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MAN 1: I first started collecting when I was seven years old.
MAN 2: I'd have been eight years old at the time.
MAN 3: When I first started collecting sports cards, I was in elementary school.
MAN 2: I was fortunate enough that my father was already working and involved
in the business that he would bring packets home.
MAN 1: I was too young to join Little League.
I fell in love with the sport and started collecting cards.
MAN 4: Still remember my mom taking me to the local grocer on our way home
and buying my first packs.
Still a very vivid memory, opening those packs and chewing that gum,
back in 1976.
MAN 5: After school, me and my few friends
would go to the local card shop,
gather up the few dollars that we had,
and just get a pack and try to get Ken Griffey Jr. ,
or Barry Sanders, or Bo Jackson.
MAN 6: And then I... I stopped collecting,
and I went on with, you know, school and work,
and became an adult.
MAN 5: Junior high, I kind of outgrew collecting cards.
And then it just sat in the back of my mom's garage for decades.
MAN 6: And then, in August of 2020,
I got back into it and started buying again.
MAN 7: I just recently got back into it about three months ago.
MAN 8: I'm probably a little bit older
than some folks who have gotten back in the game.
MAN 9: But now we're back into it in a large way.
MAN 6: My mom was excited and she sent me all my cards.
Boxes and boxes arrived in Puerto Rico.
And in there I saw all the ones that, to me as a kid, were so important
and one of them in the... in the biggest glass case,
one of the big screwdown cases,
was a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle.
MAN 7: So I'm a collector of what has culturally hit me.
I want to have a piece of history
in the same way I look at art.
It's just smaller.
When the pandemic hit in 2020,
if you had taken $1,000
from one of the stimulus checks the government sent out
and put it in the sports card market,
you would have had $10,000 or more, less than a year later.
During the pandemic, you know, just sharing,
like, trying to get your parents to understand
what's happening in the trading card market...
Taking that screenshot picture from a Target that says,
"Limit two rolls of toilet paper, three boxes of cards, "
I think really kind of hit home to people
that don't know what's happening in the trading card space.
-[SHOPPING CARTS RATTLING] -[INDISTINCT CONVERSATIONS]
MAN: If they're running, I'm running.
I'm not getting in that.
No [BLEEP] way, dude.
I am not doing that.
MAN 1: Employees buying all the cards out before the stores even open.
Guy standing here two hours before opening.
We got back door action.
Back door [BLEEP] action.
-MAN 2: Are you serious? -MAN 3: Because I need it.
MAN 1: Because you need it?
You're about to lose your job now.
I hope your family doesn't go hungry over cards, man.
The money that's in the industry right now is staggering.
I... Literally, my employees bug me,
but all I do is stand at the cash register and take money all day.
There's so many people that are coming in that they pull out a wad
of $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 to make their "weekly purchase. "
From 2016 to 2021,
the stock market had an incredible run.
It about doubled during that period.
But would you believe that the sports card market went up more than 20 times?
There are kids in high school right now
that will be financially independent
by the time they are 30,
because they've started investing in sports cards today.
The only reason the sports card market took off
was because of me.
I put that card on the map and said, "Look what I bought. "
Mike Trout.
People can laugh at me now.
But in 10 years from now, this card will be worth 5 to 10 million dollars.
Mark my words. I know what I'm doing.
And when it sold for $4 million,
it broke the Honus Wagner record.
People now saw baseball cards as no longer a hobby.
"Holy [BLEEP]. You can make millions off this. "
All these people from Wall Street,
they started getting the card market.
No way you would've saw LeBron sell for millions.
Luka sell for four million.
I single-handedly changed the market from a hobby to a business,
and to an investment.
If I didn't take that risk, who knows where the industry would be right now?
I don't really have time to spend
time on the Internet, buying things, or going on eBay.
I just never did that.
I'm doing 250 shows a year for the last 15 years.
Here I am, in my early 40s.
