PSA Buys Beckett/The Importance of Sets and Cycles

PSA has officially acquired Beckett, and this is more than breaking news. It’s a structural shift in the sports card market.

In this episode of Slabnomics, we break down what the PSA–Beckett acquisition actually means for collectors, investors, and flippers. We zoom out to examine where we are in the market cycle, explain why this moment signals consolidation, and then zoom all the way in to the microeconomics of cards and sets...the containers that ultimately determine long-term value.

This episode is designed to help you make better financial decisions in sports cards, not chase headlines.

🧠 What You’ll Learn in This Episode

🔹 PSA Buying Beckett and Why This Matters
🔹 Market Cycles Explained 

🔹 Why Consolidation Changes Everything

🔹 Sets as Market Containers (Micro View)

🔹 Who Wins During Consolidation

🔹 What to Avoid
 

🏆 Key Takeaway

Understanding where we are in the cycle helps you position ahead of the market instead of reacting after the fact.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:13

Hello everyone, and today on Slabnomics, we are going to break the news about PSA acquiring Beckett. But further than that, I'm going to talk about what that actually means to you. We're going to go over where we are at in the market cycle, focus on the macroeconomics of that, and then zoom in into the microeconomics and what that means for your carts. Little hint, we're going to talk about sets. So as always, Slabnomics is here to help you make better financial decisions regarding sports cars. So make sure to like the video. That helps the channel a lot. Let's go into it. We got the news yesterday that PSA has indeed acquired Beckett. Beckett has been the longtime number two in terms of reputational brand. Now they've flown on hard times recently. Beckett hasn't really been the powerhouse that they were three, four, five years ago. In fact, five years ago, they were the number one grader. Since then, it's become clear that PSA has become top dog. PSA acquired SGC February 2024, and that gave them a leg up in the vintage markets. Now, acquiring Beckett, they they really have ruthlessly cut off any real competitors in terms of the high value cards that are being graded. This isn't rumor, guys. All three of the major grading companies are now under the same roof. And the reason why that's important is it shows us we have a structural change. What does consolidation mean? That's the word of the day. What is happening here with SGC, PSA, Beckett is consolidation. When we talk about market cycles, consolidation is the fourth out of five steps within that cycle. The arc begins, begins with innovation. It then moves into expansion. The cycle pushes then into saturation, next into consolidation, and lastly, lastly, institutionalization. Those are the five steps of a market cycle. And normally consolidation is going to happen after excess. Think of it like the market deciding what's going to survive. And this is exactly what PSA is doing. They're already dominating all of the grading volume. They're already pushing the core concept of their brand, which is that their cards and their slabs are going to fetch higher prices on the market. But further than that, they're also leaning innovation, they're opening up new offices, and they're swallowing up competition when card grading is at its peak. The kind of volume that we're seeing right now in the grading markets is more than it has ever been by far. And this time around, as opposed to what happened during COVID, PSA was ready for it. They're not shutting their doors. They're bringing new companies under their own wing. As we see PSA make acquisitions that are adding to their infrastructure, that tells us that this market is no longer in expansion. The expansion phase would be signaled to us if PSA were making bolt-on acquisitions that help them create more product lines or expand their offering. But with this shift from an acquisition of a product to an infrastructure play, we're no longer in hype phase. We're in the sorting phase of consolidation. So what actually changes when a market enters consolidation? The first thing, capital starts to become conservative. Money no longer chases novelty as much as it starts protecting credibility. The gravy train is flowing, and the companies on top want to make sure that stream keeps flowing. A good way to think of it is consolidation, is when things stop asking what's next, but starts asking more what's durable. So as capital becomes more conservative, standards are going to harden. With the lack of competition, you're going to have fewer rulemakers, which means there's less debate. So there's going to be clear definitions of what is and what isn't. PSA is no longer allowing you the ability to go through SGC or to go through Beckett to use their grading standards. Now PSA sets all of the standards. Isn't that wild? It's not only the grades. They're going to be able to drive uniformity across grading standards as well as the population controls that they have in place. In a word, they're about to remove a lot of ambiguity. So capital becomes conservative, standards then harden. And lastly, liquidity centralizes. If you want to unlock the value of your cards, you're going through PSA or a PSA subsidiary. Not that there aren't other options. You have CGC, you have tag, but it really breaks down into what you're doing that grading for. And if people are