Prizm Comparison Across Sports

In this episode of Slabnomics, I pulled every single Panini Prizm base and silver parallel for both players: Lebron James and Lionel Messi. 

I compared PSA 10 populations, last sale prices, and a metric I'm calling Gem Market Cap. What I found shook me.

This episode covers:

How supply, demand & price discovery work differently in cards vs traditional markets
The MLD Valuation Framework (Market, Legacy, Design)
What "Lowest Common Denominator" analysis means for cross-player comparison
Why base cards and silver parallels serve completely different markets
Gem Market Cap: applying stock market thinking to sports cards
Why Pokemon's explosion is a preview of what's coming for soccer

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Transcript

0:13

Welcome to Slabnomics. This is the. podcast where I help you make better financial decisions, drawing from my 10 years of corporate experience in the finance world. In today's episode, the primary thing that we're going to do is do a little silver prism comparison. Now, other podcasts might be doing comparisons between different players in the same set. Maybe a player from one set into the next one. But on slabnomics, we're going to do two players from totally different sports, compare them against their base parallels and their silver parallels for prisms and tell you exactly what that's going to mean in terms of practical takeaways that you can go into your next sports buying excursions. Now, before we dive in, I do want to warn you that there's going to be so much that's going to come from all of this that we're not going to be able to get to at all. So if you don't already follow me on Instagram at Slabnomics, make sure to go and give me a follow there. I do a lot of deep dives, especially with post carousels, which are going to be where I can show you really cool data-driven insights along the parallels of the stuff that we're gonna talk about today. So pause the podcast for a second. If you don't follow me already and go follow me. I know I said we were going to do a little prism deep dive and do some comparisons between base and silver's across sports. But before we do that, we're going to have to talk a little bit about what a market is And look, I'm sure you know what a market is, but we're going to kind dive into the basics So can have that foundation really clear in our minds, and then we can do that comparison against the prisms. Once we wrap that up. going to give you a practical buy recommendation that's based on data. Then I'll talk a little bit about what's been going on with my Comped newsletter that I started a few weeks ago, as well as a couple projects going on on Instagram right now. You know, several years ago, and it feels like another lifetime ago, I was something of an economist a forex exchange company that catered to high net worth individuals and international companies. daily updates for for those high net worth individuals is what macroeconomic things were going on globally, how that tied into things that might be happening domestically, and what we could forecast from those things. In all that writing that I did for years, it all really came down to three fundamental things. Big surprise here. Supply, demand and then price discovery. People forget a little bit about price discovery, but it basically means what did things actually sell at in a real point in time? Now, when I was keeping track of currency pair movements, those things were happening all the time. People were buying dollars, selling euros, buying pounds, selling yen over and over and over again. In microseconds, you would have thousands of transactions. Things are a little bit different in the sports card world and even TCG because things are selling one at a time. And sometimes with big breaks in between, you could be having sales that are daily, but you could also be having ones that are weekly or even monthly or even yearly in a more illiquid market like soccer. So that's why I think some people have some difficulty figuring out the economics behind sports cards. Price discovery, unlike high frequency trading, doesn't happen constantly in a millisecond. Sometimes by the time you see a comp it's already way outdated. Added to that problem, you have supply and demand constantly shifting through these markets. So you might be thinking Slabnomics got on here to tell me what a market is and now I'm just more confused because he said more and more things that go into it and how everything's changing. I've found the best way to simplify things is looking at things one at a time. why my valuation tactics are to use market, legacy, and design as the three pillars of how I value cards. The first two of those are player-specific. You have the market of the player, and you have the legacy that that player is, the archetype that he is. But the third of it is design And design is kind of the boundaries within which those values can move. Kind of like water takes the shape of its container. Now, practical stuff. What I mean by that is design is usually going to be the set in which that player card lives. Not all sets are created equal. Not all sets are investment grade to my eyes. But we do know that every card within that set has the same boundaries of that set. So we can compare against the players of that set. Now, first little amuse-bouche is that at some point I'm going to have this all broken out by players and sets and their actual values that we can pull from all of this. Because if you have enough prism sets and enough tops chrome sets enough optics sets, et cetera, et you will be able to then equalize and find out what the coefficient of that player's value is. That's really just a fancy way of saying, If I compare enough Kevin Durant cards to LeBron James cards of the same sets on a one by one basis, I should have a pattern emerge that shows me how much more LeBron James is worth than Kevin Durant across consistent cards. and I call this exercise finding the lowest common denominator. that really equalizes our design factor out of it. Once we've lowest common denominator, the design part of it, have market