Parallels, Graders, and How PSA's Submission Pause Might Affect the Market

 I looked at all 83 parallels of Victor Wembanyama's 2023 Prizm rookie and indexed every sale against his player market. The best returns did not come from the 1/1s. This episode is a thought dump on that, plus two bigger questions: is vintage cheap relative to modern, and what happens to slab prices now that PSA cut off low-value grading. Your job this week is to tell me which project matters most to you. 

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Hi guys, and welcome to another episode of Slabnomics. Today I'm going to be going over a little bit of a thought dump. I'm sure on Instagram you've seen where everyone just goes over the photos that they've had over the last month, over their vacation time, whatever it is. That's their photo dump, right? This is going to be a thought dump. For the past month or so, I've been embarking on a lot of new projects. I want to hear what you guys think about those projects. So this whole conversation that we're having here today, usually I put everything out there. I hope that you guys like it. And I see some comments on YouTube. But today I would really love to hear from you guys on social media, put some comments on YouTube or even on Spotify, and I'll make sure to check notifications over there. Let me know what of these things sound most compelling to you. That's your job here. This is a constant battle with Slabnomics. It's one of my labors of love that the things that I work on on the website to provide for you guys, I start going down one path that usually leads to about four different paths, and then I get distracted by about three other ones while I'm doing that. So the ADHD is real as a creator, guys. But all that being said, what I've been focusing on mostly are about three things I would say: parallels, vintage versus modern, and then different graders and how that interplay works out in terms of value. Starting with the parallels, to summarize what I've been talking about over the past three weeks or so, I started with Victor Webanyama's 2023 Prism, and I looked at all 83 of the different parallels. All the sales for all the parallels, all 83 of those for all the graders for Victor Webanyama. It encompasses what, about two and a half years at this point. Actually, probably about a year and a half. Some of the sales were late 2024, if I recall, December time period, and then January 2025 is where most of them hit. Now, the first question you might be asking is why are you looking at the parallels? What does it really matter? And for me, this harkens back to something that I've been going over for probably three to six months, where I've been speaking about the fact that there are millions and millions of cards out there. What Slabnomics is supposed to be helping you to do is to choose the right cards if profit is your main motivator. If you're a collector, this isn't the type of podcast for you. Not because I don't care about collecting, but because what I am trying to help you do is to meet the end of realizing the most profit for yourself. And that's going to be able to support you and your outside life, non-sports card and non-TCG collecting, but also in collecting, it's going to really empower you to be able to make a better collection because you're going to be getting money from other sources. So, yes, it is about making money, but at the end of the day, making money is not any kind of end in and of itself. It's a means to an end. So where we put that money is always the question that I bring up as well. So a little philosophical tangent there, but it's old to say that looking at 83 different parallels for Victor Webanyama really complicates the picture because even if I say, I think Victor Webanyama is going to be an absolute legend, he's going to become on the God tier with LeBron James and Michael Jordan. He's going to surpass any other of his peers that he's currently playing with. Even if I say all of that, I look and then say, well, there are hundreds of different Victor Webanyama rookies that I can even look at. Which of those are going to be the best investment? That line of thinking then leads me down the path of, well, let's look at his prism, which I would say is his staple or his flagship rookie card. And let's take a peek and see which of those parallels are going to be the ones that have been most profitable over the last year and a half or so. Not to bore you with all the details of how I engineered all of this, but one critical thing I want to point out when going through this exercise was that not all of these sales were at the same time. So the first sale for a certain parallel and the last sale of that parallel would be much different for the orange ice versus the silver, much different for the gold versus the pink, and all of the different ones in between, the gold sparkle, the white sparkle, all the other things. So to remove that time period from those cards, the differences of the time periods between those cards and how the market was different from one sale to another, I did something called indexing, which is something you'll see on card ladder. And it basically uses a broad basket of assets to create a stable index, just like a stock market index. If you're looking at technology stocks, if you're looking at AI stocks, et cetera, it will try and use some distribution of a bunch of different stocks in order to give you an average path or an average asset class. Same thing here. I use Victor Webanyama's index from Card Ladder, his player index, which itself has a couple hundred cards in there, in order to clearly define where Victor Webanyama's market was when those sales took place. That lets us know about how much above or below the current market of Victor Webanyama that parallel sale was. To be honest with you guys, the reason this is important is because the performance of these cards, because they ended so high, really depended very greatly on if you bought them when Victor's market was low or high. And what we were looking for was more how the parallel itself moved. So comparing all of these different parallels