Still crazy prices
 

Was looking at the Goldin app this morning and see in an upcoming auction a $37,000 bid for an Anthony Edwards relic card. $45,000 with buyer's premium. Auction doesn't close for 18 days, so maybe this ultimately hits six figures.

Great young player, but people are still spending six figures on this stuff after all that has happened in the last few years? Unreal to me. Same auction has a 48 Leaf Jackie card with a top bid so far of $6,000.

Either I am a dummy and don't appreciate a great investment when its staring me in the face or others are delusional.

Agreed
 

This is why I still believe there’s tremendous upside in vintage – especially the staples and all-time immortals. The buyers of Justin Herbert for seven figures will ultimately understand and make their way over to the vintage world. Sooner or later.

I'll never understand it. The insane prices paid for modern stuff can't last, and the current crazy prices won't be there years from now. Or maybe I'm clueless and delusional.

I was one of the ones that thought we would we have more of a pullback in late 2023/early 2024.

I am not seeing that on the really good stuff. Not at all. And I don't think those prices are dropping anytime soon.

Modern continues to baffle me. Any one of these players could get hurt, and have a career altering/ending injury. Babe Ruth hit 714 career home runs. Nothing will ever change that.

Not to mention, vintage has an aspect of actual scarcity involved with it. The Goudey Gum Company isn't making a comeback and printing more Ruths, Gehrigs, Foxxs' etc. There are hundreds of different cards for these young stars nowadays, and the rarity is manufactured. A modern card is only a "one of one" because the company says it is!

Struggle with high-priced ultra modern
 

I'll start by saying, that if there was any misperception, I am a lifelong collector of vintage baseball product and love my collection and chasing my lifelong grails. I buy cards that are good stores of value and tend to be those cards chased by some of the more sophisticated buyers as they have taught me and I've enjoyed learning from, and in some ways, following their lead.

This doesn't necessarily imply I only buy "expensive cards" and in truth, I have a few big-boy cards and a few more that are far more moderate.

I see the younger guys daytrading in modern and ultramodern (mostly basketball, some football, etc.) and I see some of them rolling hundreds of thousands of dollars into their PC (Remember SashaT of YouTube Fame?) only to be left with pennies now. In many ways, they did this to themselves and stood vigilant as values sank faster than the Titanic.

I think they've lost their minds in what they bought and more so, how much they spent for what they bought.

Why in God's name would I not buy a wonderful Cobb, Ruth, Gehrig, Mantle and see their value preserved and not waste time with the usual day trading? There is real (not manufactured) scarcity of the old and non-shiny stuff and as we all learn in college freshman economics, basic supply and demand will always dictate value and pricing. The modern stuff is vulnerable and susceptible to manufactured price increases coupled with the whiplash of real-world collapses.

I worry that kids who burn a crap-ton of cash on modern shiny stuff in the hope of making long-term returns are simply delusional.

It is the lure of "easy money". The answer to otherwise stupid things, is many times "money."

And almost daily, don't we see self help articles talking about making cards a business, or side-hussle? I haven't seen many ads about collecting for the fun of it. It's always the money aspect. Don't get me wrong, a lot of us have a good bit of money into the cards, but at the end of the day, it's still fun to collect the old, vintage guys. Except on this forum, and a few other places, one wouldn't know it's a hobby rather than only a business.

The card below beats "shiny" every day for me (but probably not for most of the very young collectors).

I started collecting in the 80s and it has always been this way. Even in the 90s when the 1/1s and such became popular the nobodies sold for more than the later in their career HOFers. I remember paying $400-$600 for the 1/1 Wade Boggs cards and the "prospects" from the same set would sell for 10 times what Wade sold for.

The modern collectors have a huge turn over in both cards and collectors. It is just a faster paced version of vintage without the huge price drops after the universal pump and dump is over. So really modern is better because after the big pump and dump the prices go back down. In vintage we are also constantly getting hit by the pump and dump but sadly they pump and dump and the prices still stay crazy high.

The new stuff is a money game.

Sticking to base stuff of non-high end product (like Topps flagship), you have to open $300-ish worth of product to get a complete set that can be bought outright for $50-ish when it's released later as a full box set.

