Sports cards are now a real, global, multi-billion-dollar asset class, but the returns hide in a scarce trophy tier while the middle of the market charges you fees and volatility for an equity-like return.
Key takeaways
- The global sports card market was worth around 13.5bn dollars in 2025 (roughly £10.6bn / €12.5bn), with North America holding 41.6 per cent of revenue and football the largest sport segment.
- Grading has industrialised worldwide: over 26 million cards graded in 2025, a record, with PSA alone slabbing 15.33 million in 2024. PSA runs a UK office and ships globally.
- Returns are barbell-shaped. The PWCC 500 rose about 855 per cent since 2008, but cards outside the top 100 tracked roughly in line with the S&P 500.
- Cards are high-beta, not a hedge. The leading index fell 23 per cent in 2022, then recovered about 28 per cent across 2025.
- Fractional platforms carry real friction, around 7 per cent embedded IPO fees plus buy and sell charges, and most are US-only for now.
Sports cards sit within the wider category of collectibles as an investment class.
The 60-second version
The global sports trading card market was worth around 13.5bn dollars in 2025 and is projected to reach 24.7bn dollars by 2033. That is not a hobby footnote. In a single month, August 2025, one data platform, Card Ladder, logged more than 400 million dollars in online card sales, the most it had ever tracked, and the third record month in a row. On eBay, whose full-year 2024 gross merchandise volume was 74.7bn dollars, trading cards were the single largest contributor to fourth-quarter growth. Money is flowing into cardboard at a pace that would have sounded absurd a decade ago.
The investment case rests on scarcity meeting a suddenly liquid market. The most expensive sports card ever, a 2007-08 Upper Deck Exquisite dual “Logoman” of Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, sold for 12.932 million dollars in August 2025 to a syndicate led by the investor Kevin O’Leary. Grading, the process that authenticates and encases a card, has industrialised. Over 26 million cards were graded across the industry in 2025, a fresh record. Fanatics Collectibles, which now owns Topps, pulled in 1.6bn dollars of revenue in 2024. Real infrastructure, real prices, real capital.
The counterargument is that the returns are barbell-shaped and the asset is far more fragile than the headlines suggest. When rates rose in 2022, the leading card index fell 23 per cent. This behaved as a high-beta risk asset, not a hedge. A 1986 Fleer Michael Jordan rookie that hit 738,000 dollars in December 2021 was worth a little over 200,000 dollars by mid-2022. And the outperformance the bulls quote lives almost entirely in trophy cards. The cards outside the top 100 have roughly matched the S&P 500. Whether cards go up is not what decides your outcome. What decides it is whether you can reach the narrow top tier where the return actually sits, and keep enough of it after fees to make the illiquidity worth carrying.
I. What a sports card actually is as an investment
A sports trading card, a small printed card, usually cardboard, depicting an athlete, is at first glance the least serious-looking asset in the alternatives universe. It is also one of the oldest. What turns a piece of printed cardboard into an investable object is scarcity (how few exist), condition (how close to perfect the surviving copy is), and authentication (independent proof of both).
Authentication is the element that reshaped the market. Grading, the process by which a third-party company inspects a card, assigns it a numerical condition score from 1 to 10, and seals it in a tamper-evident plastic case called a “slab”, converted a subjective collectible into something closer to a standardised, tradeable unit. A card is no longer “mint, I promise”. It is a PSA 10 or an SGC 9.5, and the market prices those grades differently and consistently. Grading does for cards roughly what assaying does for gold bars: it removes the argument about what you are actually holding.
The market treats a graded card less like memorabilia and more like a serial-numbered instrument. A 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle in a PSA 9 is a materially different asset from the same card in a PSA 8, priced accordingly, and both trade against a public record of past sales. The whole edifice rests on the grading companies being trusted, which is why the industry’s centre of gravity has moved so heavily towards the graders themselves.
