A Rising Tide Does NOT Lift All Cards

The market doesn't reward truth, it rewards timing.

In this episode of Slabnomics, I break down the concept of DEMAND WINDOWS and why understanding the direction of capital flow is the key to profiting in sports cards in 2026.

Key insights from this episode:
→ Why "a rising tide lifts all boats" is WRONG for card investing
→ The supply absorption capacity concept explained
→ Sport-by-sport breakdown: Soccer, Basketball, Football, Baseball, Pokémon
→ Why vintage Pokémon acts like bonds in your portfolio
→ The "Studs and Duds" strategy for 2026
→ My 4-question checklist before ANY purchase

This episode builds on last week's State of the Hobby data analysis—now with actionable strategies you can implement immediately.

📊 THE CHECKLIST (from this episode):
1. What tier is this card in?
2. What direction is demand flowing in this market?
3. Has this tier received capital or is it waiting?
4. Am I positioned ahead of the flow or behind it?

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Transcript

0:13

Hello and welcome to Slabnomics This is the first episode of Slabnomics for the new year. If this is your first time here listening, welcome. If you've been here before, welcome back. Today, we're going to talk about the last episode that I did, which was the state of the hobby. I talked about how billionaires had moved the market in 2025 and where I forecasted things moving in 2026. I gave you a big breakdown of data across basketball, baseball, soccer, Pokemon, talked a lot about low end, mid end, high end. So today I want to build off that data with you. I want to make sure that we're not just throwing a bunch of numbers out there and we're not doing something actionable. So at the end of this episode of Slabnomics hopefully you're going to understand a little bit more what you can do now going into 2026. In order to talk about that succinctly, we're going to focus on demand, specifically how demand works within Windows. And this is something that the data brought up to me when I was looking through the charts during COVID times. And was looking at sales history and sales volume. What I noticed is that different markets peaked at different times. different subsets within those markets also peaked at different times. And that's where I was able to piece together how the demand dynamic actually flowed from the low end and moved up to the top Then went back compared what 2025 looked like. I think we all felt it was a little bit different, right? 2025 is not the same as COVID. Very different circumstances macroeconomically, very different circumstances within the hobby. And the demand indicators bore that out. So one of the biggest things that I had to wrap my mind around was how demand flows. You know the term, a rising tide lifts all boats. I think we think in terms of that, a general tide that buoys up all the cards that flow below it. But let's think about that logically. There are millions and millions of cards. There are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of players. And when someone makes a purchase, they're not making a purchase of all baseball players. They're not even making a purchase of all the Cincinnati Reds players. They're making a purchase of one card of one player at one time. The demand side of the hobby is thus not a rising tide, it's a current. Demand has a direction. When it enters into the market, it pulls in that direction and it determines what is brought with that and what's left behind. And a good way to sanity check that looking at 2021 and 2022, the difference between the different sports, larger, more established pools peaked later. And a lot of that is because the supply shock never really happened with those markets. Whereas when you had smaller nascent markets these markets peaked earlier and they came down harder. Markets like Pokemon, baseball, soccer, these had a little bit less supply. So they peaked earlier in 2021. Baseball and football, they had more in terms of supply. And so they peaked later in 2022. And the key difference there is supply absorption capacity. Markets with thinner supply didn't take long for sellers to exhaust themselves. Whereas baseball? Everybody had cards that they could sell. And that window of demand, that current, it shifted into where the supply and the demand could meet in partnership. And of course, before you all yell at me, there are other factors that, course, go into these things. There's seasonal factors. There's who was playing at what time, what players got popular, what sports were more popular during that time period. These all weigh in. But when you boil everything down and you strip out the hype and the attention and how that moves, supply and demand always rule king. So that being said, We then moved into not just an analysis by sport, but also an analysis by level of investment. You have low end, have mid end and you have high end. And before I get into that again, what I do want to actually go back and rectify is that I looked into how CardLadder does their indexing and I found something really important that I need to call out for you guys. So hopefully everybody that watched the stay of the hobby last week is also tuning in this week to get some clarification here. What I found in low end when I looked back at the volume, cause I started looking at month by month basis to see how the volume moved in low end. And I found it was super choppy. You would only get sales that registered very intermittently. And I thought that's weird. Low end is very liquid. You're supposed to have a lot of sales. Well, how card ladder did low end is that They took a snapshot of assets at one time. They were all under $500. They put them into