and legacy left. And these two of course are going to be related. You can't really be a goat without having a massive market. part of being a goat is a lot of people want your cards, right? but, amuse bouche number two is someday Slabnomics is going to be presenting you with player archetypes, which is going to allow us to compare different legacies across different sports. I know I've told you all in the DMs that I'm working on a lot of stuff. There you go. This is just two of them. So that brings us to our last thing, the market, the supply and the demand. Now, one quick thing that I forgot to say. reason that figuring out those legacies across different sports is so important is because that allows us to lowest common denominator. Another part of that valuation, two out of the three. And effectively that's going to isolate market as the only thing that's not equalized and it'll show us the difference in market. Now, this all probably sounds crazy and you can go ask your friends if Slabnomics is crazy because I'm a little bit crazy. And I'm not promising you that this is gonna be an exact science, but similar to R squared, being able to relate different coefficients to each other is going to allow us to really understand things at a glance much better than we ever understood things before. So, comparison time. if we can compare two goats with the same sets, then we should be able to isolate what their market is. So what I did was I looked up every single prism for LeBron James and Lionel Messi. I took all of their base cards and all of their silver or prism. if you use the 2012 through 2014 nomenclature. There were 15 different Panini prisms for LeBron James spanning from 2012 through 2024. For Leonel Messi, there were only four. You have 2014, 18, 22, and 2024 Copa America. Then I went and looked up all the population counts so could figure out how many cards there were of PSA 10s for all of these base and silver parallels for these two. Then the fun stuff. I went and I looked at the most recent sale prices so that we could see the last time it sold and what it sold for. now putting my economics hat back on for just a second. I'm sure you're familiar with the term market cap when it's applied to stocks. Pretty simple calculation, it's the share price times the amount of shares that are outstanding. This is a broad strokes overview of how valuable a company is by the market's estimation. Now what if I told you you could do that same thing in cards? Well I already told you what the population is and that you can look up a sales price, so just multiply those together and you have the market cap for that specific card in parallel for that set. Now for modern or ultra modern, where PSA 10 is really the only thing that matters as investment grade. I really just look at the PSA 10 data because it's going to give us enough information to be able to compare apples to apples to other cards within that same era. Now limitations on this try and do that with vintage and you're not going to be getting much of a market cap. but for modern and ultra modern it does us just fine. So I've teased you guys enough. Let's put it up on screen. What we actually found. So looking at Messi's Prism base, you can see that the market values all of those PSA 10s. There are 4960 of them as 961,112. So our gem market cap for the Lionel Messi Prism base collection is about 960K. Now because there's only four sets as I told you guys that means the gem market cap per set average is going to be about 240 K. In a vacuum, that doesn't mean much, but let's look at what it is for LeBron. LeBron's entire prism base over 15 cards instead of four was $1,271,775. So his $1.27 million beats out Messi's $961K. Now you're probably not surprised by that, but you might be surprised by how close they were, And unsurprisingly, because LeBron has so many different sets, his PSA 10 pop is over 20,000 versus Messi's under five. So looking just at PSA 10 base cards? Lionel Messi is very close to LeBron James, who has a much bigger card market. And this per set average is almost 3x LeBron's. Now before I get into the silver, I'm gonna say one caveat here. If you're not into soccer and you're not into basketball, you might be tuning out a little bit. And I know it can be hard when I'm chucking a bunch of numbers at you. But if you stay with me through these concepts, you'll find that the universal applications of these concepts are going to serve you in good stead, whether you're a football guy, a baseball guy, we're gonna be going over all of those things as I continue to make this project more and more robust. To wrap up the base discussion, it's kind of important to think about what base cards are there for. I mean, they're not usually investment grade. You don't go showing your friends this base card that you have, even if it is PSA 10. But it does serve its purpose for the collector's side, for if you're trying to complete a set or complete a PSA registry. And I think it also makes a really good foot in the door for anyone starting out in cards or for giving a gift to maybe a kid. All in all, pretty low cost point. can get one for 61 bucks on average for a LeBron. And Messi's 193 average, but he's only got those four, so. So if the base gem is really for those starting out for kids or for just pure collectors of sets, then the silver is a little bit more sophisticated for those with investment appetites, and also those that are doing more of the fast action flipping. And you know what? Because we just compared the basses, now looking at these silvers, we're about to find out something really cool. Where the data starts wilding out is when we look at these silvers, because if you look at Messi's Prism silver total gem market cap, if you were to take all of the gems for Messi's four different Prism sets in the silvers, he's only got three hundred and thirty two PSA 10 pop. That's less than one hundred percent. And the total gem market cap for Messi-Silvers is only 469k. Remember the base was twice that at 961k for Messi. You talk about cornering a market with less than 500K, you could go out and you could buy every single messy prism silver PSA 10. or think of it another way, you get 5,000 of us together and put a hundred bucks in each and you got the whole market. 