“This card we just paid 12.9 million dollars for once traded for 75,000 dollars. That is a (Jackson) Pollock story.” Kevin O’Leary, investor, on the record-setting Jordan-Kobe Logoman card, August 2025 (Fox Business)
O’Leary’s framing captures the bull case. He is buying what he calls “pieces unique” and intends to build an index of them, treating trophy cards the way a collector treats one-of-a-kind fine art rather than the way a hobbyist treats a shoebox of commons.
II. The market: history and growth trajectory
Sports cards have existed since the 19th century, but the asset class is young. It took off around 2020, when a pandemic trapped people at home with disposable income, marketplaces made selling frictionless, and grading firms made value legible all at once. The result was a boom, a bust, and a recovery, all inside five years. That is a fast cycle for any asset.
The scale today is real. Grand View Research put the global market at around 13.5bn dollars in 2025, projected to reach 24.7bn dollars by 2033. Within that, North America held 41.6 per cent of revenue in 2025, physical cards made up 66.1 per cent of the market, and football, across all codes, was the largest sport segment at 35.6 per cent. That football figure is the tell that this is not a purely American story: association football (soccer) cards from Panini and Topps, tied to the UEFA Champions League, the Premier League and the World Cup, carry a large share of global demand. The volume signals are just as striking. eBay reported that trading-card volume grew at “healthy double digits” year-on-year in the first quarter of its 2025 financial year, the ninth straight quarter of acceleration.
Callout: In August 2025, Card Ladder logged more than 400 million dollars in online card sales in a single month, the most ever tracked, and a third consecutive record.
| Year | Milestone | Significance |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Pandemic-era boom begins; Topps card revenue at 368m dollars | Home-bound demand meets frictionless online selling |
| 2021 | Prices peak; 1986 Fleer Jordan PSA 10 hits 738,000 dollars | The speculative top of the cycle |
| 2022 | Leading index falls 23 per cent; Mantle sells for 12.6m dollars | Speculative froth drains while trophy assets hold |
| 2024 | eBay acquires Goldin; Fanatics Collectibles revenue hits 1.6bn dollars | Consolidation and institutionalisation of infrastructure |
| 2025 | Over 26 million cards graded; record 12.932m dollar sale | Record volume and record trophy price in the same year |
III. The demand drivers
Several structural forces explain why capital keeps arriving, and they are mostly about plumbing rather than sentiment.
Grading turned a collectible into a quotable asset. The single biggest structural change is authentication at scale. Over 20 million cards were graded in 2024, up around 3 million on 2023, averaging more than 31,000 cards a day across PSA, SGC, CGC and Beckett. PSA alone slabbed 15.33 million cards in 2024, roughly 60 per cent of the entire grading market, with sports cards up 13 per cent year-on-year. Every graded card is a new standardised, tradeable unit with a public price history. In 2025 the industry pushed past 26 million cards graded.
Marketplaces made the asset liquid. A card you cannot sell in an afternoon is memorabilia. A card you can list to a global audience and clear at a market-referenced price is an asset. eBay’s 74.7bn dollar 2024 GMV and its acquisition of the auction house Goldin gave the category depth and price transparency it never had in the shoebox era. eBay runs local sites across the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Australia, so a buyer outside North America can transact in pounds or euros on the same global inventory.
Institutional capital is validating the top end. When a “Shark Tank” investor assembles a syndicate to pay 12.932 million dollars for one card and publicly announces plans to build an index of them, the signal to other pools of capital is unambiguous. Someone with a balance sheet thinks trophy cardboard is an asset. Fanatics Collectibles growing revenue 40 per cent to 1.6bn dollars in 2024 is the manufacturing side of the same validation.
The growth is coming from volume, not just price. Sceptics often miss this one. eBay’s chief executive was explicit that recent card-volume growth has been driven mostly by sold-item growth rather than average sale price, so more transactions rather than just dearer ones. A market rising on price alone tends to be fragile. One growing on the number of transactions has more people underpinning it.
