the ones that most often we just you we have to put in but if you were to see the chart you're like whoa that can't be a right sale because it'll be like and then I go and look and I'm like oh a random PSA 10 Tom Brady base card that sells for$30 every other day on eBay just sold for$130 on pristine. Like and it's a real sale. It's like a different marketplace each of those I talked about like the preference is real for these buyers on different auction houses and the ones that buy on pristine heritage some of the others even even Golden and Fanatics collect don't seem to like care about comps or be aware of what things go for on eBay or that they could have just gone and bought one on fixed price like literally for a fraction of the cost. And it it goes the other way too it goes down. I have a good friend who is a full-time dealer and has been for a few years and he's like he did a lot of research almost experiments. He conducted his own experiments with different cards on different marketplaces to learn really well over time which players and which types of cards do well on pristine at Fanatics on eBay at a show in other places and has kind of optimized that as his secret sauce for success. So that's a big piece that you know when you see those things you know you can look at it but in terms of like what the app shows you couldn't say like chart the same messy card in three different lines as eBay, pristine and fanatics or something like that. And frankly most of the time there's not enough transactions on the other websites that aren't named eBay to do anything meaningful with that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I want that secret sauce Tyler I want that because that buying better is how you make money. I think on on the sale you can get lucky sometimes but mostly you're going to be around within one standard deviation of where the market price is so if you can get that optimized and take 10% 20% here it it really adds up on the sale prices. 100% yeah so we've talked a little bit about what market movers is doing what you guys do well and what you've done in the past. What we haven't talked about is what the future looks like and of course I'm not going to say tell me your entire roadmap but is there anything that you'd like to share about some future projects that you're working on or future things that you see coming down the pike for all investors and collectors that you want people to be aware of?
SPEAKER_01:I think there's a big gap today in the ability to explore and discover. You can do it you can sort of do it manually but I think for all of us even for me having been back in you know like six, seven years almost and and even as a child and the people who have been in forever, they still stumble across a card they didn't know existed that they really like. You're gonna know the iconic stuff and depending on your goals like sometimes that's all you need to know but if you do have that collecting itch or if you sort of discover something out in front of other people that can be the most profitable thing that you can do. And the best example I have of that is not sports cards but is actually some Marvel cards that I discovered. I saw a guy post on Instagram these Marvel Flear Retro Marvel Precious Metal Gems cards and this was back in like 2020 2020. He like randomly posted one I couldn't tell you who it was but I saw and was like whoa there's you know Spider-Man PMGs or whatever and I was like let me go look into this and I found the checklist and I went out onto eBay and over the span of about two months bought almost like around 25 or 30 of them. And they were all like 15 to 50 dollars a piece and in the coming 18 months they just went absolutely crazy. And it was a question of awareness. People didn't know they existed because it was from two obscure sets that was low print run that nobody even knew had been out there from 2013 and 2015. And so buying those and scooping them up a fun anecdote around that is that I actually wanted to rip a box of it just for fun and I finally tracked one down. It was like$200 and instead of opening it myself we put it into like an advent box break series for charity that we did through SCI. And in that box we hit a blue Wolverine PMG from 2013 that sold for like$300. I think we were we had partnered with Pristine for their auctions and then we donated that money to toys for tots that person sent that card in to PSA for grading and then it got stuck for 14 months in the shutdown that happened and when it came back it was quoted at$100,000. When it came PSA nine it was the highest grade pop one. I believe the dealer brokered a private deal for that card. It wasn't a public sale but he presented it at Culture Collision to me that year and said I bought this from you guys. I'm trying to figure out what it's worth and my jaw dropped because I knew that market had gone absolutely nuclear. So regrets I've had a few, you know, but happy for that guy. So yeah I think um I guess kind of lost my train of thought on that but there was you know some having being able to explore is already something I love to do. I just like to go down the proverbial rabbit hole and see what's out there and discover new things. I'm kind of a sucker for novelty in general but I don't think people have a good way to do that. And so that's what we're working toward is like using this entire comprehensive card catalog so that not just for pricing data but just research, visual exploration, scrolling through hey I want to go buy some really cool you know Lewandowski cards. Let me go see what's out there and just search for the player and imagine that, right? And then start filtering out. So that's something we're really excited about. And then a big thing too is obviously we've got the brick and mortar card shop with all the e-commerce as well with cards HQ now is how can we start to marry up that experience which is something that there's nobody who's in the hobby who doesn't buy sports cards, right? So you want to buy so how do we find things and help people maybe locate cards and source them and maybe have the the shop act as a a vehicle for that. There's a lot there's a lot we want to explore in that space about just how we can support store operations with technology but also maybe tie it into market movers.
