Does This Bull Market Have Legs? (Fanatics Fest/National/Soco)

The bull run is roughly a year and a half old. People are getting nervous.

Matt takes the temperature three ways: Fanatics Fest, the National, and the SoCo Expo. Three different reads on the same hobby.

Covered in this episode:

 Loss aversion and the psychology behind selling
 Why the COVID comparison breaks down
 Institutional money, breaking, and new distribution
 The Panini to Fanatics shift as a market signal
 Pokemon, One Piece, Disney, F1, and modern soccer as early markets
 What a healthy pullback looks like

No call on the top. A method for reading the room.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Welcome to Slabnomics. Today we're going to be talking about does this bull market still have legs for sports cards and TCG? This question is incredibly appropriate because we've had a very long bull run that spanned back into the beginning of 2025. We're now in about a year and a half, and I know that some people are starting to get nervous. I've had a few episodes that have dealt with the data around what 2020 and 2021 looked like as a bull market, how that differed from the bull market that we're in right now, primarily focused on where that influx came from. During COVID, it was from the bottom up. During the 2025 to now, what I call the AI bull run, it's coming from the top down. We'll talk a little bit today about how I'm finding things, how I'm taking the temperature of this bull market. But before we do that, if you're watching this on YouTube, make sure to give me a quick like on it. And on Spotify, make sure to head over to Instagram at some point and shoot me a DM with what you liked or did not like with this episode. Now let me set the stage a little bit. I've seen a lot of creators when I'm surfing around Instagram talking about how it's time to be cautious. It's time for us to start pulling back a little bit. I know a great many of content creators and cards guys who have been consolidating from the very get-go, just moving up into those grails, using this opportunity of the bull market to be able to do that. And the longer a bull market goes on, the more that makes absolute sense. The most foundational reason for that is due to loss aversion in human beings. Studies have shown that human beings fear loss twice more than they want to have gain. And this loss aversion ratio is what keeps human beings in check. But at the same time, if you look at markets like Pokemon, a little bit of One Piece, you might see these things as rocket ships. So you might well ask yourself, where's the loss aversion there? In sports cards similarly, we've seen things go up on a rocket ship during COVID and then crash down to Earth just as quickly in the year afterwards. So the most critical question is really how do we know when we should start selling? Well, the big caveat here, if I knew exactly when to buy and sell, I'd be on my own private island. But what I'm gonna go over this episode is not so much the when and the what, but more the why. Let's boil this down to the most fundamental of values here. If we're going to be looking at bull markets and bear markets, we're going to have to understand that these are driven by us, by human beings. And human beings are going to be motivated by many different things. I already touched on the loss aversion versus greed ratio. But just as powerfully, we are herd animals. The things that we see walking around, the opinions that we hear when we're at vendor tables, and admittedly, those news flashes and clickbaity things that we see on social media are the things that are going to inform our decisions and going to inform a bull market stop and a bear market's begin. So learning from each other is how we're going to be able to get a true pulse on where a market is. And I want to take advantage of my time at Fanatics Fest as well as my most recent time vending at the Soko Expo and walking around the national to use that as a gauge of the temperature of where our market is for the AI bull run. I believe over the past few months I've been cautiously optimistic while many other people have been crying bare. What I found from those other channels is many of them were trying to draw parallels to COVID. And as I start out this video saying, this is not the COVID bull market. Those that are making that analogy, I totally understand why. That's the other massive bull market that we've had while most of us have been in the hobby. But the macroeconomic environment of that time period, a time when we had surplus coming in, a lot of people laid off, so much risk and uncertainty around the global economy as well as the US economy, particularly. And in general, some fearful loss of identity in people are not things that we're seeing right now in the AI bull market. Yes, this is a time where there's rapid change happening. And honestly, I think we're in line for some really rapid GDP growth. The biggest thing that we have going for us in this AI bull market is the institutional money that's coming in. This is the reason that the AI bull market has been top down, meaning the high end of the markets has been juicing up, while the low end of the market has been barely registering. We're seeing real money be put into collectibles, whether it's funds being organized, whether it's new distribution channels like breaking really taking off, and yes, other forms of gambling like re slabs, repacks, that we're seeing continue to move along the base of the hobby. We've seen demand ratchet up not only in major sports, but again in Pokemon, and now with a new entry in One Piece over the past four years. And it's not just isolated there, we're also seeing Disney really go on a rocket ship as well. And new massive influencers like Gary V entering the space very strongly with their own brands under Topps Chrome umbrella. All the while we're seeing the advent of AI really take over and boost the technology of the hobby that was pretty backward until now. If you've ever graded through Beckett and you've seen what their app looks like, maybe a mid 2000s app, you know that most of these other apps bringing up that do things like organize your collection, allow you to see better data of sales, submit to different marketplaces, and many more are apps that are new, they're technologically innovative, and they're exciting. And then you see money coming into promotion, and you see people with mass media followings coming into the hobby, like Tom Brady with Cardvault. And all of these things are taking the hobby from a hobby into a business. The shift from Panini to fanatics is a foil for what's happening elsewhere throughout the entire hobby. We're coming from something of a dinosaur with Panini, which was lagging behind on a lot of innovations and seemed to be a little bit of stale in many areas, to Fanatics, which is itself a massive company, a true business oriented franchise. They're vertically integrated, they're led well, and they know how to throw an event. So that leads me to my Fanatics Fest experience. I talked about it on a couple of my podcasts recently, so I'm not going to go into it too much. But Fanatics Fest was an experience. And it's organized in a way to bring people into the hobby. You can see your favorite athletes, you can see them up on stage in front of you, talking about what they've done, talking about what the future looks like, talking about things that are exciting and invigorating for the sports and the hobby. And then they lead you into the cards tables to see the cards that you can actually buy. Your hero that was up on stage has cards right there in