IV. The players
The sports card market has no single dominant institution the way private equity has Blackstone. It has a chain of specialists, each taking a fee for authentication, liquidity or price data. Knowing who does what tells you where the money leaks out along the way.
| Player type | Role | Key names | What to know |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manufacturers | Print the cards, control the licences | Fanatics Collectibles (Topps), Panini | Fanatics revenue hit 1.6bn dollars in 2024; still private at a ~25bn dollar valuation. Panini and Topps hold the big football (soccer) licences that drive European demand |
| Graders | Authenticate and encase cards | PSA, SGC, CGC, Beckett | PSA graded 15.33m cards in 2024, ~60 per cent of the market. PSA runs a UK/EU intake office; all the majors ship worldwide |
| Marketplaces & auction houses | Provide liquidity and price discovery | eBay, Goldin | eBay acquired Goldin in early 2024; Goldin hit all-time-high quarterly GMV by Q1 2026. eBay’s local UK/EU sites price the same inventory in £/€ |
| Data & fractional platforms | Index prices; sell fractional ownership | Card Ladder, PWCC, Rally, Collectable | Card Ladder logged 400m dollars in a month; fractional shares from 10 dollars. The fractional platforms are largely US-only |
The individuals matter as much as the firms. Kevin O’Leary is the most visible capital allocator, leading the syndicate that bought the 12.932 million dollar Logoman and openly treating trophy cards as an index-able asset class. Jamie Iannone, eBay’s chief executive, is arguably the most consequential. His company’s marketplace is where a large share of the volume clears, and his read on the market’s durability moves how the category is perceived. On the manufacturing side, Fanatics’ consolidation of Topps under founder Michael Rubin put the sport’s dominant card brand inside a single fast-growing private company.
V. Geography: where the market lives
Sports cards are a global asset with a heavily concentrated centre of gravity.
North America is the market. It held 41.6 per cent of global revenue in 2025, and it is where the grading firms, the dominant marketplaces and the record sales all sit. The deepest liquidity, the most transparent pricing and the largest buyer base are all here, driven by baseball and basketball. For an individual investor, access is easiest in this region because the marketplaces, graders and fractional platforms are built around it, but so is the crowd, which means the least mispricing.
Europe is where football, the world’s game, anchors demand. Grand View’s finding that football leads at 35.6 per cent reflects a global football-card market in which European players, clubs and competitions dominate the licences. This is also where the sticker-and-card culture runs deepest: Panini’s UEFA Champions League and World Cup collections, and the album-sticker habit built over decades, seed a huge base of UK and European collectors who now buy graded cards too. A UK or EU reader buys on eBay’s local site in £ or €, or through specialist European auction houses, then sends cards to grade. The barrier is that liquidity for European football cards is thinner and more fragmented across national marketplaces than the deep, single-venue liquidity North American cards enjoy on eBay.
Asia-Pacific is the fastest-growing frontier by demand, driven by the same digital-marketplace access that fuelled the North American boom, plus rising disposable income and a strong regional appetite for both basketball and football cards. Access is improving as global marketplaces extend reach, but authentication and cross-border shipping friction remain real barriers for buyers outside the established grading hubs.
The rest of the world participates mainly as buyers into the North American and European venues rather than as distinct markets. Because physical cards are still 66.1 per cent of the market, geography matters more than it does for a purely digital asset. The card has to physically ship, insure and clear customs, and that cost sits on the buyer wherever they live. A UK buyer importing a high-value US card, for example, faces VAT and potential duty on top of the hammer price.
| Region | Market position | What makes it different | Access for individuals |
|---|---|---|---|
| North America | 41.6 per cent of revenue | Deepest liquidity, graders, record sales, baseball and basketball | Easiest, but most efficient, least mispricing |
| Europe | Football-led demand (35.6 per cent segment) | Fragmented across national venues; deep sticker/soccer-card culture | Buy in £/€ on local eBay; grade via PSA UK/EU |
| Asia-Pacific | Fastest-growing demand | Rising income, basketball and football | Improving; shipping and grading friction |
| Rest of world | Buyers into other venues | Participates via NA/EU marketplaces | Hardest; cross-border cost, VAT/duty sit on buyer |
VI. How to actually invest
There is no clean ticker for “sports cards”. You can buy physical cards outright, buy fractional shares of a specific card through a platform, or buy the infrastructure companies as a proxy.