the index. They could move out of the index only if they sold for $500 or more at some point. So you could have cards on one side that plummeted and they were worth $100 and are worth a dollar. You have cards on the other side that escaped out of the index and became mid end index pieces and they were added into that mid end. but the key concept here is the other cards, The cards that were so rare, they haven't really sold publicly, but their value has shot through the roof. if you look into the low end index and card ladder, you'll find cards that last sold for$200 in 2017 and card ladder value is now $11,000, $12,000. These are purgatory cards. They're sitting there in the low end index. If they ever sell publicly, they instantly get moved out of the low end index. So you're having this reorganization of the index constantly and the volume is not really going to be consistent because the cards are constantly getting shuffled or they're not even transacting. So I don't think it's a really fair representation of what low end looks like. I would say shout out to card ladder. can create your own custom indexes there. It has been broken for a time for me. Maybe I created too many of them, but look at the specific sport that you're interested in. pick some cards that make sense to you as being good barometers of low end for that index and then create your own index whether it's 10 to 20 cards that will give you a more accurate representation of how the index of what you're trying to look at moves. a little clarification there for you on the low end on the mid end and on the high end. I haven't really looked into it as much want to make sure I got this podcast out for you guys on time. But the key finding that we had for COVID versus this past year is that in COVID demand started from the bottom in low end cards. Everybody had time. Everybody had way too much money and everybody was trying to find identity. So they pushed into the low end all at once, which created supply shocks. As people that traditionally look at cards as more high end assets or long term assets started to focus themselves on their high end speculation, It moved into the mid end and then into the high end. That is the price tracking that we see from the data. Contrasted to the last year, everything moved from the high end because we had this push into alternative assets. We've seen that then move into the mid end. And that's really where it stopped. But going back to the whole rising tide concept, when we look at those things, we look at the overall market rising. And even if we segment it out into low end, medium end, high end, there are still thousands and thousands of cards across those indexes. But what really happened is that human beings are social animals. Someone started buying Luca base rookies PSA 10. They told their friend about it. news spread in little groups and little pockets, maybe 10 people, if you want to get a little COVID reference there and then things ballooned out that way horizontally. Some really powerful data insights would be to see which hyper segmented parts spiked quickly and what their average time of play was. How long did the Luca bases and then Lucas silvers go bananas? What did that timeframe look like? How big was the spike? Did it start in the base? Did it go into the silver? What about? higher end and the gold and then look at how it might have moved was that September was that October did it move into another player did it then just move into goats did it move into MJ rookies this business intelligence would be some amazing stuff to be able to look at to actually see at a fundamental level where demand is moving throughout the market because we're looking from this top down bird's eye view and we're just saying yup index went up But really, it's those cards within the index moving. If anybody out there has a great LLM, let me know and we can maybe partner on something in order to get some data insights like this. I would love that. So why is this relevant? Because we've been able to look at from a broad strokes perspective how things have moved. But there's this tired old saying in finance, past results do not guarantee future returns. And actually, if you look at more of a traditional foundational value based investing, it's almost the opposite. Because I think what people really look for more than anything else is a deal. Now, maybe I'm a midwesterner. All right. I'm a midwesterner and I love telling you how much my jeans were and how much I got them off MSRP. But in a real sense, guys, if the price of an asset moves up so much that the next asset looks cheap, money is going to flow into that like water. Perfect example of this messy Ronaldo. They used to be one a one B on the same level messy in twenty twenty two cemented himself as the goat between those two. Ronaldo just became a very, very, very good player, generational player, but no goat status. When this spike happened last year in the high end, especially with the messy BIS rookies. It was really just messy going for a while, but then after things really peaked for messy's high end market, they moved into Ronaldo because messy moved so much that Ronaldo correspondingly from his status looked incredibly cheap and attainable. then money cycles into that next cheap asset. And that's the value gravity concept that we can use demand windows in order to show us where it might go next. Where is the gravity going to pull it? Just like that current, where's that current gonna pull it into? We know where the current is emanating from and we know where it's going to move into. skate to where the puck is going, move to where the gravity is pulling. So practically the data is not telling you to invest in