trying to flip cards, knowing that PSA is going to have the highest value of their cards, as that's the one thing that they boast, people are going to keep going through PSA. Tag. Tag and CGC might continue to get pigeonholed into PC collections, lower value cards, or TCG. A lot of people are starting to feel like the hobby's changed and it's no longer as much of a hobby as it is a business. This is definitely a signal for those people. You're right. And hey, on a slightly more positive note, maybe I'll actually get some of my emails answered from Beckett now. So that's the macro picture on what's going on with the PSA acquisition of Beckett. Now let's zoom in a little bit. Similar to when we talk about market cycles, the reason that we have those is so that we can understand the full picture of something. It allows us to understand the structure and the container that houses something that we're inside of. In the same way, on a micro level, cards don't float freely. They're constrained within containers. These containers define liquidity ceilings, replacement risk, and institutional trust. So when I say container, what I'm really talking about is a set. On a conceptual plane, a set is applied artwork to a moment in time surrounding a checklist of players. And I know it might sound a little bit crazy when I talk about liquidity, replacement risk, and institutional trust. And maybe the reason that that sounds so crazy is because we've been in a bull market for sports cards over the past year. Maybe if I would have said those terms to you a few years ago and talked about them with sets, it might have made more sense. Because I believe back then the liquidity that was within the sports card market was still there. It was just more concentrated. As bull markets begin and gather steam, the liquidity sloshes over from those traditional bastions of collecting into more and more risk on assets. There's some major sets that we all know, and these are treated almost like blue chip sets, talking about Prism, talking about tops Chrome. And then I like to think of it as large cap sets, things like select or tops finest, maybe Don Russ Optic, if you want to go that route. And then you have mid-tier sets which are geared more towards entry-level points, sets like Tops Flagship or Absolute. And I think these sets have different purposes. I don't think a lot of people are ripping absolute so that they can so that they can collect those cards, grade them, and hold them for eternity, knowing that their value is going to go up. I don't think there's a lot of absolute cards that are going to have value that goes up, besides maybe kabooms. And that's the interesting thing that these manufacturers have done. They put case hits even into those lower end sets to give them a little bit of staying power, to give them some lasting juice. But at the top, those are the sets that we've always collected and always will. Your prisms, your top chromes. And sometimes those high-end sets like National Treasures, Immaculate, those also are going to have a lot of collectibility, but maybe more in a top-heavy way, more on the high-end side of the market. Whereas I believe that tops chrome and prism are in that sweet spot where their collectibility expands through the mid and the high-end market. And these sets, these containers, the manufacturers are always playing with them. Let's try this set out. Let's expand this set that we've traditionally had in basketball over to soccer. Let's do the same the other way. Let's try and do high-end during this month. Let's see, let's see how many more parallels we can throw into this set. Let's see what the market can support. And you'll see them dial back sometimes. Sometimes they're taking that feedback and you can tell that set was a bomb. We're not going to do it again. And then you get one-offs on that. Sometimes you get popular sets that were one-offs, and then they bring them back 10 years later. I can't say I know everything that goes into set production, that's for sure. But I do find that demand works through sets. And I think that's because human beings look to other human beings in order to for guidance and for validation. Someone comes in, they find this tops Chrome set, and they're like, man, I really like this. They show their friends. Their friends are like, man, I really like that. And if it's eye-catching, if it has the design that I've talked about in Slabnomics before, if it has that legacy of that set, then more often than not, they're going to become a new fan joining all the other old fans that already know and love that set. So I truly believe that over the long period of time, the GOAT sets are going to continue to get stronger and stronger over multiple market cycles. Cause even as we go through all of those phases, they're going to go back into those sets at the end. Sure, they might expand out, demand might pop into that top's finest for a while. But at the end of the day, when all the hype is over, when all the market has expanded, consolidated, and retracted back into value, it's going to be into those GOAT sets. And the biggest factor that people don't talk about with those ancillary sets is that the timing windows are smaller. So you might own a great card in the wrong set and lose. Not because you're wrong, but because the markets moved on before you had. So talking about macro stuff, moving into micro stuff, the question becomes who's going to win? There's a