Some people opening the new stuff outright toss all the base because they only care about the "hits."

One of the last reasonably priced and affordable pack break these days is Topps Big League. Unfortunately, they recently started to SP some of their "base." It's still a welcome affordable entry-level product and I appreciate it's out there in the hobby.

To some degree it is good people get into modern. Some of these very same people will eventually gravitate to vintage and fuel our segment of the market. But yeah, crazy, er, just plain stupid, that there is so much money pouring into young players that will never pan out.

Your average 20-30 year old card bro will tell you that they do not care about players they never saw play.

Their fathers and grandfathers probably never told them stories of players.

It is all about making the quick buck via a flip.

Nothing wrong with making $, but its a game of hot potato on these scrubs (see the NFL quarterback market) and you do not want to be one of the last few to handle the steaming pile of... potato.

I also am boggled by it, but I would just add: sports betting is now over a $100 billion industry annually. I think you should see the card market for active players as part of that industry. A lot of cash around for that, apparently.

The more things change...

Back when inserts first became all the rage it was really easy to see that this year's inserts were awesome and valuable, until next year's came out. Most of these cards, some of which went for hundreds or even thousands of dollars, go for a pittance now. A few truly iconic things have held value. Donruss Elite aren't worth what they were but still do well. Upper Deck Autographed Heroes still perform and 1993 Finest Refractors will likely never die as they are the grandfather to all parallels.

I equate it to the Florida Condo boom and bust of a few years back. Eventually the condo has to sell to someone who wants to actually live there at that price. If that person doesn't exist the last flipper in line gets burnt.

I know that this thread is all about modern prices still being crazy.

But are vintage prices any less crazy?

Great analogy, Scott

I’m finding value all over the place!

I find plenty of value in most modern cards as well. 99.999999% of modern sells for peanuts.

I’m going to loosely use the term gambling here but modern card collecting is gambling adjacent in my opinion (or actual gambling in the case of breaks). This century there have been four forms of gambling that have come in and gone out of vogue at varying levels – first (online) poker, then fantasy football, followed by cryptocurrency, and online sports betting is the current zeitgeist. Collecting benefitted indirectly from all of them but the current popularity of sports betting seems to most directly relate to sports cards. The relatability between the two has probably helped prevent a bigger post-pandemic trough in (modern) card prices. Who knows how long peaked interest in sports betting will last and if and when it will be replaced by a fifth form of gambling. But when it does wane, I have a feeling the modern sports card market will dip as well. The two are just too close to each other. Who knows how that will impact the vintage market – time will tell.

No, they are just as crazy from all the pumping and dumping. Many vintage cards are 5 to 10 times in price from just 6-8 years ago.

I think this is more of an indication of why there is a downside on modern, actually. Vintage will always be fine. We saw a huge demand for it that raised prices during the pandemic. Most of it has come down from there but some is still higher than it was prior to the pandemic but year over year stuff seems to increase.

The modern market has huge upsides but even greater volatility.

I remember when the breakers were salivating over Zion and how he was the second coming. . . . refractors selling for over a million . . .how did that work out? Got to have a short memory to play this game.

Or crash a car speeding and kill a few people. Or push a woman down a flight of stairs in a rage. Or be arrested for abusing your children. Or pull a gun on the wrong hombre. The list is long.

Haha. I read “Anthony Edwards relic card” and immediately got excited about a Goose/Maverick dual auto!

Let those of us who haven't shot off a half dozen bullets in our garage in a fit of rage throw the first stone!

People are always looking for the next Jordan. They found him in Lebron but that was pretty obvious. Everybody invested in Lebron. But VERY few people saw Steph Curry coming and whoever did is making an absolute killing right now.

I think that's what's going on with players like Zion, Ja Morant, Anthony Edwards, Wemby, etc. It might seem crazy to you today, but if Anthony Edwards takes Steph Curry's seat at the table, there is definitely money to be made.

To bring things back to baseball, Ohtani was the biggest name in baseball when he came to the US in 2018. He had a huge season, generated all kinds of buzz, and his cards were priced really high.