Buying physical cards is the purest exposure and the most demanding, and it is the route that works anywhere in the world. You buy a graded card on a marketplace, you insure it, you store it, and you sell it when you choose. You control the asset entirely, and you carry all the friction: authentication risk (buy raw and you inherit grading uncertainty), storage and insurance cost, cross-border VAT or duty if you import, and the spread between what buyers pay and what sellers get. A UK or EU collector buys the same way an American does, on eBay’s local site in £ or €, or through a specialist auction house, then submits raw cards to PSA, SGC, CGC or Beckett, all of which run international intake and ship graded slabs back globally. PSA operates a UK office to shorten the round trip. That means the grading half of the process is genuinely global even though the deepest marketplace liquidity still sits in the US.
Fractional platforms lowered the entry price dramatically, but they are largely a US-only route. On Collectable, fractional shares can start from 10 dollars, but with around 7 per cent embedded IPO fees plus 1 per cent buy and 1 per cent sell fees, and a 90-day IPO lock-up before secondary trading. Rally (formerly Rally Rd.) works similarly: secondary bid/ask trading opens after a 90-day hold, and exits happen via shareholder-voted buyout offers rather than a continuous market. You never hold the card; you hold a security backed by it. These platforms register their offerings under US securities rules, so access for a non-US investor is restricted or unavailable, and a UK or EU reader who wants fractional exposure should check eligibility before assuming they can buy in.
The proxy route is buying the infrastructure, and it is the one open to any investor with a normal brokerage account. There is no pure-play listed card stock, but eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) gives marketplace exposure through its GMV and is buyable from a UK or EU broker like any US share, and Fanatics, still private at a ~25bn dollar valuation in 2024, is the manufacturing-and-platform bet, not yet accessible to public-market investors anywhere.
| Vehicle | Liquidity | Minimum | Key risk | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Physical graded card | Days to weeks | Price of the card | Condition, authentication, storage, import VAT/duty | Investors who want direct control (global) |
| Collectable (fractional) | After 90-day lock-up | ~10 dollars | ~7% IPO fee + 1%/1% drag; US-only | Small tickets, trophy access (US) |
| Rally (fractional) | After 90-day hold, buyout-driven | Per-share | Exit depends on buyout vote; US-only | Access to specific high-end cards (US) |
| eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) | Daily | Share price | Diversified business, indirect | Marketplace-infrastructure exposure (global) |
VII. Unit economics: a worked example
The economics of card investing are easy to state but unforgiving once you work through the detail. The appreciation is real, and the fees decide how much of it you actually keep.
Take a real fractional exit. A 1980 Topps Larry Bird / Julius Erving / Magic Johnson rookie in PSA 10 was offered on Rally at an IPO price of 352,000 dollars and exited at a 720,000 dollar buyout, a gross return of +105 per cent to shareholders. On the headline number, that is a double.
Now apply the friction. Using Collectable-style charges as a model, around 7 per cent embedded IPO fees plus 1 per cent to buy and 1 per cent to sell, the total drag is roughly 9 per cent. Run that against the position:
- Gross headline return: +105 per cent
- Fee drag (modelled ~9 per cent of the entry-and-exit cycle): roughly 18 percentage points of the gross gain absorbed
- Approximate net return: around +87 per cent
The maths shows that the card generated the whole return, and the fee load still took close to a fifth of the profit. On a shorter or thinner win, the same fee stack turns a modest gain into a wash. The second worked case shows the same pattern with more upside: a 2017 Panini Flawless Green Patrick Mahomes rookie patch autograph in PSA 10 IPO’d at 46,000 dollars and exited at a shareholder-approved 100,000 dollar buyout, +117 per cent from IPO. Big gross, and the same fee stack sitting on top of it.
Callout: On a fractional double, roughly 9 per cent in combined fees can quietly absorb close to a fifth of the profit. The constraint on your return is not whether the card appreciates. It is how much the fee load takes on the way in and out.