SPEAKER_00:That's such an interesting dichotomy the exploration but also the assistance with people looking for specific things. It makes me think of the collector's journey that you outlined and shared with me about a month or two back. I think at times we go down those rabbit holes and we discover things that really speak to us and then maybe it's for a week they speak to us, maybe it's for our entire lives but the exploration is really key for that but how do you keep everything focused? I mean having cards HQ, I mean that retail as well as the online ability to sell, how do you keep yourself from just buying up everything and then be selling a bunch of stuff you don't really know because I've run into that myself.
SPEAKER_01:If we really are being candid in talking about strengths and weaknesses that level of focus is not something I'm good at. I struggle I have a lot of interest I mean you can see just like a subsection of my cards behind me and I've got a row of Giannis and then I've got a lot of football stuff here from the 90s all the way back to up until current I've got baseball and basketball over here, you know, going to work pistons cards, I've got Star Wars cards, I've got my graded slabs and my Barry Sanders and my high-end Grand Hill and I've got I mean I have everything I have a lot of different stuff. And it's really challenging. I just sent 1300 cards to Comsey and several hundred nicer cards to Fanatics collect to put into their vault with the thought that I don't necessarily want to let all of them go right now. I even sent all but a handful of my one of one drumming cards to fanatics. I made an entire video about this actually and it was like okay I can still have access to these cards I can have them digitally stored and scanned in and safely you know stored and insured but if I decide I want to move some of them I can also like slow drip them into weekly auctions over time or drop the price on them on the you know on the fixed price marketplace and just chip away at letting some of them go that I may not want as much to ensure that I'm continuing to be smart about how I fund my PC and growth and even investment opportunities and other things. Or in some cases hey you know we want to get new carpeting and upstairs time to sell 10 of the drum in one of ones you know just over time or whatever else I sent out there. So that focus is difficult. What I'll say is like I I preach a lot about focus and I try to leap by example. It's okay if you buy things and then decide okay now I'm gonna let some of these things go. It's like part of the process. The fun of collecting is the acquisition it's the chase and the acquisition and then you get the card in your hand and you're like man that little dopamine hit of that whole experience is can be pretty high and pretty satisfying. And it's hard to put the pause on that completely. So if going out and buying you know this$5 Mariano Rivera gold medallion you know tickles your fancy, scratches the itch while you're trying to hunt down one of your grails, that's fine. And then maybe eventually you get a box full of that type of stuff and you're like, hey let me go set up one of my local shows, put the value boxes out, get a little showcase, see if I can't move some stuff or go work out a deal with my card shop or put it on eBay or whatever, you know, whatever's easiest and most effective for you and then consolidate in like it that's just almost like inherent to the collector experience too. I just try to tell people set some guidelines. Know have rules for your collection this is actually something that I've been talking to a lot of friends and other hobbyists about. Know your rules and so what I'll give you some examples. I am at the point where I almost completely refuse to have sticker autos in my PC. Now that's tough with soccer soccer's almost all sticker autos and if it's not a sticker auto it's expensive because there's so few on card and they're usually from high end sets. So if I do want an auto I have a DDA Drogba auto it's a sticker auto you know I have a handful of autos of different players um but outside of that when there are readily available ubiquitous on-card autos of Chauncey Billups uh he just got I don't know if you saw the news about him but um any player that I might want a card in my collection, I can go track those down. I also am trying not to have cards where I don't like the image like the photo of the player unless it's a super rare insert or something else is really cool about it that I just have to have. So you start to like put those constraints and just sort the wheat from the chaff within your collection goals and then go from there. That type of process can help quite a bit.