Then he got hurt in 2019 and stunk in 2020. I purchased the card below in 2020 for just under $300.

Today, two MVPs later, I can sell it for $4,500 without even trying:

https://live.staticflickr.com/1876/2...0f1b2cb1_z.jpg

Still crazy prices
 

+1

What percentage of 4/5/6/7 figure ultra-modern glossy, shiny, patched, autographed, PSA 10, 1 of 1s are purchased by the actual end-of-the-line collector?

Same question, but prewar?

I think there's also a similar and not all that different contingent in vintage already. How many people create threads that ask questions like: what cards will gain the most value over X years? What cards are undervalued and overlooked?

These questions don't really come from a collecting standpoint. They come from a profit standpoint.

It will be worth $500 dollars soon if that,,these are horrific investments

Admittedly, this is only one card, but when I started my signed 1953 Topps project in 2014, Satchel Paige was a $1,000 card. Maybe as high as $1,200 if the buyer had to have it now, or as low as $800 if the seller was looking to move it quickly. And it stayed at that level for about 5-6 years. They were readily available too; there was always at least 1 or 2 (or more) on eBay, and a few others would pop up from time to time at the auction houses.

Then around 2020, I started seeing it sell in the $2-3,000 range. I figured some sellers were taking profits, some new buyers were impatient, and soon it would return to normal. Instead, over the next few years that became a $4-6,000 card. Now, Probstein sold one last month for over $8,000, and there's another on eBay right now for $12,000. The buyers are holding on to them as well; before those two, it had been a while since I saw one on eBay. As a buyer, it's the worst of both worlds; not only does he not come up as often, but the prices are much higher when he does. There's one in REA right now in a PSA holder that sold for $3,500 two years ago in a Beckett slab; I'm keeping an eye on it but am fully prepared for it to go out of my range.

It was the same with the Satchel Paige signed business cards. They were a $100 item and the last of them were signed more than 40 years ago.

Today, despite no change in supply, you'll have to shell out $400 or more.

I can at least justify the price of that though. It's Satchel Paige. He's one of the greatest pitchers to ever play. Why anyone would spend 1000+ on a card of Anthony Volpe is beyond me.

I don’t disagree. It does seem like prices are crazy for everything these days was what I was trying to say. It’s a new normal even in the vintage world. Stuff I liked used to be in my budget even if it meant selling something or saving up for a while. But now I find myself collecting more of what I can still afford whereas in the past I was able to collect more of what I liked. And I've had to accept that I've likely missed my shot at some things.

I agree. Paige is much better than Volpe in many ways.

Why would anyone pay $660,000 for a card of Sheree Magee? (I'm sorry, I hope I didn't spell it wrong.)

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Is that a thing?

Yeah, but it's a 1-of-1, haha. (PSA 8 T206 "Magie" sold for $660k @HA, 9/20/18.)

You could buy 660 Volpes, if you could find that many.

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With 660K I could preset an incredible pre war collection that would not include that card.

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...d%20People.png

This is really nothing new. Cards have always been an investment (at least for the last 40-50 years). As I view things, the casino-level action that inspires modern is a symptom of a speculative bubble, not an end in and of itself. People who get into trouble bubbles conflate the two every time.

I don't think there is a serious debate to be had that a sizable percentage of newbies are engaging in a form of young player/new card speculation that has a long track record of failure. The cabinets of longtime collectors are littered with the cardboard images of flashes in the pan, from Ron Kittle to Kevin Maas; we've all got piles of junk (damn you Keston Hiura). Pete Reiser and Herb Score Tony C., we feel your pain with our stacks of your cards. Most prospects will go sour, as will their cards. There is no reason to believe that the people speculatively accumulating cards of shiny new players will have a different outcome than everyone else who followed that strategy in the last 40 years. What does stand out today is the steep trajectory of the price increases and the resulting incredible sums at risk, so much more than in any other rookie card run. I don't really care that the twenty bucks I put into Topps Walgreens yellow Hiura cards is gone; I would be shitting egg rolls if I'd spent thousands on a signed shiny limited edition thingy. The scary thing about modern is that there are tons of very expensive signed shiny limited edition thingies that place really large sums of money at risk and that new ones come out practically every week.