VIII. Macroeconomic sensitivity
Sports cards are a high-beta risk asset, one that amplifies the direction of broad risk appetite, rather than a hedge, and any investor should understand that before buying. The 2022 drawdown demonstrated it. As post-pandemic inflation and rate hikes drained speculative liquidity, the Card Ladder CL50 index fell 23 per cent in 2022 and a further 9 per cent in 2023. Rather than protecting capital when equities fell, cards fell harder. This is a global monetary story rather than a US one: the same tightening cycle ran through the Bank of England and the European Central Bank, and card prices are quoted worldwide off dollar-denominated sales, so a UK or EU holder felt the drawdown regardless of home currency.
| Regime | Impact | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| High inflation / rising rates | Negative | Speculative liquidity drains; CL50 fell 23% in 2022 |
| Low inflation / falling rates | Positive | Cheap money and risk appetite return; CL50 rose ~28% across 2025 |
| Recession | Negative | Discretionary spend contracts; high-end auction sales fell 27% year-on-year in Q2 2024 |
| Stagflation | Negative / Mixed | Cards are a discretionary risk asset, not an inflation hedge; trophy pieces hold better than the middle |
The recovery matters as much as the drawdown. Across 2025 the CL50 rose around 28 per cent, with 29 of Card Ladder’s 35 indices up on the year. The asset class round-tripped its 2022-23 fall by 2025. The pattern is sharp falls when policy tightens and sharp recoveries when liquidity returns. An investor expecting cards to rise while equities fall has the correlation backwards.
IX. Tax considerations: a global overview
This is not tax advice. Card investors face a treatment that varies sharply by jurisdiction and by how they hold the asset, and the difference can be worth more than the fee drag. Confirm your position with a qualified adviser wherever you are resident.
The core distinction is collectible versus security. Physical trading cards are generally treated as tangible collectibles, a category that in many jurisdictions carries a higher capital-gains rate than mainstream equities, produces no dividend or income yield, and is taxed only on realisation when you sell. In the US that means the higher collectibles capital-gains rate; a UK resident holding a card as a chattel meets a different regime again, with its own annual exemption and the “wasting asset” rules that can apply to some tangible property; an EU resident meets yet another set of national rules. Fractional-platform shares may instead be taxed as securities, depending on how the offering is legally structured, potentially a different, sometimes lower, rate. The framework here is consistent with how Collectable and Rally structure their fractional offerings as securities rather than direct chattel ownership.
What to ask your adviser, wherever you are resident: – Does my jurisdiction tax collectibles at a higher rate than listed shares, and does that rate apply to a physical card I hold directly? – If I buy fractional shares, am I holding a security or a beneficial interest in a chattel, and which tax treatment follows? – Is the gain taxed only at sale, and how are storage, insurance and grading costs treated against the gain? – Do cross-border purchases trigger import duty or sales tax (US sales tax, UK VAT, EU VAT) at the point of acquisition?
With cards, the wrapper you hold the asset in can change your after-tax return as much as the card’s appreciation does, so the structure you buy through is worth deciding on before you buy, not after.
X. Case studies
The record: the Jordan-Kobe Logoman. A 2007-08 Upper Deck Exquisite dual “Logoman” card of Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant sold for 12.932 million dollars on 23 August 2025, the most expensive sports card ever sold. The buyer was a syndicate led by Kevin O’Leary. The card is one-of-one, a genuine “piece unique”, and its sale is the clearest evidence that trophy cardboard now attracts capital that thinks in millions. O’Leary’s own line, that it once traded for 75,000 dollars, carries both the bull case and the warning at once. The appreciation is enormous, but it is concentrated in an object so rare that there is almost nothing to compare it against.
The benchmark: the 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle. Before the Logoman, the record belonged to a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle #311, which sold for 12.6 million dollars on 28 August 2022. It remains the benchmark vintage baseball sale, and it sold at the height of the 2022 rate-hike drawdown, while the broad index was falling 23 per cent. Trophy assets and the middle of the market do not move together. The scarcity point is even starker with the T206 Honus Wagner, which sold for 7.25 million dollars on 3 August 2022 with only an estimated 50 to 200 examples ever produced. At the top of the market, scarcity does most of the work in setting the price.