phrase that's really popular with stock market writers. It's not those who dig for gold who get rich, but it's those who sell picks and shovels. In the hobby, this is going to be those who own infrastructure tools, grading, data, registries, marketplaces. These are the guys that take their 1%, take their 3% of all transactions and move on. Another analogy that I really like is the toll road operators. They're happy to take their dollar or two, but they're the ones that are getting rich incrementally, especially during the consolidation phase. Owning the toll road always beats owning the car. Second winner is going to be assets with institutional money. These, like gold and silver, are going to be traditional stores of value that money is always going to find its way. Some examples of this are going to be legacy sets. Usually first sets are always going to soak up the money. You're going to have benchmark cards, iconic cards within those sets that also act like magnets, attracting investment and scarcity not only for its own sake, but for the demand of that player and of that set. So infrastructure owners, traditional assets, and then the third winners are going to be those who prioritize liquidity. There's another well-known phase, this one a little bit less pleasant, being caught holding the bag. A lot of times what happens in bull markets, things go up and up and up. You're buying, buying, buying. You're waiting for it to keep going up so you can sell. And then the cliff comes, drops off, and you are left with that asset that you see going down, down, down. Savvy investors are going to be the ones that keep cycling through exits. Take your small wins, ratchet it back up, keep going. That way you know when things are happening a lot quicker than moving slowly and waiting for investments to happen and ripen. Maximum ROI usually loses to repeatable ROI when you have quick moving markets. And another word about the losing side, you don't want manufactured scarcity. Stay away from those weird parallels, orange wave or red and yellow star fractor, or any of that bullshit that Thomson Panini tries to keep whittling away money for. That's those are not going to be assets that history is going to look favorably on. Also, stay away from over-engineered sets and productions. A lot of times when something comes out, you look at it, you don't really get the gist of it. And a lot of times that's something that you should stay away from. I learned my lesson pretty recently with Don Ross, and this also goes for absolute, trying to do kaboom hunting. If you want to try and do that on scale and really like plunge a bunch of money into it, you can, but understand that you're going to be left with a bunch of worthless paper. So know what you're buying and know what you're buying it for. So this brings us back to where we started. When consolidation happens, you've moved past the innovation phase and you've moved into the authority phase. And that's what we're seeing with PSA. The vast amount of card value is still raw. But PSA now owns the companies, the picks and shovels that all of the flippers, collectors, and investors want to use to get that raw value out and marketable. Because we're in the late stage of this business cycle, we may not have the innovation that we need to break the chains of grading at this time. But I do believe in the next market cycle, that will be first and forefront for what the hobby needs in order to innovate. Remember, consolidation rewards discipline and authority. And every mature market rewards discipline. Some helpful tips about sets. You can go on to PSA and you can see the actual value of all auctions that have been dealing with cards of a set. That will allow you to see the most valuable sets out there, whether it's baseball, basketball, football, soccer, you name it, hockey, tennis, whatever you want. A good bet is going to be one that's already played out and won over many, many years. So when fast money slows down, it's usually going to be going back into those bastions of value, those GOAT sets. A second thing I'd recommend, treat this alternative asset as a portfolio. If you're going to have exposure into modern cards, understand that at some point the bottom may drop off of them. But the blue chips are usually going to be in time-honored sets, in players that have standing relevance historically, and especially those that have both. So keep your money moving fast, but also recognize that part of your portfolio should be allocated into those long-standing assets, those long-term assets, so that when the bottom does fall out of the market, you do have assets that are going to continue doing well. You do have assets that are going to be inversely correlated to the market. And then don't forget about the importance of cash. Because when that bottom falls out, if you are able to pick up those pieces, you are going to be in such a better position to be able to capitalize on the next bull market. To sum all that up, buy when there's blood in the streets and sell when everyone in their mothers is telling you what you should be buying. This has been Slabnomics. I hope you guys have enjoyed this episode. I have a lot of other episodes up on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Make sure to give me a like and head over to Instagram. Leave me some comments. Happy to have a conversation with you if you like this episode. Keep building, and I'll talk to you guys later.