Only 4 of These 1952 Topps Legends Beat the S&P 500

 Out of the 10 biggest names in 1952 Topps, only four beat the S&P 500 over 22 years. 

We pulled 9,720 real sales back to 2004, ran every PSA grade through three market cycles, and spoiler alert, the winner isn't the 1952 Mantle.

Plus the first look at RRR, the risk-return ratio built to tell you which cards let you sleep at night. Full grade-by-grade breakdown at slabnomics.com. 

Keep Building. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to Slabnomics. Today I have a very special episode for you. I'm going to be looking at a set that is near and dear to everyone's heart, the 1952 Topps Baseball set. All 407 of these cards are very special. So special, in fact, that it begs the question of which ones are the most special, which one of these are going to be the best investments for the future and which have shown the best returns in the past. And because y'all know I'm nerdy like this and a little bit crazy, I didn't just stop there. I'm not just going to tell you which of the players had the best return and which of those players are going to outperform the SP 500 over that time period. I am going to also show you which of the grades for those players would have given you the highest returns over three different time periods. So buckle up because of course I'm coming at you with all the data. For this exercise, I looked at 1952 Topps Baseball and I looked at the top 10 cards to my eye. Players that I chose for this were Mickey Mantle, the Eddie Matthews rookie card, Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson, Bob Feller, Duke Schneider, Warren Spahn, Johnny Mys, Roy Campanella, and the Hoyt Wilhelm rookie card. Now, I'm sure most of my listeners have heard of all 10 of those players, and I would bet a lot of money that three or four of them is known by every single person listening to this podcast. But one of the critical questions that I've been trying to solve as I've gotten into sports cards is in a market where we have so many choices and the ability to buy so many different cards, which of these cards are the right choice if we could go back in time? Maybe none of these cards actually could outperform the SP 500, but that's something we're going to get to a little bit later. So I told you guys the 10 players that I'm going to be looking at. The number of sales that I analyzed for this exercise is 9,720. 9,720 sales in order to look across every single grade of PSA for all 10 of these players. Everything from authentic up to PSA 10, which usually didn't have much data for it. Now I could have just stopped there, but I'm a rabbit hole guy and I went down a rabbit hole and I thought to myself, what if I look at the different market cycles that we've had in this entire time period that I'm trying to study? And I haven't told you what that time period is quite yet. This is something you are not going to hear or see anywhere, but the time period that I have sales data back to for that 9,720 sales is back to the year 2004. 22 years of sales. This data is phenomenal, guys. So the time periods that I really want to call out though really started with COVID. This is our first recognizable and easily traceable bull market for cards. Checking out the card letter index for baseball, it's clear that March 2022 is when things started heading south, when the bear market started. And that lasted until January of 2025. So we have three discernible markets in here. We have the bull market from October 2019 until March 2022. We can call that the COVID bull market. Then we had the post-COVID bear market from March 2022 until January of 2025. And then what I'm calling the AI bull market of 2025 through current. And the reason I broke it up like that is having this context gives us a lot more inputs for what we're going to talk about later, which is risk-adjusted return. That's a metric that I'm about to introduce to you guys for the first time ever on this podcast. This is a fully loaded one. But first things first, let's get back to the basics and talk about the SP 500 and what's happened during this time frame. I said 2004 is when everything started for when this data was collected. And in that time, the SP has returned over 5x your initial investment if you invested into the SP 500 at that time. Honestly, that's a great return. It's higher than historical average for the SP 500. The second watermark that we're going to have for the SP 500 is going to start at October 2019, which is going to be the start of those three cycles I talked about: the bull, the bear, and the bull in cards. So that's going to give us a nice reference point for that as well. And since that time, total return for SP 500 is about 2x, not a bad seven years. The reason why we bring this up, guys, is because something I've been talking about so much over the past few weeks, few months is comparative analysis. We have so many choices that we can make. Finding the right choice is going to be the one that's going to drive alpha, which is usually defined as gains above a benchmark. If you want a stock market example, the SP 500 is the generally accepted benchmark. And every fund manager is trying to convince everyone that you should invest your money into their fund because they're going to do better than that SP 500 you could put your money into. Spoiler alert, they usually don't do that for a long period of time. The