low end. I am not telling you to invest in low end, but I am investing in low end. Now that doesn't mean I'm buying a $20 card and trying to hold on to that and hope that it becomes $30. That's not what I mean. Low end as defined by card letter again is under $500. That's something that most people can afford. If you want something really liquid, you're talking about something that's $100. that's a nice amount that people can wrap their heads around and that they're very happy to buy into. So why am I going into low end? Because I believe that the people up top making the biggest financial decisions and moving this money around understand that the demand is going to have to well from the bottom Increasing the foundational base of low end, which then moves like a pyramid into the high end, the people that are flipping and Actually doing it as more of an investment angle and money making enterprise. And then that moves into the apex of the pure collectors and the pure businessmen who are looking at it as an alternative asset. So you have to build that pyramid in order to get up to that apex. I don't think Kevin O'Leary would spend millions and millions of dollars on cards if he didn't understand there was a groundswell of demand coming. Now, this has all been conjecture because we're entering into territory where data isn't really going to tell us much, but experience and market movements within traditional broad finance is going to give us indicators of how demand moves through windows and how volume follows sales. So our actual framework here is that we need to be tracking volume. This is pivotal. you need to be able to track the low end to high end volume. Because unfortunately guys, demand windows don't announce themselves, they just appear suddenly and before you know it they've moved like they're a stranger thing's dimensional portal. So, our leading indicator is volume, because most of the time, volume precedes price. Here's an example. Late 2024, Pokemon volume started accelerating long before prices really started boosting up. breakout was enabled by having enough supply in the market to absorb initial demand, but then when that early supply was exhausted, that's when the prices broke out to a new level. So here's some things to watch along those lines. One transaction count versus dollar volume. If dollar volume rises, but the transaction count does not, You have whales concentrating. This is a top down flow. Second thing to watch. Tier divergence. This is what's been happening recently, where you have movement only on the high tier, but you don't have movement within the low tier. When you have this movement disparity, the current is just not strong enough to reach into that demand. If you ask me why that might be in 2025 is because I don't think we really had it being pointed at that demand quite yet. I think that's 2026. Thirdly, if you have a volume surge without a price surge, you're having accumulation before the breakout. That's when things are about to pop off. Lastly, if you're having the opposite, price surge without volume surge, you have a supply vacuum. Very risky stuff. You're probably going to see things gap up and gap down because it's very fragile in terms of its liquidity. And you're probably going to want to view that as a warning signal for yourself. So let me go over those four things again really quick with you. have transaction count versus dollar volume. You have a tier divergence. You have volume surge without price surge. And then you have price surge without volume surge. If I had to guess, I would say that low end is about to see a volume surge pop off in the next couple months, but you probably won't see prices move that much. And I think that may have already started, but I'm still gathering data for that. Volume surge before price good, price before volume fragile. But if you want the biggest red flag indicator of get the hell out of there, I'm going to tell it to you as Peter Lynch would. It's the classic shoe shine example. When the shoe shine boy is giving you stock tips, that's when you know to get the hell out of the market. people with long investment histories, people that are aware of how markets move understand this very succinctly. It's moving at the top, it filters down to the bottom. Once you reach enough movement within the bottom, it's going to be capped out. You start wondering who's going to be holding the bag. So my current read, we're about to move in from that tier gapping into a volume surge before a price surge. We are mid cycle and we are nowhere near any kind of demand exhaustion. This is the part of the podcast where I tell you, do not take this as financial advice. Do your due diligence. Use your brain. I am not going to tell you what to buy, how much to buy. Always make sure that you are not putting yourself at risk of making silly decisions that are going to hurt you in the long term. All of this has risk to it. This is not financial advice. Now, if that low end starts moving, you really got to watch that high end. Is that high end still moving? Because when that high end starts moving out of it, those guys are getting information that they're getting a little bit scared off and skittish. And volume is going to follow that price movement. When all the whales stop buying, people wake up, they look around, they say, no, and they start quietly withdrawing. Because the first people that see that are the people that are in it every day. They start saying, no, these $20,000 cards are not moving like they used to. Man, people are trying to offer me less for this. And then that filters down. and they start getting a little bit concerned and they start letting things go a little bit quicker, And when