The cautionary tale: the 2020-21 boom and bust. A 1986 Fleer Michael Jordan rookie in PSA 10 hit 738,000 dollars in December 2021, then fell to a little over 200,000 dollars by mid-2022, a fall of around 70 per cent in roughly half a year. A 2003 Topps Chrome LeBron James refractor in PSA 10 went from about 300,000 dollars to below 50,000 dollars. These were not obscure cards. They were among the most sought-after modern rookies. Buy at the top of a liquidity cycle, in the middle of the market rather than the trophy tier, and the drawdown can take most of your capital before it recovers.
XI. The core constraint: grader trust
The bottleneck that most defines where sports cards go from here is the trustworthiness of grading. The entire market’s price transparency rests on the assumption that a PSA 10 in New York is the same asset as a PSA 10 in London or Tokyo, that the grade means what it says regardless of where the card was submitted.
That assumption is under structural strain from the sheer volume. When PSA is slabbing 15.33 million cards a year and the industry is grading over 26 million, consistency at scale becomes the whole game. A grading standard that drifts, or a grader whose reputation cracks, would reprice everything sitting in that grader’s slabs, on every continent at once. The industry is solving this with reputation concentration: PSA’s ~60 per cent share is partly a flight to the most-trusted name, which is why a UK or EU seller usually still routes the highest-value cards to PSA despite the shipping. But concentration is its own risk. For an investor, the slab is only worth what the grader’s credibility is worth, and that credibility is what you are ultimately underwriting when you buy.
XII. Inside the asset
Hold a graded card and you are holding a specific physical object with measurable properties. The card itself is usually cardboard stock, printed on both sides, roughly 2.5 by 3.5 inches (about 6.4 by 8.9 cm). The grade turns on details invisible to a casual eye: centring (whether the image sits square within the borders, measured as a ratio like 55/45), corners (sharpness under magnification), edges (fraying or chipping), and surface (print lines, scratches, gloss). A card can look flawless and grade an 8 because the centring is 60/40. That precision is why two copies of the same card, printed the same day, can differ in value by a multiple.
The slab, the sealed plastic case, is itself part of the asset. It carries a tamper-evident label with the grade, a serial number and a barcode that ties the card to the grader’s online database. Crack the slab to remove the card and you have destroyed a chunk of the value, because you have severed the authentication. In practice you are not really trading a card. You are trading a sealed, serial-numbered, third-party-certified unit whose value depends on the seal staying intact and the database staying live. It behaves more like a bearer instrument than a keepsake, and like a bearer instrument its worth collapses if whatever authenticates it is compromised.
XIII. The central dilemma: collectible or security
The tension that defines card investing is that a card is two assets at once, and they pull in opposite directions.
As a collectible, the card’s value comes from scarcity, emotion and the passion of collectors, the very things that make it illiquid, hard to price precisely, and subject to shifts in taste. As a security-like instrument, especially once fractionalised, the same card is meant to behave like a tradeable financial asset with a clean price, a market and an exit. The problem is that fractionalising a card to make it liquid and tradeable strips out the thing that made it valuable in the first place: you cannot hang a share of a card on your wall or feel you own it.
This is why the fractional model carries 90-day lock-ups and buyout-vote exits rather than continuous liquidity. The underlying asset resists being turned into a pure security. And it is why the collectible-versus-security question runs through everything from tax treatment to how the asset behaves in a downturn. The investor has to decide which asset they are actually buying: the passion object that might appreciate, or the financial instrument that carries fees and lock-ups. Most of the disappointment comes from buyers who expected to get both.