There is also a meme component to it. Lots of peers valuing these cards so they go along to get along, and market be damned.

From a financial perspective, I am not sure the newbs understand that the hobby is a particularly brutal investment when it comes to new players and modern cards because the bet can go to zero very fast and there is no hedging or exit strategy available. Even in a falling stock market, you can set a stop loss and get out, and real estate never goes to zero, it cycles, but when Sam Horn goes down the tubes there is no exit and no bottom except the commons bin. Babe Ruth does not go down the crapper the way the latest, greatest thing will when his WAR falls to 1.8 (yeah, looking at you, Pete Alonso).

Kids are always going to get into the current stuff; we all did. I was abuzz every year with the latest offerings from Topps, and crazy to get that rookie (I recall 1976's Willie Randolph and Ron Guidry RCs with great fondness today as the young stalwarts of the first Yankees team of my childhood to win a pennant). Man, how I chased those cards. A percentage of those kids trading cards will study history and become intrigued with the past, like all of us did; no one is born with a desire to buy a Harry Hooper card. They always do, and the 'boring' cards from 100-150 years ago will come to life for them and that itch will start. First it is the Mt. Rushmore players: Ruth, Cobb, Gehrig, Robinson, etc. Then, it is the next tier down, and so on, until they are chasing regional Claude Osteen cards for their Dodgers franchise collections. It is the journey of a lifetime of collecting.

As one who sold all his modern at an auction years ago and sometimes thinks “I should have held on to that Jeter, etc,” and one who passed even more years ago on buying pre-1955 cards because they weren’t Cubs, I still don’t understand the prices or asking prices for todays modern cards. One thing that hasn’t been mentioned and is relevant, is today’s trading. I used to do a lot of trading but today most younger traders only want PSA 8 or 9 or 10. This goes along with today’s buyers. Traders want to trade for the high graded cards because they think they can flip them for a big price. Lost is the fun of trading – found is only “what can I sell it for”.

Not a breaking revelation of any kind, but I suspect there are small groups of investors who own many of these 1 or 1 shiny things selling for $900,000 and some of the bidding is people with a vested interest in keep the market at a certain level. Propping up cards that will hopefully help them sell higher down the road. Like a bunch of rich professionals telling each other what the hot neighborhood or condo complex is going to be the next big deal.

Doubt many people with no knowledge of sports collecting wake up one morning and decide it would be a good day to spend $700,000 on a Jasson Dominguez cracked ice refractor.

I think I'd prefer they stay away from vintage :)

Yes, the market is thin for high value cards and is made up of people who have a lot of money and are looking for things to spend it on. I really don't think it's those guys' investment advisors that tell them to buy baseball cards though. They buy them because they enjoy having them. If their rich friends are envious they buy them too and prices go up.

That said, I think one reason card prices took off during the COVID bubble is there were a bunch of ballplayers who decided to see who could put together the best Topps refractor All-Star team. I'm not sure if that had anything to do with Dominguez, but those cracked ice refractors are pretty cool.

it seems to me the younger generatiion only wants 10's. they even shun 9's.

Well said.

Amen!

It seems just as reasonable for someone collecting modern cards to ask why you'd spend more money on a Bill O'Hara card because he's pictured on the Cardinals and not the Giants. Or to question why anyone would pay a few thousand dollars for a card of Louis Lowdermilk.

There is a change in supply, though, as such things get "collected up." So, no surprise in their appreciation.

Whoops, I thought you were quoting my other post. They are always available so I'm not sure there is a change in supply. I think it's more that people started appreciating Paige more but I'm not sure why that wasn't the case from the start with a personality like him.

+1 on that, what an icon in the game! My point was just that every time someone grabs one of those great signed business cards, the next one up for auction has one fewer bidder going for it. And of course these collections get recycled from time to time, putting a "new" one onto the market, but I think there's a lag there between those looking and those selling. In my time I've seen many pieces of memorabilia go from common at shows and other venues to practically non-existent, attributable to that phenomenon, I believe. I predict that $400 Paige signed card will seem a real bargain not long down the road.