I gotta give Josh Luber props. He helped make second-hand sneakers into a $30 billion market. And he spends a lot more on sports cards than I do, so he is plenty interested in the card market and is invested in its success.
As Josh points out Wall Street is recognizing our hobby and investing in it. He thinks this is a good thing and will help make card-collecting cool. I guess I am happy the hobby is getting more interest. Although corporate backing doesn’t necessarily mean long-term health for our hobby – companies have a track record of making short-term decisions – if corporate attention can add new collectors some of them will get hooked and that is a good thing. Because while it is nice for card manufacturers to sell more new cards, at the end of the day the most important factor for the health of the hobby is whether there will be continued demand for the cards that already exist, and we need new collectors for that to happen.
I am not sure how much I agree with his take on the market over the last year. I’d say his “Mark y Mark” theory is true: some people with a lot of disposable income and limited options on how to spend it (like Cuban and Wahlburg maybe) started buying cards, and as prices rose other people who had cards were happy to cash out and take profits. But I would say the run ended when vaccinations got people out of the house again. All the other things he mentioned were minor, and while PSA shutting down did choke off the market (and still is), prices were already falling and anyway a lower supply of graded cards should cause prices to go up.
Also I don’t know how much you can tell about the state of the hobby by looking at sales of $1 million cards. Those are out of range for 99.9% of the hobby, and the future of collecting is not going to be determined by what the ultra-rich decide to put in their vaults. Card Ladder’s Low-End Index, which focuses on $1 to $500 cards, shows prices have not stabilized since the bust in April, and have continued to drop over the last six months. Looking through individual cards in the index, vintage seems to be holding up better than modern, but it would be nice if they had a specific index to show that.
My personal take is that buyers are being pickier right now. High-quality and low-population cards are going up, while run-of-the-mill cards are sliding. This to me is a sign that we don’t have many new collectors building their collections, but instead a lot of Net54-veteran types upgrading their sets and dumping their discards. I don’t know if this will continue but it is not a good direction to be heading.
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