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah having rules is really important and it makes me think about something I've been mulling over for myself which is buying and selling cycles. Tell me if this is something you've experienced where you're buying during one period and then you kind of stop buying and then go into a selling cycle. Maybe that's just me. Maybe other people are different and they're buying and selling at the same time but I kind of focus on one thing and I'm a hunter. So I'm out there I'm like I want this I want that right now I'm hunting 2019 Sapphire sets for soccer most of the big names like Messi Ronaldo Mbappe. So I just get focused on that and until I get what I want I just that's the game I play you know do you do the same or are you constantly buying and selling 1400 into Compsy is quite a lot. I sent 400 and thought I had a lot going.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah and I've got a bunch that's now hitting my inventory that I need to price but I mean they've got a good system down and it it works really well. Absolutely buying and selling in cycles makes sense as long as you are doing it in the cycles where it makes sense. If you're trying to buy into the cycles where everybody else is buying that's not a good idea. You want to know the timing of those different markets and typically buying in the offseason about a month after whatever given sport cools off and another one picks up is the sweet spot to buy. So like right now, baseball buying baseball right now outside of those guys mashing home runs and in the World Series, Otani, Vladdy and others, if you're going out looking at baseball cards of other players who you believe could more importantly than anything else have some buzz about them going into next year, like before the season, when typically it makes the most sense to sell before April 1st for a lot of players knowing and understanding those market cycles matters a lot and that's another reason why having a chart of giving cards is so powerful. You can see that you can understand you can extrapolate maybe you're studying a given player and you're like hmm why did this card do what it did back then? Well go to Google Trends and see how they were trending at that given time or do you know study look up a snapshot of news related to them or whatever might have been going on. Everything with that is hype cycles and the hype Are pretty predictable at this point, almost surprisingly, because I feel like the hobby collectively is maturing, and sometimes that does impact things, but I still find myself wondering like who the heck is out there buying these cards on the night, you know, when Otani hits three home runs or whatever. But hype and FOMO are a powerful beast as well. And I perhaps some of those people are just doing it because they're like, I want to immortalize this night in my mind that I saw this event happen in sports, and then I bought the card of my favorite player of this guy.
SPEAKER_00:We talk a lot about those cycles, and they are very easy to look at and find. It's just you get caught up in the hype sometimes. You get excited, you're out with the boys, you have a beer, and it's like, man, I saw Otani do that crazy historical thing, and now I want a piece. So you gotta take a motion out of it for sure if you want to be an investor.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think if you're gonna buy a FOMO, make a FOMO purchase, wearing it like a badge of honor and maybe stupidity is is worthy. I I've sometimes done that. If I have a mail day, be like proud FOMO purchase, just had to had to get one, you know?
SPEAKER_00:So we've talked a little bit about cards themselves, some trends, tape cycles. We've talked about uh things that will make us a little bit better of a collector and an investor, some things that you see coming down the pike. Let's talk a little bit more practically about how we see things coming up that are going to change the dynamics of sports cards. Yeah. So you mentioned as we started talking about the tops and the fanatics changeover in a lot of the sports licensing. We've gotten news as well in the last day that Panini is looking for a buyout. Any thoughts on that as we got the hot news?
