Skyrocketing Card Values Lately - Theories?

[MailboxBaseball]

Swarmee,
Thats an interesting take and thanks for providing a specific example and rationale for an upcoming dip in prices potentially.

Thanks for the reply.

Do you think the Lebron insanity taking place in eBay right now is a bubble also?
No joke, some of these cards have seen their values MULTIPLY BY 4 in only 3 months. And the sports not even on right now! Madness.

[swarmee]

Originally Posted by MailboxBaseball

Do you think the Lebron insanity taking place in eBay right now is a bubble also?
No joke, some of these cards have seen their values MULTIPLY BY 4 in only 3 months. And the sports not even on right now! Madness.

Current superstars may take longer to drop back than retired guys. This new blood even made nearly worthless sets (like 2012 Panini Prizm Baseball with no MLB logos) have huge gains just because the basketball Prizm cards are valuable. I think once they have sports they can gamble on and stores they can camp out to buy shoes from, they'll take their money elsewhere. Kobe is sky high since he just died at the beginning of this coronavirus stuff, and once he enters the HOF, I think his stuff will gradually drop. They're basically running out of new buyers, and they have to resell their product to afford to buy more.

[irv]

Originally Posted by swarmee

I expect a plummet. There are a lot of sneakerheads (Collectors of basketball shoes) and bitcoin kids and gamblers who are getting in on baseball cards because they're following baseball card savants like Vegas Dave, Gary Vaynerchuck, and other people you've never heard of on Twitter. Most of them are buying up card segments, then telling their followers what is hot, and then seeing their cards skyrocket when those newbies blindly trust what they're being told.

Look at Topps Project 2020 as an example. Cards with print runs of 40K copies started selling for $200 each even though they were printed by Topps days ago. Now they're dropping to $150 > $130 > $100 > $80 > $60 over the course of two weeks. EBay sellers who sold those cards at $140-200 are getting refund requests because these kids didn't think cards could go down!

They're also the reason you can't get any blaster boxes at Wal-Mart and Target; they're buying them up when they hit the shelves (or supposedly extorting the middleman to force them to sell to regional managers instead of ever hitting the store shelves) and then reselling them online for quadruple or more. It's a huge bubble market right now and you can already see the bubble bursting. Now that those kids' PayPal credit cards are due and they're underwater, it's only going to keep sliding.

It was either you, John, or someone else who wrote a post about that? I haven't been following along much but I am not the least bit surprised to read what you just wrote.
I seen these cards on EBay shortly after the last post about this and seen prices in excess of a thousand dollars asking and it just made me shake my head.
Personal opinion, I thought the majority of the cards sucked, but then again I am not an artist by any stretch nor am I a follower of these supposed new wave artists.

[Directly]

Banks paying .002 percent interest offering a whopping 1 percent interest for four years and with the stock market volatility, flipping cards and new boxes making 20-50 percent is attractive right now--?

[sreader3]

White collar men ages 30-70 make the vintage baseball card market. Most are gainfully employed or comfortably retired and many have more cash than places to put it to work right now. You can’t get much ROI in bonds or real estate. Stocks are trading at historically high valuations. So alternative investments like vintage baseball cards are attractive. That seems unlikely to change for a while.

Sure, the vintage baseball card market could crash for a host of reasons. But I heard many of the same arguments in 2008-2009. What happened then is that the market in “commodity” vintage baseball cards (i.e. low- to mid-grade commons) got soft for a couple of years before roaring back. Hall of Famers never dipped much at all. I will add that I have personally sold quite a few mid- to high-grade T206 cards to young professionals in the last couple of years. There is fresh blood in the hobby—and with this fresh blood comes fresh resources.

No doubt current prices are strong. But I think prices are more likely to plateau than drop precipitously. Heck, prices may even continue their relentless ascent. Aside from David Hall’s rare backs, I have not seen a lot of quality T206 offerings come to market recently. Or offerings in other sets for that matter.

[irv]

Originally Posted by sreader3

White collar men ages 30-70 make the vintage baseball card market. Most are gainfully employed or comfortably retired and many have more cash than places to put it to work right now. You can’t get much ROI in bonds or real estate. Stocks are trading at historically high valuations. So alternative investments like vintage baseball cards are attractive. That seems unlikely to change for a while.

Sure, the vintage baseball card market could crash for a host of reasons. But I heard many of the same arguments in 2008-2009. What happened then is that the market in “commodity” vintage baseball cards (i.e. low- to mid-grade commons) got soft for a couple of years before roaring back. Hall of Famers never dipped much at all. I will add that I have personally sold quite a few mid- to high-grade T206 cards to young professionals in the last couple of years. There is fresh blood in the hobby—and with this fresh blood comes fresh resources.

No doubt current prices are strong. But I think prices are more likely to plateau than drop precipitously. Heck, prices may even continue their relentless ascent. Aside from David Hall’s rare backs, I have not seen a lot of quality T206 offerings come to market recently. Or offerings in other sets for that matter.

That is good to hear!

[swarmee]

https://www.blowoutforums.com/showpo...ostcount=25597
This was 11 days ago, and the value just keeps dropping.