In the news.
 

Well, things like NFTs and Pokemon cards are a fad, bound to crash. The economy is actually doing quite well. While that trinket stuff tanks, I don't see Ruth, Cobb, Foxx and Gehrig going anywhere except maybe further up.

Thanks...this article has made me change my mind about converting my vintage baseball card assets into whiskey.

Brian

Interesting that most of the cards in the CL50 that are tanking are not baseball.

I am going to play devil's advocate about Pokemon (which I don't collect). I don't think Pokemon is a fad, like Beanie Babies was a fad. The subsection of card collectors that focus more on artistic mediums like Magic, Pokemon, comics, anime are just as likely to buy them due to nostalgia. In the 2020 runup, nostalgia drove the vintage card years 1980 - 2004. Jeter, Griffey, Chipper Jones, and other 90s HOF'ers were purchased by millenials who now had cash to buy cards they couldn't afford as kids. It has been, and will continue to be, the same with collectors of Pokemon and Magic. As millenials age and become more secure financially, I would predict that not only will late 1990s sports cards continue to rise in value (long term), but so will Pokemon and Magic. Millenials will drive the 1990s collectibles market just like Boomers drove the 1950s market.

I see where you're going with that, sir, I just think the big difference between vintage and some of these new cards is the sheer numbers of these new cards produced, even ones that might be desirable. There will always be that one card, like Michael Jordan for example.

So things more than quadrupled then went down a bit more than a third.

Glad I mostly do this for fun, I suppose.

Interesting considering that the stuff I like to collect seems be absurdly expensive compared to 2021 even. Maybe names like Ruth/Cobb/Mantle/Jackie will just always go up

Sorry, gotta be "that guy" that asks the stupid question: What's the CL50?

I agree on Pokémon and I don’t collect it. My son did and I just see that excitement move through the last couple generations. Pokémon first edition was 1996, it has been consistently popular for 27 years…that is far past any comparison to beanie babies. They are here to stay and as those kids get older they are going to circle back just like we did.

We might think it silly, but I can’t imagine visiting a card show from now until my death that doesn’t include a Pokémon table, whether I like it or not.

According to the article Brian posted, it's an index of 50 different cards:

https://www.cardladder.com/indexes/cl50index

I hadn't heard of it either :)

Thank you? :p

I was beginning to feel a bit nauseous after seeing a card index trying to mimic a stock market index. Card Ladder 50.

Pretty soon some knuckle head will try to sell shares of the CL50 like an ETF and pretty soon, some knucklehead will buy it. Holy crap, could you imagine the manipulation that could take place if someone tried to ETF the CL50?

This is a system that could be easily gamed. Just for poops and giggles, I wanted to see what the 1 year graph for the CL50 looked like and the link took me to a subscription page. All I could do was shake my head and laugh.

I guess my problem is that I look at this stuff like it's cardboard when I should be actually be judging it by the label in the plastic casing.

By the way, if someone sold shares of this index, do they also sell shares for shorting the index?

Article and its author carries no weight.

He “flashes” the reader by dangling a pre-rookie of Ruth at the top of the article, then backs up his thesis that trading cards have crashed with Pokémon cards and nft’s. Really nft’s! Not remotely in the same asset class.

And an index does not portray the entire market. We hear about new highs due to the (overpriced) mag seven in the nasdaq 100 carrying that index. Doesn’t mean the whole market is doing well. The Russell 2000 index is the best broad measure of the market which has rebounded as breadth strengthened but it is still 17% below its highs from a couple years ago. My point is the Pokémon card negative skew to the trading card index is the inverse of the magnificent 7 + skew to the nasdaq100, but doesn’t depict what’s really happening to the broader markets as depicted by the Russell 2000.

I thought his story was weak so I decided to look him up in LinkedIn. His pedigree is weaker. The kid is 6 years removed from grammar school and has 3 years of journalism under his belt. Hardly a business expert for business was insider let alone him penning an article outside his lane regarding collectibles.

But wait his profile summary says the Wharton school. So that provides some cred… until you read further that he added that to his cv for attending a seminar at Wharton, and not a degree from there. Overinflated cv is another red flag for someone trying to pretend to be above their weight class.

So don’t give the article much credence.

He is right about brown liquors though. There has been a trend towards clear alcohol to the detriment of scotch whiskeys. But that’s not a bubble pop, that’s simply a change in consumer preference.

The Russell 2000 is an index of small public companies. While following the health of smaller companies can be helpful, they are a small part of our overall economy. The total market cap of those 2000 companies together is about the same as Apple's.

I think it makes some sense that there has been a pullback in collectibles because of high interest rates. I know I've been buying bonds, not cards, lately.

Sent from my SM-S906U using Tapatalk

I think you missed my point about skew. Apple is 10% of the nasdaq100. Mag7 is 40% of ndx market cap. So the performance of those stocks drive the index and perception of the health of the market far more than what is really happening underneath in the overall market. So the next time you hear bear market, it’s more likely just mean reversion to the mag7. Russell 2000 is small cap but is more indicative of all sectors, not just tech.

But back to cards as I don’t know anything about the stock market... The site below is interesting.

https://www.cardladder.com/indexes

I haven’t looked into the constituents nor its performance calculations deeply. But while all have been soft, sports cards, particularly vintage cards, have held up fairly well. Yet pokemon shows down 40%. Truth be told, that number looks suspects if you look at the 3 month graph, but still shows Pokémon is an outlier and negative attribution to the collectible trading card market.

So to use Pokémon and nft’s as an indication of a crash in trading cards is not a fair.

I don't think Pokemon has the strong staying power of baseball. Collect what you enjoy and, if it goes down in value, you can still enjoy it.

Well, maybe...

I'm not worried about what I collect, it's not for investment. However, if I spent 10s of thousands on Pokemon and it dropped by a factor of 10x, I might have to take some medication to prevent me from vomiting before opening my box of Pokemon cards. :p


Edited to add - I don't own any Pokemon cards - not that there's anything wrong with that...

I think Pokemon is much closer to comic books than Beanie Babies with respect to future collectibility.

At the White Plains show a few weekends ago, a dealer was commiserating about how so much of his regular shows now are Pokémon tables and how it’s growing.

There are people turning 30 who collected these cards as a kid. And they are collected around the world.

P.S. The definition of the word “fad” is not “stuff that I personally don’t collect And have no interest in ”.