benchmark is pretty much undefeated, which is why Warren Buffett tells you, just put into a low-cost index fund. Now, me being the finance guy that I am, also want to just put things into an index fund unless I can find something to beat that. That's why we're here today at 11 o'clock at night, talking about which cards out of 1952 tops have beaten the SP 500 over the past 22 years. I gave you guys a list of 10 amazing Hall of Fame players, a couple of those rookies, and each of those guys has a subset of all the different grades that I analyzed, going from PSA 1 all the way up to PSA 10. Now, out of those 10, how many do you think outperformed the SP 500 over that time period? Just any grade, let's say. Maybe you're thinking to yourself at least half, because otherwise Slabnomics probably won't be asking this question. Maybe you're a little bit more optimistic and you thought all of them outperformed because cards have been doing so well, two massive bull runs over the last seven years. The answer is out of those 10 amazing players in this amazing, beautiful, historic, iconic set, four of them have outperformed the SP 500 over that 22-year span from 2004 until current. Four. And this is a point I like to bring up a lot. Most cards aren't going to outperform the things that you already have. Most cards aren't going to actually be good investments. And that's the crux of what we're trying to do here. Find out which ones are. And I know that I've been teasing you guys way too much in this episode. So I'm just going to give you the four names of those outperformers. They are Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Jackie Robinson, and Hoyt Wilhelm. Johnny Mys, amazing Hall of Famer, one of the best players of his era, not on that list. Warren Spawn, some say one of the best pitchers to ever live, not on that list. And guys, I'm not talking about an average of all of the grades or multiple grades having to beat it. Not a single grade was better than that 5.5X of the SP 500 for any of those six players. PSA 10s included. One caveat there that I have to say is there's not too many PSA 10s of these things. So a lot of times there wasn't really enough data to make those kind of comparisons, just being really honest with you guys. So of those four bona fide superstars, Mantle, Mays, Robinson, and Hoyt Wilhelm, I'm sure you can guess who would probably be the lowest return. It's Hoyt Wilhelm. But the highest return is probably going to surprise you. It's not Mickey Mantle. It's not Willie Mays. Jackie Robinson, by a comfortable margin, has outperformed everybody else. And it's obviously not an accident because it's not even as if one grade drove all of this outperformance. It is multiple grades of Jackie Robinson that beat out every single grade of all the other players. If you'd like to see what those grades are, head over to slabnomics.com. I'm going to have this posted up for all of my investor tier subscribers. What you'll find over there is not just which grades outperformed others, but it will also show how they performed through those cycles. During the COVID market, which of the PSA grades outperformed more than the others? During the bear market, which got hit worst? Which players were hit worst? And in this AI bull market that we've been enjoying for the past 16 months or so, where have we seen this pick back up? In which grades, which players? All of that fascinating information is going to be available on slabnomics.com. So check it out. One little reminder to support what I do with Slabnomics, that is a paid tier. And there are so much more that you're going to get on there, including deep dive podcasts, compostor newsletter, only available to you subscribers, frameworks that I built out through everything I've talked about on Slabnomics, and of course, data analytics for different sets and different players, which is what I'm working on right now on the player side. Thanks so much for supporting this movement to get real data analytics behind this market. So the question then comes to my mind, if Jackie Robinson is the one that's outperforming all the rest of these across multiple grades, is this something that's going to continue? Is it something that inertia is going to continue to push forward? Or is it something that will recorrect? That's something that you're going to have to think about. But I find that markets move in cycles, but they usually rhyme. There's a reason that Jackie Robinson has this outperformance. He's a cultural icon. It's beyond sports. This is something that we saw with Michael Jordan, and it's something that we also see right now with another player in baseball whose rookie cards came out in 2018. I'm sure you know who that is. So what do these 9,720 sales tell us? What can we practically do with this information? Well, this tells you within this set who has had the highest returns, which is something that you aren't going to be able to find anywhere else. That might be valuable to you. But what's going to be even more valuable and so much more powerful when I get through all of this is when I have a bunch of different sets being able to be compared against each other, especially players compared against their own cards as well as other players' cards. The more we build out this informational database, the more we're going to be armed to make better decisions and sports cards financially. Keep an eye on my