SPEAKER_01:I think that aspect of the hobby is like ever evolving. I will say it does look like Fanatics is here to stay for quite a while within the card space. Um, I don't see that changing anytime soon, but we see other acquisitions. What we're seeing now is a big consolidation of power. A lot of people are mad about it, right? We see like partnerships between eBay and PSA, and obviously they have the eBay Comcy relationship, and then you see, you know, Fanatics has their own marketplace, and so Ken Golden's getting mad at them because they seem to get first rights to certain cards from their own packs and knowing who hit them and all these things. That the whole hobby landscape, especially, especially the industry aspect of it, the true business aspect of it, is always subject to change. They're gonna get new people coming in, looking to make a splash. There's a lot of people, a lot of people trying to get investment capital into it. We talked about Kevin O'Leary starting secure with Shine and you know, buying up these big cards, in my opinion, like massively overpaying for a lot of them, but they're doing that. And then there's a lot of private equity trying to get their piece of the pie and investing into businesses and other things. There's new innovation always happening. So this is a landscape that's still ripe for opportunity to evolve, and especially in the technology space, which is how market movers was born. When Jeff Wilson started a sports card investor, he's like, one, I just feel like there's a lot of buzz around alternative investments, and he saw that cards could be one of those vehicles. The other piece, though, was just how incredibly technologically laggered the card industry was. I mean, like people were still pulling up the digital Beckett price guide that didn't actually have any reliable pricing data whatsoever to speak of, and like trying to use that and just like again, just using an eBay sold search without having access to best offer data, and that was pretty much it. Uh or looking at a card and going, wow, I think this is like nine bucks. So how's that sound to you? So we're moving into that space of data. As we think about technology and how itself it's it's advancing, and AI, it's really good at quantitative analysis when you have the right inputs into it. And I think the way that people interact with sports card apps is going to evolve a lot more in terms of how those apps can extrapolate the words that you give it to tell you what you need. So, you know, you come in and you're like, maybe you're like, hey, Marga Movers, which Lionel Messi card should I be looking at investing in right now? And it's going to do quantitative analysis and it's also going to do qualitative analysis. And you ask it, well, what's the main why is this card more expensive than this card? And you start interacting with it. We've been, you know, kind of concepting a like a playful thing that we might call T bot that would uh like feed in inputs of data, knowledge, um, information about the history of cards, the qualitative descriptions, as well as a more quantitative analysis of the journey of that card and what it's you know looking like. And the predictive space is one that I approach with a lot of caution because the card hobby itself is still comprised of human beings who are wildly unpredictable. They don't out there following logical trends. They're doing whatever they want. They're buying into hype with FOMO. They're doing things that are irrational. They're getting drunk on a Tuesday night against one other buyer who's also drunk and just bidding up ridiculously on a given card for no reason. And then people are going, like, wow, you know, imagine if I were anchoring the rest of that player's cards to an index for that player and saying, well, now I think here's my market mover's value that says this card should be worth X. And in reality, that same card sells later that night and goes for a fraction of it, or exceeds it massively, depending. You know, it's all over the place. So we've we've intentionally steered away from predictive values for that reason, because unless we feel confident that they can be somewhat, even somewhat reliable, you know, it's something that I think has a lot a lot more liability to it than it does benefit for people.
SPEAKER_00:That will be cool because it is very difficult when you start going down those rabbit holes to figure out why I should buy this card and not this card. There's millions of different cards, as you said before. So how how are we going to figure out which one is most investable? And whenever we have these discussions, I always, of course, think of the stock market. We try and talk about alternative assets and how they can measure up to the usual asset investing class within equities in the stock market. So the price discovery on the stock market is so instantaneous with high frequency trading that we have now. Everything's so liquid. We do have things like options, where option chains, we have massive jumps, kind of what you were talking about before, when you have two people bidding against each other and one wins a very high price. Same thing happens when you have those illiquid options chains and someone's just like, I'm gonna buy a hundred options of this penny stock, and all of a sudden, you know, that constitutes the float of like 50% of all of that. Do you see us heading towards some kind of sports card investment stock market in a way? Because I've seen some whisperings about having we have things like Rally, right? Where you can own kind of crowdsourced portions of big cards. Do you think we'll end up having almost like a commoditized marketplace at some point?
