[Dpeck100]

I have been reading your posts on the various boards here about this "buying gang". When looking at the Rose I see 12 unique bidders above $2,000.

While I realize that the prices of cards can be manipulated to some degree for certain it seems highly unlikely that a pack of 12 buyers in this case would collude to drive an item higher.

What seems very likely to me is that some fresh investors have moved into the market for cards and are wanting to get some money put to work and aren't as familiar with the history of card prices and perhaps don't care.

As the prices go higher with hard assets such as cards the demand actually increases which is obviously contrary to your typical supply and demand equation as humans like things of value and get turned on more by the higher prices. Essentially they come attached with more bragging rights.

I don't profess to know what is going on but it is entirely possible for markets to change. If you take a stock. You can see a security try and break out for months and years to no avail. Once the breakout occurs it can find itself rising rapidly and bringing in new participants. I don't think that can be entirely ruled out with cards in general.

Someone pointed out that there are 400 PSA 8 Pete Rose rookies. I would be very curious to know how many were in the pop report two years ago, five years ago etc. It isn't like this stuff is growing on trees and very few packs from this era still exist let alone get busted.

This speculative run up could easily end badly but what is more likely is many of these cards find a much higher plateau. The amount of skepticism that exists is actually quite healthy if one is bullish on HOF related trading cards.