XIV. The next frontier: fractionalisation and the index
The most interesting emerging thesis is not owning a card outright. It is the attempt to turn trophy cards into an index, a basket treated as a single investable strategy. Kevin O’Leary said it plainly when he described his intent to “build an index” of one-of-one cards. That is a different bet from the mainstream fractional play. The fractional platforms, Collectable from 10 dollars and Rally with its buyout-vote exits, democratise access to individual high-end cards, at least for US investors. The index thesis goes further: it treats the trophy tier as an asset class you allocate to, the way you would allocate to fine art or vintage wine.
The appeal is that the index approach targets exactly the segment that has actually outperformed, the trophies, while diversifying away single-card risk. Against that, the trophy tier is where scarcity is most extreme and price discovery weakest, so an “index” of a dozen essentially unique objects behaves very differently from an equity index of thousands of fungible shares. This frontier is more compelling than the mainstream fractional play precisely because it aims at the part of the market that beat the S&P 500, but it inherits all the illiquidity and pricing opacity of the objects it holds.
XV. Lessons from history
The 1980s-90s junk-wax era. The last card boom ended in a glut. Manufacturers massively overproduced in the late 1980s and early 1990s, so cards marketed as investments were printed in the millions and are worth almost nothing today. What matters is scarcity rather than popularity, because a card everyone owns cannot appreciate however famous the player. It is why the T206 Wagner’s estimated 50-to-200 surviving examples command millions while contemporaneous mass-produced cards are worthless.
The 2020-21 boom and 2022-23 bust. The most recent and most instructive cycle. Prices doubled and tripled on pandemic liquidity, then the CL50 fell 23 per cent in 2022 and 9 per cent in 2023 as rates rose, with individual cards like the 1986 Fleer Jordan falling ~70 per cent. This showed that cards are a leveraged bet on risk appetite, and that the middle of the market takes the full force of a liquidity reversal.
The 2024 mid-cycle wobble. Even inside the recovery, the market stumbled. High-end auction sales dropped 20 per cent quarter-on-quarter and 27 per cent year-on-year in Q2 2024, with six-figure sales down around 40 per cent to a three-year low. Even a recovering market stays volatile at the top end, where thin liquidity magnifies every swing.
Each of these cycles has repeated the same few points in a different form. Scarce cards hold their value, overproduced ones do not, and a wave of liquidity lifts prices before it drains and pulls them back down. The 2025 recovery to ~28 per cent up on the CL50 is the latest upswing, and it is not evidence that the cycle has stopped turning.
XVI. The case for it
The trophy tier has genuinely outperformed. This is the strongest single argument. The PWCC 500 index rose around 855 per cent since January 2008, against roughly 175 per cent for the S&P 500. Over that window the best cards beat equities by a wide margin. For an investor who can identify and access the top tier, the historical return is real and large.
The market has industrialised, which reduces some risk. The boom-era card market was opaque, illiquid and rife with authentication doubt. Today, over 26 million cards graded a year, a 74.7bn dollar marketplace providing liquidity, and index-level price data from Card Ladder and PWCC mean the asset is more transparent and more tradeable than at any point in its history. That infrastructure is a genuine structural improvement, not hype.
Volume-led growth suggests a broader base. Because eBay’s card growth has been driven mostly by sold-item count rather than price, the market is widening, not just inflating. A market with more participants transacting is more resilient than one levitating on a handful of rich buyers.
Scarcity is a hard floor at the top. The truly rare cards, the 50-to-200 T206 Wagners, the one-of-one Logoman, cannot be printed again. In a world where most assets can be diluted, genuine one-of-one scarcity is a rare property, and it is exactly where the outperformance has concentrated.
XVII. The risks
The outperformance is barbell-shaped and mostly unreachable. This is what undoes most of the bull case. The PWCC 500 rose ~855 per cent since 2008, but the PWCC 101-500, the cards outside the top 100, has tracked roughly in line with the S&P 500. The premium lives in the trophy tier only. Unless you can buy the very top, you are taking illiquidity and fee risk for an equity-like return.
It is a high-beta risk asset, not a hedge. The CL50 fell 23 per cent in 2022 exactly when equity investors wanted protection. Cards move with risk appetite and amplify it rather than offsetting it.
