Is this really a buyer’s market?

[Exhibitman]

Interesting tidbit re modern-ish cards. I say "ish" because modern to me and modern to a collector who started in 2020 are entirely different things. I have quite a nice stack of 1996-1999 baseball stars and numbered parallels and I was pricing them for sale at shows using recent eBay pricing. Prices are not down across the board for modern-ish baseball parallel and limited cards. Most prices are down but some players and some issues are doing just fine, particularly non-RC Jeter and Griffey, many of which have gone up since I last checked them about 15 months ago. A few of the limited and popular late 1990s cards are actually going up. Modern boxing is up; it never really caught the COVID wave.

My sample is limited, just a few shows, but the 1980s-1990s cards are popular with younger collectors and collectors of modest means. One thing that bodes well for vintage is that I see kids excited to get modern cards reproducing the classics that they cannot afford (Topps and Bowman golden age) and commons from older and obscure sets.

I am talking raw cards, not slabs, BTW.