Posted By:
Mike MasinickHi Everybody,
I will introduce myself again. I'm Mike Masinick and I'm one of the co-founders of CardTarget.com. Since I'm not entirely sure what the "joke" is that is being referred to, I'll assume it's the concept of people getting together as a community to purchase some nice high grade cards.
I've said this to each person I've met on these boards and people who collect cards elsewhere: This was not intended for you. I know that you like to touch your cards. I know that you like to control your own collection. I met Leon and Scott and many others at the National and I think they at least understood that we never set out to convince people that owning 1/100th of a PSA 9 card is more interesting than actually owning a PSA 3. But, believe it or not, there are many of us who feel that way. Many of us, for a variety of reasons, enjoy having our collections in more of an online format and not sitting in our closet. If this is weird for you, then our marketplace was not meant for you.
If you would like to get into the issue of "unregistered securities", please feel free to write up a nice legal brief regarding EXACTLY why these are unregistered securities citing actual sources and I'll be happy to respond and discuss it privately (I'd actually really enjoy that). However, if you are just going to attack the concept without doing any research yourself, please stop now. I've posted my research on this topic before and there is no evidence anywhere that sports cards or any type of collectable is covered by any of the Securities and Exchanges acts. Just becuase more than one person owns a single card or group of cards and they can be traded electronically does not make them securities.
Let me be plain in saying that the goal of CardTarget is not to make money for the market participants and it has never and will never be marketed that way. We are a community of collectors. Period.
Yes, some of our users aren't as "hip" to how the vintage card marketplace works and they overvalue and undervalue cards in our marketplace. I do my best every day to pass on little things that I've learned on these message boards to the guys in our community and I hope that I have brought many people into the vintage card collecting world and passed on a ton of knowledge of vintage cards to our guys. If this is a joke to you, fine, but I don't appreciate your laughter being made public in a forum such as this.
If you have any questions for me about CardTarget, the legality of it, the question of "what happens when" or anything else, please feel free to email me anytime at mike@cardtarget.com. Please understand that I don't plan on getting into any further discussions in this thread as I don't see it being productive and most people here really aren't interested in our current product. I look forward to being more a part of this community as I've just started a T206 set (after over a year of reading and research). Thanks,
Mike