SPEAKER_01:I think there's a lot of probably justified cynicism around it from those who have been in it for more than you know, for five or six years at least, because we saw a wave of that. We saw a number of different fractional investment companies crop up and they tried to make those things work and they just sort of flopped. Now, Rally is doing that with a lot of different very high-end, you know, alternative investments. But if you try to like drill it down to more you know liquid cards, it's very difficult. And it's also difficult to do with cards that are not liquid but aren't the most expensive, most iconic, because they just don't ever sell. So you're you're basically investing into a valuation of the card that might be total BS in many cases. There's a demand for it. People would like to be able to do it. You have big differences between sports cards and obviously stocks and NFTs, even in other things. Um, a lot of people get cranky when we even call sports card investments because they're like, there's no dividends, so there's you know, all these reasons why they get mad at based on their definition of what an investment is, that um it doesn't qualify. But we typically just say, you know, short-term speculation, flipping, you know, just like sub-one year short-term asset type deal. That's speculation, a more long-term play would be an investment. There's a website, I don't know if you're familiar, but they just shut down completely. They just announced they're completely shutting down, and that site is called was called Starstock. And Starstock was uh a website that basically did what you're describing and had all these cards on it. And they would like even assess A, B, or C grade, like condition on it, even if it wasn't graded. And you could just you just kept it on the platform. Buy and sell, buy and sell, keep it. Think about check out my cards com C, but like specifically designed for buying and selling commoditized, like high high volume cards every single day. And so people would do that. Oh, I saw that you know, Donovan Mitchell dropped 50 last night, like, or he's on pace tonight. I'm gonna go scoop up a bunch of these cards right now and then sell them all for nine percent more in the morning, you know. They would do this, and I think it was low, low fees or no fees until you withdrew or something along those lines. It failed. The site, you know, it failed. People loved it. It had a number of like really, really passionate fans. It just didn't work out at the end of the day. So is it possible? I think there's a demand 100% for it. I don't that's one space that I'm not sure how to execute properly. And I know a lot of people would really like to have the ability to short certain cards, but uh yeah, the more that stuff does get formalized, the more we risk the SEC getting, you know, wanting to get involved and regulate. And I also get not too excited about that idea.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. That was gonna be my next point is that you need regulatory oversight if you're going to have true commodities because they'll they'll get classified as such by the SEC. But the nice thing is you get protections and you get oversight, and the not nice thing is you get oversight. Interesting times. We'll see what happens with the sports car market as it continues to grow and and move forward, but I do think data and analytics is going to be the augmented reality that we all have to be a part of. And it has to go past comps, right? We can't just look at something and say it sold for this a year ago. I want that for it now. So since things are so illiquid and we don't have price discovery in a lot of markets, especially NASA markets like soccer, how do you think we can find some kind of way in the future to derive more data for places that don't have as much data? Yeah. You know, you're in there looking at cards that sell every day, but what about cars that don't sell every year? I think so.
SPEAKER_01:A couple questions there, right? But I think today, what we can do is we can use data to say what we think a card logically should be worth. And you look at it in different tiers, you look at, you know, what level of the market is it in? It's high end, is it mid-cap? Is it, you know, low, low dollar stuff? Is it sell often? Does it, you know, what's the sales velocity, all these different factors, what's this player's price is doing overall? What did the same card of a comparable player who sells at 80% of the rate of this player just sell for? You can triangulate all those things together. And that's helpful, especially, you know, sometimes when you're arriving at that number in a private negotiation with somebody else, monoimano, trying to like both feel good about where you're going to close the deal. Where it doesn't work is just when a car goes to public auction and just has you know hundreds of eyeballs on it and people who don't follow the same rule book, right? If you're operating in a space where you like, where you build a network of buyers and sellers and um in certain like niche, like soccer even is is still very niche on a lot of these cards, maybe you can operate that way a lot more, just like using data and saying, like, hey, let's both get you know into this space. But for the rest of it, there are people who are much smarter than me when it comes to actual, like, actual analytics, actual, you know, data science and doing some of these things. It's it's interesting to explore. Whatever that calculation would be would have to be very transparent and either somehow easily explained and understood to people, or at least you just have to have a lot of trust and credibility as the one building that, you know. So I have some other ideas around it that I have kicked around in my mind in terms of how we could do it, but I don't want to volunteer it necessarily because it's something I still want to unpack with my team in the future.