they're not holding those prices up, prices start falling on the mid end and then low end sees that they start getting spooked. Now everybody's exited. and we're going to have new people that come in from this whole cycle. Just like every other market guys, it's actually healthy. It's how markets work. Of course we're going to spike and then it's going to go down because have you seen what happens with Bitcoin? Have you seen what happens with silver? Have you seen what happens with equities? Have you seen what happens with bonds? Everything is cyclical and that's okay. Be aware of it. Move before everyone else is moving and you'll safeguard yourself. So I'm going to give you guys sport by sport how this might look. Take this as a starting point. Put your watch lists up. Where do you think everything's going to move? Who do you think are good barometers of where volume is flowing in and out of so that you can know before everyone else does if the volume or the price is moving more? and I promise I'm not going to spend too much time on this. So bear with me, even if it's not your sport, cause I will get to your sport and it's going to be important to understand the whole picture. So first one, soccer, because we have a demand catalyst coming up with the World Cup. So many people are going to be introduced to soccer here in the United States, which is incredibly important because the United States holds all of the resale value. Well, 52 % of the entire resale market And the biggest disparity in terms of worldwide popularity is between soccer in the United States and soccer across the entire. So I can almost guarantee you we are going to get a demand spike. Now, I don't know which window that's going to enter into. I think it'll probably be big enough to actually enter into multiple windows. But what I do know is that because the supply is so small in soccer, the print runs are so small guys it's going to very quickly get caught up. So I don't think this market movement that's going to take place in soccer is going to be able to have the legs to last for a very long time. I think this is going to be a huge gap up. It's going to then settle down a little bit afterwards. And then we're going to have a more mature market in soccer after this. I think there's a lot of groundswell when it comes to youth programs of playing the actual sport. A lot more people are starting to get a little bit excited about it. All of the infrastructure investments that the United States has put into soccer is starting to take root. We also had an amazing coach who's now with the United States. But you're going to have to move fast because it's a quick market. They're going to move aggressively and things are going to move fast. All right, out of soccer into basketball. Basketball is kind of like a supply side grind. There's been a lot of supply and I think demand was pretty much capped at a certain point when it comes to the basketball market. But then supply just keeps rationing up every time. It's a lot further in terms of the print run dynamics than soccer is. All those cool inserts in the 90s, People loved them then, they love them now. Soccer had nothing like that. In fact, stuff wasn't really popular until 2014 Prism, was almost 20 years after that stuff was really gaining steam in the basketball markets. So of course, when players pop off, their card markets are going to go up very much, similar to football, but different. And I think in terms of the economics of the whole thing, they printed all the hell. There's so many Cooper flags. There's so many Wembenyamas and so many of the popular players of the 90s and the late 80s really had too much supply for them really to be popular in terms of their card markets. So you have this supply glut pretty much everywhere. similar to the junk wax era of baseball. But baseball has the vintage market, which rules, but we'll get into that. I would say in basketball, if I'm giving you any kind of stuff that you can really chew on, you have to have the rare stuff in basketball. It's not going to be as easy as it is in something like soccer to just grab a refractor and be confident in it going up. Before I get to the granddaddies of baseball and football, I want to talk to you about Pokemon a little bit. Pokemon's super interesting. You know, it reminds me a lot about this concept that something gets popular when we're kids and then when we get money, it becomes popular again. It's kind of the retro cycle. This happened with baseball, with the boomers. You know, it was popular when they were kids, but they were rolling around within their bike spokes and then they grew up. And then when they got money and came into their own, then they started pushing money again. and that brought us really into the junk wax era. baseball was everything in terms of sports cards markets back then. There was a little bit of basketball and football, but so, so small comparatively And still about half the size, if that. Now I think this just happened in Pokemon with vintage. So the 1999 set that came out in the US, that's what was really popular when I was a kid. I was nine years old and I remember everybody just going nuts over the Pokemon stuff. I loved it. Unfortunately, I was into Beanie Babies a little bit more, which I think about pretty much every day. now that millennials are getting more money, They have discretionary income and they're like, man, Pokemon, I love that stuff. And now their kids are getting into Pokemon as well. So it's this interesting cycle where the demand side is getting a constant boost from multiple different generations. It's like Pokemon just keeps being popular with the youth. have something figured out where kids just love Pokemon. so