to Victor Webanyama's price index then gave us a real isolation of how those parallels appreciated themselves. And I've shared with you the results on Instagram. So you can go and check out some reels on my page. I have them labeled there so you can actually see what the labels are about before you click in. Check my timeline for any of those labels. But there were certainly parallels that were able to outperform other parallels. And you might think that, well, they're just the one of ones or maybe just the golds. And I found that wasn't really the case. In fact, I found that from 199 down to about 75 was your sweet spot in terms of the percentage gain that you were going to have. Those percentage gains are critically important because going back to this whole three or six month thing that I've been talking about a lot, being that you can choose what cars you're going to buy, and you have almost an unfathomable amount of choices to be able to make to in that regard, it's really the percentage of gain that's going to matter, not necessarily the dollar amount. So I'm going to give you a summation of all of that, and then I'll give you one big takeaway that I think is the most key thing that I've been thinking about that's come from that exercise. In summary, I looked at all the different sales of the parallels for Victor Webb and Yama's rookie. I was able to find which of the parallels actually outperformed the other ones and which ones underperformed. And I think that's going to be a huge data point when I gather more sports, more sets, and more players together to see what parallels investors, card collectors, really love. The takeaway to think about from all of that is one, will the hot cards continue to be hot? Do people just like it? And so when people come in, they're going to be buying more and more of that. Or if you're more of a value-focused individual, are you going to look for what cards seem to have underperformed in their parallels? Why has this been outperformed by 100% by this other parallel that's less rare? This has been the thing that's really been tugging at my mind. The growth versus value dynamic and which one's going to win out, which one's a better investment thesis for the future? Because these are all past-looking results. So that's the quick and dirty for the parallels for you guys. Now, the vintage versus modern debate for me, when I've been looking into all this data, I've been searching through, starting with the 1952 Topps baseball set, how these cards in their values have behaved over time versus more of the modern parallels where we see so much money socked into all of these different parallels. Looking at the raw numbers, it really makes you think about how bloated this parallel system has made the investment in these specific cards. As I point out to you guys in a few different places, now Victor Webanyama's 2023 Prism market is more than the rookie market for Nolan Ryan, completely. In fact, by double now. And that's just one set for Victor Webanyama. He has multiple, whereas Nolan Ryan just has the Mets rookie card. Now you might be thinking to yourself, well, people just like the modern cards more, and the people coming in with new money are actually going to be newer investors who are excited by the player that they see on the court. Also, you might be thinking that's a totally different sport, Matt. Why are you being so stupid as to compare those? Both of those absolutely fair. But what I'm going to tell you is that I do believe, in one case, yes, vintage is bought by people that are older, maybe that saw that player or that grew up hearing stories about that player passed down by their parents, their fathers, their grandfathers, etc. But on the second hand, I think people do come back to vintage a lot because at some point we get tired of this sprawl. We'd start to think how crazy it is that there are so many parallels, sucking up so much money away from cards and players that are historic and legendary. I believe that's going to happen a lot when some of these heroes that are already being considered shoe-ins for the NBA Hall of Fame, the NFL Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, maybe underperform. We've seen that a little bit with Patrick Mahomes. His market has cooled off. He started off being the unquestioned goat. Now all that money has been sucked into Tom Brady, from what I've seen. And that's not to say that Patrick Mahomes isn't still valuable. He certainly is. His cards are still a pretty penny. But status of goat of goat means so much to the card market, because that's where all the money starts flowing. It starts in that cascading effect at the top and it trickles down into other players from there. When a player loses that goat of goat status, when his market gets shook, money starts sloshing over into other places. So it begs the question, is vintage cheap compared to modern? And by many effects, I would say absolutely it is. But I'm going to give you the caveat that I don't know how or when that reverses. This is something I really want to study in the future because it's a little bit of a backburner project, but to see how vintage and modern move with each other, which ones are being more overhyped where the prices are moving more quickly, versus the other one only going up maybe a small amount raises the question is it like the old economic indicator that we all know who have studied the stock market, used car sales. There's new car versus used car sales, and they go in this cycle. When a recession is coming, you're going to be able to see new car sales absolutely dip down to their bottom, and you're going to see the used car sales spike up. This is a tried and true indicator of oncoming recession. And my instinct tells me that vintage and modern can work in a similar way because it's a similar mechanism. Money can only go to a certain amount of cards and assets. It gets spread out by the pool of collectors and investors into these pockets. So there's only so much money in the market. And sure, Pokemon is hot, but those old vintage issues, those old baseball, old basketball, they're pretty hot too. So