Fees eat the return. The fractional path carries around 7 per cent IPO fees plus 1 per cent each way. On a modest gain, that stack can turn a win into a wash, and as the worked example showed, close to a fifth of a doubling can disappear into friction. For a non-US buyer, import VAT or duty on physical cards is a further layer on top.
Single-card drawdowns can be catastrophic. The 1986 Fleer Jordan’s ~70 per cent fall and the LeBron refractor’s collapse from ~300,000 dollars to under 50,000 dollars show that even blue-chip modern cards can lose most of their value in months.
Liquidity is thin and lumpy at the top. Six-figure sales fell ~40 per cent year-on-year in Q2 2024. When the top end quiets, exits get slow and prices get soft precisely when you might most want out.
The whole edifice rests on grader credibility. As Section XI set out, the market’s price transparency is only as good as the trust in the slab. A grading scandal or standard drift would reprice everything at once.
XVIII. The Alternative Fortune verdict
The market is real, growing and better-built than it has ever been. Around 13.5bn dollars in size, over 26 million cards graded in 2025, and a record 12.932 million dollar sale. This is no longer a shoebox hobby. But the returns are barbell-shaped in a way that matters more than any headline. The trophy tier beat the S&P 500 by a wide margin since 2008, while everything else only matched it and still carried illiquidity, a ~9 per cent fractional fee stack, and high-beta drawdowns of 23 per cent that offer no protection when equities fall.
Against its alternatives, sports cards sit closest to fine art and vintage wine: a passion-driven collectible whose financial returns concentrate in a scarce top tier and whose middle behaves like a fee-laden, illiquid equity proxy. It suits an investor who can genuinely access and hold the trophy tier through a full liquidity cycle, and who treats the position as a discretionary risk allocation rather than a hedge. It does not suit anyone who needs liquidity on demand, wants downside protection, or expects the middle of the market to deliver the returns the trophies advertise. That verdict holds wherever you sit, though a non-US buyer should price in import VAT or duty and the fact that the fractional route is mostly closed to them.
Where the edge actually is. The mispricing is not in cards generally. The mid-market is efficiently priced to roughly match equities while charging you fees and illiquidity for the privilege. The edge, where it exists, is in the trophy tier and specifically at moments of forced liquidity: the top-end drawdowns like Q2 2024’s ~40 per cent fall in six-figure sales, when scarce, genuinely one-of-one cards change hands from stretched sellers into a thin market. A buyer with capital, authentication expertise and patience can acquire irreplaceable scarcity at a cyclical low, which is precisely the O’Leary index thesis. The edge is scarcity bought in weak liquidity and held through the recovery. It is not a case for buying cards in general, but for buying the genuinely unique pieces when the top end is quiet.
Questions to ask before you invest, by vehicle:
If you are buying physical graded cards: – Is this card in the genuine trophy tier, or the mid-market that only matches equities? – Who graded it, and is that grader’s credibility the one I want to underwrite? – What are my all-in storage, insurance, import (VAT/duty) and sale costs, and how do they compare to the expected gain?
If you are buying fractional shares (Collectable, Rally): – Am I even eligible, given these are US-registered offerings? – What is the total fee load, IPO fee plus buy and sell, and what net return does that imply on my expected exit? – When can I actually exit, is it a continuous secondary market or a buyout vote? – Am I holding a security or a beneficial interest in a chattel, and what tax treatment follows?
If you are buying the infrastructure as a proxy: – How much of eBay’s business is actually cards, versus a diversified marketplace where card exposure is diluted? – Is a private company like Fanatics even accessible to me, and on what terms?
For most investors, the mid-market is a fee-laden, high-beta way to earn an equity-like return, and the trophy tier that justifies the asset class is either out of reach or requires expertise most buyers do not have. The opportunity that does exist is narrow but real: scarce cards bought in weak liquidity by someone equipped to authenticate and hold them. Whether that describes you is the decision only you can make. Just make it knowing the return has come from the top of the market during its drawdowns, not from the middle where most of the marketing points.