as long as kids love Pokemon, every time a new generation gets more money, Pokemon is just going to go bananas again. this is all of course, pure speculation, but that's the thing about Pokemon is that you have modern, which all the kids are really excited about and is actually pretty affordable. And there's so much of it printed. And then you have vintage where you have this actual capped supply where there's a good amount of it, but compared to the modern stuff, there's almost nothing. And the pop reports are just a fraction of it. And so money will always cycle back into vintage. It's like a wave coming into the ocean. It's going to come up on the shore. But at some point, that tide's going to go back out. And it's always going to go back out to vintage. So I don't know if that helps you understand Pokemon a little bit more, but in terms of sports card markets and an investment portfolio, you should really be diversified. And if you know a little bit about Pokemon, it's kind of like bonds. can smooth out some of your returns and make you a little bit less emotional. and you can move into different sub markets when you see that things are conducive for it. Alright, back to sports. more. Football. Football has two problems. Number one, it gets printed all to hell And number one be some of the sets are absolute garbage, which I brought up in my last podcast. So I won't beat that dead horse, that dead absolute horse and score horse. But the second problem with football is that All the value is really myopically focused into quarterbacks. It's so crazy to me and I feel like everyone looks at it and so crazy, but I think it's because they get so much camera time. Unless you're Miles Garrett or Aaron Donald, you're not really getting that much camera time consistently. Football is a very ratings driven sport. It's all about entertainment. and the people want to see the quarterbacks. They want to see that guy directing, orchestrating, et cetera. So to me, it's a very fragile market. You'll have these rookie quarterbacks that just blow up and they start getting valued like they're Patrick Mahomes. And it's because everybody moves into that one new quarterback at the same time. And so the numbers get skewed because not everybody wants to go for the old, reliable Patrick Mahomes all the time. They want the hot, fresh stuff. So really, your demand window is perpetually diluted in terms of your supply. All right, guys, last one, baseball. Man, I love vintage baseball. When I first got into the hobby, vintage baseball was my jam. It is still something that scratches a different itch from everything else because there's legends attached to these things and the supply was so low And we've already seen the cycles play out so many times, and we've seen that supply is only just trickling in. So there's just. Just this awesome scarcity effect and awesome photography and. how much people value centering And it's really the last bastion of true value and true scarcity is finding that old centered copy of the 1952 Bowman. It's finding the 1971 Topps Black Beauties without any whitening around it. It's finding the registration on those vintage cards where it looks clear as day like it just came out of a pack and transports you back to 1965. Vintage baseball is just little works of art. I think that's museum-worthy stuff and those high-end pieces are just truly extraordinary. So your demand windows for baseball are a lot different because they're collectors that are holding high end. Those guys with those really nice copies, they're not selling. They're fine in terms of money. They get so much more joy out of having that than they would with the money that they sold it for. So until those things move down to their kids who don't care about it like that, we're going to continue to see just these low velocity permanent demand windows for baseball. It'll just tick up. But it will be interesting when some of those baby boomers start aging out, start passing on. Will they be transmitting that love of those cards to their kids? Or will we start seeing fire sales of those assets? That's something to keep an eye on. So I'm about to get you guys out of here, but I want to give you a little bit of a checklist. I want to make sure that I'm giving you practical stuff guys. So hopefully you like what we're doing here. Give me a follow on Instagram at subnomics and let's get you the checklist before any purchase. Here's what to ask yourself. What tier is this card in? What direction do I see demand flowing in this market? this tier receiving capital or do I think it's waiting for capital? And lastly, am I positioned ahead of the flow of sales volume or behind it? So to me, guys, I'm starting to think a little bit of the old studs and duds strategy. Now, I'm not saying by score. I'm just saying You can have some $50 stuff and some $5,000 stuff. And the stuff in the middle is probably going to do just fine as well. I think demand will be pretty consistent. But I think the studs and duds is what we're going to see in 2026. Again, just my guess. It'll be so interesting to see how this thing plays out. Every sport is going to be so interesting in 2026 because there's so many macroeconomic tailwinds. If I have to leave you with one final thought, it's this. reward truth, it rewards timing. So understand the windows through which demand enters and where that demand is flowing to. So thank you all so much for listening to this episode of Slapnomics. Happy New Year to you guys. I hope it's a fantastic year for all of you. And I hope this year you're going to make amazing financial decisions. I'm here to help you with that the best that I can. So until next time, keep building and I'll talk to you later.