332 total silvers! All right, but let's compare that to LeBron. Let's give ourselves some kind of comparison here. LeBron's total gem market cap for his Prism silvers is just over 2 million. That's more than four X messy's total gem market cap. Now maybe that's more in line with how you thought this whole comparison was gonna go. But after looking at that base and seeing how close those two were, LeBron only being about 30 % above in total gem market cap for base. How much of a disparity do we have to have the silvers be 4x for LeBron? the rationale for that? think the answer lies in what silvers are used for. hint at before, but silvers are really used as more of an investment-grade piece when you're talking about prisms. They're liquid, you can move them really quickly, everyone knows what they are, and they have consistency across different sets. known to hold their value pretty well, Although population inflation is also a thing. And I was just talking about that on my Slavenomics Instagram when I compared the twenty twenty four prism silvers for all six of the first round drafted quarterbacks. found some incredible insights. Go check out that post But generally speaking, silvers are just rare enough to be investment grade and to be something that can change hands pretty quickly if you're a vendor or a flipper. So the investment appetite is different than basis. It's a different market altogether. Really? There's a little overlap, of course, but but by and large, they're separate. When your PSA pop when you're looking at the difference between messy and LeBron is again a crazy number almost 20 X 332 total messy gem silvers versus 6192 LeBron's. I'm gonna tell you guys the single biggest takeaway from this entire podcast right now. This data tells us that the collecting base and the low end base of fandom manifested for Lionel Messi and for LeBron James are actually pretty similar. But it's the low to mid investment grade assets as well as the flipping currency that is silver's. that shows us muted demand in the marketplace. Now, why is that relevant? Because once that demand flips and vendors start getting excited about moving those cards and they see the demand that market starts going bananas. And I'm going to give you an easy example of what's already happened that way. Pokemon. When I was looking at tables two years ago, It was overwhelmingly sports cards and a little Pokemon mixed in. Fast forward to this past year with all the incredible gains that Pokemon enjoyed, you saw more Pokemon tables than sports cards, and it happened fast. And the crazy thing is, Pokemon is a huge market with huge populations. Soccer, 332 PSA 10 silvers for Messi. That's why I'm so excited about soccer guys, because when the full demand hits this small of a market, it just pops. And you're about to start seeing more advertisements for World Cup. NFL is promoting it already. I'm just excited for the energy that we're going to see this year. So there you go, guys. We did a little deep dive into the Prism comparison data, and I showed you what's happening on the base and how that's different from the silver and explained why that might be happening. And as on my previous podcast three or four ago called Why Billionaires Are Buying They can find YouTube, Spotify or Apple podcasts. I showed how 2025 was all demand from the high-end market moving sports cards and how the low-end market was still 43 % off those COVID all-time highs. Whereas that high end was up back into that all time high range. So think about these markets, about comparisons, and let's skate to where the puck is going. Which probably isn't hockey, Now, if you like the kind of stuff that I'm talking about here and you want to have data driven analysis and metrics for your sports card activities. You may have heard about my new free newsletter that I put out every Saturday morning called Comped In that newsletter, I'll show you six different sports and TCG markets and what they did in the past week and compare that against the S &P 500 gold and Bitcoin so that you have a robust idea of what's going on in all markets and how they're feeding into each other. I also give you a little bit of analysis about all of those markets. I talk about the current news that I see. maybe flush out a little bit of concepts I've been thinking about. And then I always end with a framework with which you can upgrade your investing chops when you look at sports cards and TCG. So go to slabnomics.com if you want comped or go to Instagram and just shoot me a DM. You'll see it on my profile. I give you some instructions there. Wrapping up things with you guys here today. Hopefully I haven't been going on and on too much. I'm in the middle of a two day fast and I haven't eaten in a while, so might get a little bit spacey. But I really encourage you guys to go head over to Instagram and check out what I'm doing over there. I'm doing some really fun project like a sports card bracket for 25 years to buy and hold On one hand, looking at vintage stalwarts like the Nolan Ryan rookie or the Jimmy Brown rookie. On the other hand, going crazy with some Charizard first edition PSA 10s or getting some of the modern stuff with my homes and LeBron in there. So it's a fun way to go in there and see how things shake out. One thing I can tell you from that that I found really interesting so far about the results is that PSA has won every single matchup. And a lot of times that PSA 10 was worth much less than the card it was going against. That blew my mind. So that's it for today. I hope you guys got a lot of value out of this. I'm trying to put out so much content for you guys. Always come and tell me what you find valuable, what you find boring. So that's it for this discussion of markets and a comparison cross sport between prisms. You're going to be seeing a lot more of that cool stuff going forward. But until then, head over to slabnomics.com. Follow me on Instagram. And as always, keep building and I will talk to you later.