that room that people can lead you to and show you a little bit about and answer questions for for you. And you can own a piece of that memory. It's tying the experience to owning a memory. And you add on to that all of the activations and all of the merchandise that isn't card specific, that's sitting there and fanatics, and just the energy that's so pervasive, and you get an experience that's bringing people into the hobby in the most organic way possible. Now about a week later, I've just come back from the national and vending over at the Soko Expo, which is the soccer only expo. And I feel like the national is the opposite of what I saw at Fanatics Fest. The National has the same old tables in the same old layout doing the same old thing. Last year I know they added a bunch more on the Breakers Pavilion. This year I wasn't there for very long, so I can't say that I experienced everything that they had to offer, but it really did just seem the same old thing that I saw last year at the same expanse. Sure, they added some tables upstairs, made it more crowded, didn't seem to really care about funneling traffic in a way that was comfortable, I guess. It just seemed like they added a little piece to an unwieldy structure. And the national's great. There's so much history behind it, but that's really what it is. It's a piece of history that you get to go walk around in and feel. But the national is becoming more about conservation to me. More about keeping what was. And the third experience that I had within this was the Soko Expo, the Soccer Only Expo, which this year got extended into TCG. And I think Scott did an amazing job really solidifying the Soko Expo's place within the hobby and especially within the soccer card community. Last year was a lot of fun. It was great media and a lot of people, and I think everyone felt the community there, the buzz of the soccer card community. But I think this year people came in and saw this as a true exposition, a true convention like the national. It was much bigger, it was very, very well organized, and having the Pokemon and One Piece in there really brought a new, fresh faced crowd that I think offered some cross migration between soccer and between a very hot industry full of young people with a lot of energy. It was the perfect blend of fresh, but also we're here to stay and we are real. So what does all this tell us about where the state of the hobby is? We have tradition, we have growth, we have technological innovation, we have institutionalization. The people that came to my table and bought big soccer cards from me, 10K plus, were people that were buying to have this for a very long time. They saw the value of these cards for long-term holds and investments. And the people making those kind of plays when the market's at this level, when we've just come out of a massive World Cup, are the people that see things long term and see that we're at the beginning of growth cycles for a lot of these sub industries, if you will, for cards. Japanese Pokemon's been going from nineteen ninety six, American Pokemon's been going from nineteen ninety nine, One Piece just started in twenty twenty two, and the soccer cards really got their start in twenty fourteen, if you want to take it into the modern realm. When we think of sports cards, we think of the old history of baseball, all those massive vintage cards like the nineteen fifty two mantles, or maybe we think of those early seventies basketball cards when they were just getting started, or those football cards in the sixties and definitely in the eighties when there were some amazing cards. Then you line up something like Pokemon, something like Disney, which has one of the most massive IPs out there. Something that Bandai is making so incredibly well, so deliberately with their TCG as well as their anime, as well as how they print and distribute cards with One Piece. And tack on soccer as the biggest sport in the world and just really getting started in the modern realm, there's a lot of exciting things going on. And I haven't even mentioned yet things like F1, which had their grail set in 2020 with Tops Chrome Sapphire. It might seem crazy to say this, but I think we're young in the hobby. And I think the people that are buying amazing rare Messies and Hollands, they know that. And I think people that have been buying Disney for a long time, they also understand that. And look, I'm not gonna say this bull market is gonna go on forever. In fact, I'm gonna tell you it's not. There's going to be a pullback at some point, I don't know how long it'll last. But that happens in the stock market too. And if you've been following the stock market for some time, you know that the feeling of a pullback in the stock market, a bear market in equities, is a different feeling than you might have felt if you were in cards in 2022. In cards you felt like the world was falling, I'm sure. Might have felt, well, that was fun while it lasted, but now it's all over, maybe. But think how you think in the stock market. Unless the whole world's going to be burning down, you know that that's going to be coming back at some point. And so most people, unless they're totally over-levered and they've gone far past their means in the stock market, are fine with a little pullback. It's natural, it's normal. And I think we need to start having that maturity in cards because I think it's going to be more like that. I believe the macroeconomic situation for cards is still incredibly positive at this time, but we're going to have pullbacks. We're going to have recessions in cards. And that's healthy. And I think that healthiness was echoed in all three of these different stages that I saw. The temperature that I took at all three of these places, Fanatics Fest, the National, and Soko Expo was all extremely healthy. There's a lot of passion for the people that love the cards. They enjoy being at trade night and being able to work deals with people, the vendors that are there that are respectful, communicative, then the vendors that have been there a long time, showing the history, showing their big dogs that know how to play in that sandbox. And buyers, I think, that are more measured than ever before. I didn't get the feeling most of the time when I was selling cards over at Soko that people were just buying to flip a quick profit. Sure, people would haggle, and I'm sure some of them were going to try and flip it. And overall, it just felt like a marketplace. It felt good. So if you're feeling like the bull market's been going on for a while now and you're getting a little bit worried that it might not last much longer, just remember that at the basis of all of it, we're human beings that make up these markets. Watch what the humans are doing. Get out there to shows, whether it's just local ones or bigger ones if you can. Try and read the room, gauge how the people are, both on the buying and the selling, and that's going to give you a good idea of if the market's running too hot or if everyone's just excited to be in a great macroeconomic time. If you've gone this far for Slabnomics, thank you so much as always for listening. It was so great to meet so many of you out at Soko Expo. Thanks so much for saying hi. One of my favorite things is seeing you guys out there in the wild. If you enjoyed this episode and you've been having these conversations with friends of yours, make sure to kick this episode to them if they don't know Slabnomics yet, and shoot me a DM with any of your thoughts as always on Instagram. That's all for me this week. As always, keep building, and I will talk to you later.