Slabnomics Instagram, which is where I try and break things down even further. Now, hopefully I've given you guys some things to think about regarding what long-term values are actually created through the hobby. Biggest takeaway here is honestly that things that you might have thought were valuable for long-term holds probably aren't going to be as valuable as you might have thought. Imagine going back in time and telling yourself, don't buy that Warren Spawn PSA 8. Take that money and buy as many Jackie Robinson PSA ones as you possibly can. And you're going to be 9x better. This is the information that I want to provide you guys right now on Slapnomics, so that in the next 20 years, you're going to know where the market has traditionally valued these assets. And speaking of the next 20 years, the one thing that I hinted at earlier is something that I'm so excited to give you guys right now for the first time. It's a metric that I've developed myself. It's called RRR, but it's the risk-reward ratio for a card. If you're a disciple of traditional financial analysis, you might know what the sharp ratio is, which basically shows you if I have this holding or that holding, what's the risk adjusted rate of return historically? And a quick aside here, because you might be thinking to yourself, why is that important? Why can't I just get the thing that's going to go up the most, right? Well, if it were that easy, we'd all own an island. But the sad fact of the matter is we are human beings with emotions. And a lot of times when those emotions go the wrong way, when we're put under a lot of pressure, we end up making decisions that aren't our best. The sharp ratio for stocks is to help you sleep at night. The RRR does the same thing for carts. If I'm comparing against this Jackie Robinson PSA 2, and I'm comparing it against the Willie Mays PSA 4, maybe they have pretty similar returns that they've given the market, but one might have been risk adjusted, much easier to hold on to through the ups and the downs, the peaks and the troughs of the market. That's one of the reasons why I did those three different sets of data, 2019 through 2022, to get that bull market, 2022 to 2025 to see what that bear market looked like, and then 25 to now to see how everything has recovered in this new bull market. And a lot of times what I found was that bear market would hit hard. You would see something go up eight, 900%, but then it would take a total dive when it got to that bear market. That's the RRR in action. If you were holding on to that card and it went up so high, if it's got a low RRR, you're gonna know that that thing is about to go right back down. You can capitalize on that window, but if you're a guy that's more buy and hold and you don't want to have to time the market much, you want to be looking for that high RR. Maybe we could call it the sleep to reward ratio or the gray hair metric. But advanced investors know that mitigating risk is the true way to drive long-term returns in any asset class out there. This RRR is going to be available on slabnomics.com, but please be patient with me. It is a work in progress. I need to go through a lot of sales. I know I told you guys a couple times over 9,000 just on these 10 cards. Imagine that pushed out to all the different sets. And yes, I'm doing this for baseball, basketball, football, and soccer, but only in modern. So to summarize what we've talked about today, we went over 10 different megastars from the 1952 Topps baseball set, which is one of the most beloved sets of all time. And we found that only four of those players had any cards that outperformed the SP 500 broader market. Further, we did find one of those was clearly head and shoulders above the other. Jackie Robinson had a couple of the PSA graded tiers that ended up being 4X that amazing stock market return, which was about five and a half. We touched on a little bit that you might be surprised which of the PSA grades actually ended up returning the most for these four players. I didn't get into that because I don't have time on this podcast, but you will be able to find that on slabnomics.com very soon. I reviewed a little bit why this all matters, why we do this analysis, and why we try and find these diamonds in the rough. At the end of the day, we need to find better returns than just parking money in an index fund. I also broke that data out to three different cycles, which is going to be an amazing use case for later things that I'm going to do with Slabnomics, and talked a little bit about the RRR, the new metric that I've come up with, the risk-return ratio that's going to tell you how much you can sleep at night holding this asset long term. I'm so glad that we got to start going over this groundbreaking stuff that I've been working on. I'm sorry I haven't been as active on social media, but it's because I'm knee deep in data right now. If any of this was really interesting to you, make sure to share it with a friend. And as always, be sure to hit me up on Instagram. You're welcome to pop into my DMs, ask me any questions about the things that I've talked about. And those Slabnomics investor tier, of course, have the Discord where they can send me messages and I'll see them a little quicker. That's it for tonight. I'm gonna get some sleep. But as always, thanks so much for being here on Slabnomics. Keep building, and I'll talk to you later.