SPEAKER_00:Good tease there. Good tease. Before I ask you two more closing questions, Tyler, can you tell everyone where they can find you and see the content that you put out? Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:So um obviously Market Movers, you can go to MarketMoversapp.com and um you can check out our different tiers. Like I said, there's also a free version of the mobile app to use. So just download it and test it out, and you'll get access to the basic features. You get access to that 6.1 million card database that'll show you like a limited set of data history for it. We have a really cool grade selector to like look at all the prices of the different grades, look at all the variation prices, look at different players in the same card. It's very easy to navigate and about to get a lot easier um in an upcoming release, probably two to three weeks from now. Uh so and then I'm on the Market Movers YouTube channel, and the focus over there is somewhat diverse, but it's it's meant to be a mix of education and entertainment at the end of the day. And we've done a lot of stuff that's more 101. We kind of dug through the uh sports card investing and collecting for dummies book, like outline, which we wrote and published. And I've just been making like videos, you know, how and how do you know when to grade your cards? What should you be looking at? What are some of the gotchas? Things I wish I knew before buying and selling sports cards, all those types of things. And then we do a lot more like entertainment. I went to an antique mall recently looking for cards. We'd sometimes I'd, you know, decide it's a good idea to get smoked on ripping some some wax and showing people what the value is. So there's a lot of good content there. Uh, I do content over on SportsCard Investor, especially on Thursdays for a show we call Cards on the Table. That's more your kind of like round table pardon interruption style, uh discussions about news in the hobby. And then I have a baseball card podcast specifically with four other guys, Scotty B, Chris, and Jeff from Blabbin' About Slabin and Filmington. That podcast is called Spitballing Cards, and it's on YouTube. So you can go check that out if baseball cards are your thing. And then on Instagram, I've tried to be so much less active if I'm being honest on Instagram, not to waste time, but I am on there sometimes, somewhat poor with DMs, but uh at drumming card collector is my primary handle. I might evolve that over time, but we'll see. I'm still collecting drumming, but I'm kind of whittling down the collection as well. Well, I'm glad you brought up the book uh that you guys wrote together. You, Jeff, and who's a third party? Uh his name's Ben Burroughs. Ben used to work for us and um now he works for Collect Media.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, there's a free cheat sheet uh for you guys. I will probably post a link on that when I put this on Instagram. So if you're seeing this on Instagram, you'll see that. Uh, maybe on my YouTube channel as well, I'll go ahead and put a link to that cheat sheets, and then you'll be able to find that book. What was the title of the book again?
SPEAKER_01:Sports and collecting and investing for dummies. I think I said it backwards before, but it's collecting and investing.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. Alphabetical sports card collecting and investing for dummies. Nice, nice. And that leads perfectly into the first of my last two questions for you, which is I want to know when people are going to level up from beginner to intermediate to pro sports card collector or investor. What are maybe one to two main things that they can do to make that no education is just a big piece, and that's back to the focus.
SPEAKER_01:And so if you uh uh it doesn't matter, collecting or investing, I always tell people to start small. Pick your favorite sport or your favorite player or your favorite team and get into those and learn the products and learn the manufacturer, study checklists, watch YouTube, you know, videos, get into forums, whatever it is that you prefer to do. Reddit has some some community around that stuff, blowout forums, other places, but really like laser in on some stuff and then expect to make mistakes and don't let it discourage you. Learn from the mistakes. Like that's a big piece to to stepping up your game and leveling up. Eventually you're gonna understand which products are respected and um appreciated by the collective hobby and which ones are not worth your time and money and why. And then the the hidden gems within those two spaces where things aren't getting identified just yet, but your little alarm bell goes off inside and says, it seems like it should be. These cards have great eye appeal, they're rare, you've got an iconic set of players in the checklist, those ones have become so inflated while this one stayed down here. Is it gonna catch up and close the gap? And you start to you know see some of those types of things and get into that. I I held up this Mariana Rivera card. This is a non-numbered, just short printed gold medallion. I believe those used to be like one per pack or you know, in in ultra packs back in the 90s. There are serial numbered versions called platinum medallions, typically around to numbered to around 100, depending on the year. And as we saw a lot of other serialized parallels and other inserts from the 90s skyrocket in different sports, those platinum medallions, as well as like flair legacy cards, were kind of not taking the same leaps. And they've been hot now for the last year, like very hot, like catching up to Star Ruby's and essential credentials and PMGs, not to the same level, but rising. So sometimes you start to pick up on things like that. When you start seeing those types of opportunities, that's when you know you're you've made the leap for sure out of novice into, you know, more of an intermediate or even advanced collector or investor.
