The Cardboard Investment

It's All A Balancing Act

With the start of my expanded family, it was hard to find the time respectfully to participate at the same rate in the hobby as I had in the past. I still maintained an online presence and bought a few cards here and there for my collection, but cards had to go on the back burner.

I was fortunate to be able to have some free time at work that allowed me to continue looking on Ebay and following a few online communities. Vintage cards were still a passion of mine, and I began dabbling in trying to finish a couple PSA graded sets. This is when you have at least one graded card ever made by a certain brand during their playing years. This can include a certain player, team, or sets of all the hall of fame rookies from a certain brand. The more I scoured the internet for these cards, the harder it was to find them, at least at a price I wanted to pay.

I remember around the time my son was a year old there was a lot of talk about possible market manipulation occurring in the vintage sports card market. There was only so many hundreds or thousands of these high grade investment worthy cards, and it wouldn't take much of an effort between a few wealthy people to buy the majority of the cards off the market and then control the supply. It started to present itself in the cards that were flying off of Ebay at prices sometimes double what they were before. Certain cards set records for sale prices, and I was able to sell a number of my vintage baseball rookies for double or triple what I paid.

This only lasted a few months before priced went back to what they were before. It didn't really make any sense, as there was no economic change that started it, and it was not like baseball became more popular all of a sudden. I was able to buy back almost all the cards I had sold for a much cheaper price. Modern cards did not seem to have been affected like the pre 1980 baseball cards, but something was going on. I cashed out a good portion of my vintage collection, like I had continued to do with my circulating collection.

Some collectors bought cards and never sold them, while others continued to buy and sell to fuel and pay for their hobby. It turned into a calculated risk investment. I could buy high risk cards and potentially have 10x profits in a year, or I could buy the blue chip proven players and almost guarantee I would not have a loss. It was also around this time that I started getting involved in the growing online stock market apps. I began to see the correlation and ease at which investors could easily get into the sports card market. With the types of returns that were possible, it only made sense that big money would try their hand at the hobby.

Either way, I was fortunate enough to take advantage of this small market outburst. I started rebuilding my depleted collection with cards that had not spiked in price. Soon my boxes and safes were starting to fill again as I put way too much time and money into cards. Little did I know that I should have been putting every extra penny I had into the card market, what I experienced in a small sample size was only a taste of what was to come.