in a meandering way, all of this is to say, I'm questioning a lot what the relationship is between vintage, modern, and ultra modern in cards as a market and how that changes over time, because how we can use that is going to be an indicator for us to see what stage of market cycles we're in in cards and how we can figure out a little bit, forecast how the future is going to be so that we can position ourselves well for coming cycles. That makes a huge difference in being able to day in and day out, year in and year out, turn a profit in this business. All right. So those are the two big things I've been working on. Parallel and then modern versus vintage, basically. But the third thing that this has kind of brought into my mind is thinking about where we are. And we know that PSA has shut down the low value submissions before. We know that we've had a pretty hot bull market in 2025 going into 2026, especially. I think 26 weeks I wrote about in my comp newsletter, Pokemon has shown a gain in the index on card ladder. 26 straight weeks. It's absolutely bonkers. And a lot of those weeks are higher than all the other sports. You'll see a half a percentage gain in one of the more major sports, and then you'll see Pokemon at 3.6, 3.8%. And this happens consistently. And when I go to card shows, I also see a lot of people selling modern. So considering where we are, there's a couple things that I've been thinking about that I want to share with you guys. Some people will kind of hold this to themselves, I think. I know a lot of creators want to keep their best ideas to themselves, but I'm going to give you guys this. Where we are is going to tell us where we're going to be in the next two, three months. And what I mean by that is assets get revalued depending on how easy it is to move in and out of them. When we had the days where PSA was able to churn through low-cost grading very quickly, people were shooting those cards in, being able to say, I bought this for $40. I'm going to hope for the PSA 10. Maybe it'll be $120, right? Buy for $40, my gain that I can get is up to $120 minus the fees and the shipping and everything. So out of that $80 that they might gain, let's say they gain $50. So you're pretty much doubling up $40 at the end of the day after taxes, you make about 40 bucks. That can no longer happen. So that entire stage of the market has now been cut off, you could say, for anyone that wheels and deals on cards. That's going to naturally force flippers of cards into different lanes. And I think that's going to change the prices of many different things. One of the things that I start thinking of most is how you can regrade from one grade to another. And I feel like I've been starting to see some of the Beckett and some of the CGC slabs start going up in value compared to their PSA counterparts. When PSA was able to continue grading all of that lower stuff, Beckett and the CGC slabs for those same cards were going at such small multiples for the same grades. A PSA 10 to a BGS 9.5 true gem or CGC 10 usually was going to be like 40% on the same grade. But what we're seeing now, I believe, is that we're going to see those come up as the market no longer has that ready supply of those lower tier cards being able to boost supply. And a second consequence of this, those PSA 10s that were 120, 150 bucks, we're not going to be seeing new supply for that for a long time. So I think those prices might actually go up quite a bit. What's been happening a lot of times is when I look at silvers, for the past two years, silvers haven't really moved in price, even if an athlete has done well. And it's because the supply of those slabs has also been moving up significantly. You'll see three years ago a slab had 500 on the pop, now it has 2500, and it's about the same price. Well, technically it's gone up 5x, but it's all gone up in that supply. Supply and demand is a seesaw. So the demand went up 5x, but the supply went 5x, leveled out on the price. I think we're going to start seeing if demand continues to go up, we're going to see prices of those lower end slabs actually go up. And that's going to be for ones that have a huge influx of demand. So I would say my couple strategies are I'm starting to pay a little bit more attention to cross-grading opportunities if they're higher end, higher price slabs, which comes with its own warning that it can be very difficult to get the same grade in another grader in PSA. I would not assume that that's going to be the case. I've tried that before. But the second thing I think is very much true by the laws of economics, that we're going to see those cars that no longer have more supply coming into the market rise in price. So there you guys go. That is the thought stump for Slabnomics over the past month or so. I'm working on so many things. I'm trying not to let my ADHD move me from thing to thing to thing. I know I keep telling you Slabnomics investor tier that on Slabnomics.com I'm going to be getting new data up for you. Mostly I'm trying to figure out how not to just throw up a bunch of data. I want to put it in a way that's digestible for you guys and actually useful and actionable for you. So I'm still trying to figure out how to do that. But please be patient. Know it's coming. And for the rest of you that have never checked out slabnomics.com, head over there, put it in your browser right now, go check out, see what I have going on in there. You can see all of my past comped issues that I put out. You can see all of my Slabnomics episodes there on the hub. And then if you're the investor tier, you can also see the comped investor newsletters that I put out every week and all of the frameworks and data analytics. I hope I've given you guys some stuff to think about. Remember, this is so important. Tell me what you think is most interesting so I can go work on that thing for you guys. As always, I want to be working on the stuff that is most useful for you guys in your daily lives because the purpose of Slabnomics is to help you guys make better financial decisions with cards. So, as always, thanks for being here, and I will talk to you later.