SPEAKER_00:Excellent. So education and being able to spot opportunities based off of, I'm trying to find a good word for it, based off of like foundational aspects. I know we talk about rarity a lot. So my question for you, my number two question before we get you out of here is if we're looking at what the things are, the the value aspects that people might misunderstand. I think rarity is is up there. Just because it's a rare card doesn't mean that it's going to be in demand. But what are those things that you can find opportunities for that the market has to catch up on, especially to that earlier point that you had about, say, those Marvels, where you just had to wait for the market to get educated and find them. Give us a helpful tip on how to look for those opportunities before other people and know when they're actually going to come about.
SPEAKER_01:So the first step is if you look at there's always leading indicators and lagging indicators in every market. And if there are things today that you can see just looking in the data, what cards are selling for the most, find out why. Ask yourself why or ask other people who are knowledgeable, why is this card determined to be so valuable? Why do people care? And start to understand those attributes and then go on that discovery and exploration journey, looking through other checklists and other sets, looking just even through sales comp history or what's for sale on different marketplaces and looking at cards and going, why is it that that serial numbered card to 50 for that player is goes for this much money, you know? Let's say it's$10,000, and this other one, you know, sold for$420. Like why that doesn't, you know, I don't understand that. And just extrapolating, applying the why of a given set to something else, the more remote it is, sometimes the better. And so, like, a really good example of that is if you look at these basketball and how those inserts and parallels are like the most iconic ones, are very highly sought after. And then you look in baseball and football and you're like, why is Jerry Rice's, you know, Star Ruby's card the same price as like Dekembe Mutumbo? That something there doesn't add up to me at all. Or another really good example, if you had looked, if and for anybody who would have looked even two years ago, much less five, six, seven, eight, nine years ago, and said, why are like all of Lionel Messi's cards like four percent of the cost of Tom Brady or Michael Jordan when he's like the most popular athlete on planet earth? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Surely somebody's gonna start to care about that at some point, like just you know, connecting those dots. So understand the why of the things that are established as important, and then go discover the other things that are just hiding under a rock, waiting for you to apply the same litmus test to them. I like to really look for those opportunities a lot. And the best part of that, the the sweet spot with that is if you find you like them anyway, so that even if they don't blow up, you're really happy to have them in your PC. The one thing I always say, the phrase I always say is collect what you like, invest in what others like, or especially invest in what others are going to like. So that's that's
SPEAKER_00:Kind of some words to live by within the hobby, I think. Fantastic. You know, I had high expectations for you, Teapot. You delivered. So thank you for coming on Slabnomics, buddy. This has been really fun. I'm so glad that you also did a little cross sport there at the end, talking about different archetypes for different sports. Hopefully, you guys are going to see more of that from Slabnomics very soon. Now that I'm back from Barcelona, I can actually get back to work. So thanks again for coming on, man. Anything else you want to say before you head out or you all good?
SPEAKER_01:No, I appreciate it. It's been a lot of fun and um looking forward to seeing your continued evolution on the channel and working through your goals and understanding of the markets and what you can bring to the table. Thank you, brother. I appreciate you. Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00:Catch you later. See ya. Wow, I don't know about you guys, but that was one of my favorite episodes to be able to record. It was so good to have Teapot on here, have him talk about how we got involved with market movers, as well as what he thinks the future is going to bring for all of us sports card investors and collectors. So I hope to have him on again because we kept everything pretty high level and I would love to get into the weeds with him talking about all of those nerdy finance things. Make sure to subscribe to the Market Movers YouTube channel, subscribe to Slabnomics YouTube channel if you're not already, as well on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. So that's it for me this week. Keep building, and I will talk to you guys later.
