Quote:
Originally Posted by Jetsfan
I hope this isn’t hijacking the thread, but I am curious where folks think the 52T Mantle will be at price wise in the next 5-10 years. I personally think that given the significant price increases across the board in the last few years that we may be in a few years of price stabilization. Hard to envision much of a price decrease in the next 5-10 years. However, I do share the concerns mentioned by some that current teenagers may not hold the card in the same esteem that many in the 30-70 year olds do. I do think it would be fun to come back to this thread over the next few years and see how close our predictions are.
Adam
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I'm going to go a bit contrarian and suggest that there's likely to be a drop in prices, at least overall. For blue chip pieces like 52T Mantle, particularly in high grades, maybe not so much. But overall, I expect prices will come down a bit.
A big part of my thinking is that prices have run up so much over the last 2 years, give or take. Depending on which basket of cards you look at, and how you do your math, the increases are pretty easily 200%-500%, and sometimes more.
When I think about the underlying factors that have contributed to the jumps in pricing, the factors that mostly come to mind are:
1) People coming back into the hobby because they had extra time on their hands during the pandemic.
2) Some pumpers jumping into the action because that's what they do.
3) Lots of people with a lot of extra cash on hand.
4) Every asset class, and I do mean every asset has been on a crazy run over the last 2 years. Okay, maybe there's a couple that missed out. But almost every asset class.
Certainly it will be interesting to see whether #1 has any staying power. Certainly #2 won't be around for long, and arguably a lot them are already gone.
I think for #3 and #4, I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of the recent runups in asset prices more generally start to unwind. Certainly most assets have come off of their highs, even including housing. But there's still a lot of froth in a lot of markets. If we hit a soft patch in the economy, or especially a major recession, and people who are crazy leveraged end up having to repay their debts, then there will be a lot more asset sales, and prices will come down. Once they start coming down, that process can accelerate, and really start to pick up steam. The number of people who end up having $100k+ to drop on a luxury like sports cards and memorabilia will decline in a hurry.
When you start looking around at the broader market, including basketball cards, soccer cards, game-used memorabilia, pokemon cards, football cards, just to name a few, there is a lot out there, and if you started counting it all up, there are a lot of pieces that are 6 figures or more. A lot.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not predicting a collapse in the market, where we'll go back to the good old days of trading 52T Mantles for our lunch money, your mortgage payment will be $30 a month, and candy bars will be 5 cents. But I wouldn't be surprised to see baseball card prices broadly fall by 20%-50% if the economy goes badly enough. And even if the economy gets by without much trouble, then prices could still easily pull back 10%-20%.
Bottom line for me is that there's just so many pieces trading for such high prices, there's really only one way to go, and it's not up.