COVID hits.
Um, my touring schedule has come to a screeching halt.
And now I have like...
"Whoa, I don't know how long this is gonna be. "
So, I was in the studio just cranking music out, and then I got burnt out.
After a few months, I got burnt out.
I was like, "Well, this is a lot longer than I thought. "
And what do you do when you get burnt out?
You just find different interests.
I just left the studio.
I was like, "I need to take a break on this.
"This is a lot longer than expected. "
That was the opportune time for me to just kind of just put my reachers out,
and one of my friends was like,
"Hey, I just bought a sports card for $15,000. "
I have... I have those cards, too.
Like, they're not worth that much. There's just no way.
I could not believe it.
I just was like, "I don't understand it. "
I called him up, I was like, "Okay, explain what is going on. "
Like, it just sounds ludicrous. It's crazy.
He broke it down almost like... very much like an investment.
He's like, "I just spent 15 grand,
"and I plan to sell it in maybe 6 weeks' time for 10 grand more. "
I'm like, "Six weeks' time, you're gonna make ten grand?
"How is that possible?"
NICK GONZALES: My first feeling when I saw my own baseball cards
was like, "Is this even real?"
'Cause you see stuff photoshopped all the time,
and you kind of just assume that it's not, but it is real,
and you see the Topps on it, and it's kind of shiny.
So it's really cool to see that.
JOSH JACOBS: Man... So we moved into our house.
Growing up, and in the attic, there was a deck of cards like a book of cards.
That kind of started my fascination with cards.
And, young, I didn't know it was this big of a deal,
but I kind of got into it until like high school.
Until I got into girls and sports and things like that.
So, yeah. [CHUCKLES]
So, I do collect my own cards.
I try to get at least one of each card just for my kids.
So when they grow up, they can see it
and be like, "Me and my dad... It's just some... some memorable moments. "
GEOFF WILSON: I started collecting sports cards as a kid.
I was absolutely obsessed.
Every week, when I got my $5 allowance from my mom,
I would get on my bike immediately,
ride down to the corner drugstore
and buy as many sports card packs as I could possibly get.
My first job ever, at age 14, was at a sports card store in Sarasota, Florida.
Sports cards were my life as a kid.
As I got into high school and then went off to college, I lost touch with sports cards.
And it wasn't until a few years ago that I got back into them.
My son came home from his grandmother's house one day,
and had a pack of football cards.
So we opened the pack together and it brought back for me a ton of nostalgia.
And the more that I got into it, packs that I opened, cards that I researched,
I all of a sudden saw this has incredible investment potential
and incredible business potential.
And this is a sleeping giant industry,
and nobody realizes it right now.
You know, as an immigrant coming from South Africa, and being an only child,
I knew that I had to connect to my peers at school through something.
And sports cards was the perfect answer.
Even though most kids collected back then because it was the fun thing to do,
I really had that investor mentality back then.
I loved looking at those Beckett magazines
and seeing if my cards had gone up $2 or $3
because if they did,
I would have more to trade with my other friends.
And, to me, that was even more fun
than just collecting the cards for myself.
I started collecting baseball cards at a very young age,
about 12, 13 years old, buying and flipping cards.
While most of my neighbors and friends were playing in the backyards
and just hanging out,
I was, on the weekends, going to the local trade shows with my dad.
He used to leave me at a table, and he goes to the next table
and he comes back and he buys cards.
I say, "Why you buy this for?"
He say, "Trust me. "
As a 12-, 13-year-old, I was making $1,000 a week buying and flipping cards.
By 14, I was actually a dealer.
I'd run a table for 40 bucks and sell cards.
And then, before I was 15, I became a real entrepreneur.
I'd rent Holiday Inns or hotels in Michigan, rent the tables out,
hire Detroit Red Wings players to sign autographs, pay them 1,000 bucks.
Charge a door fee.
So I was making the door fee, the autograph fee, and the table fee.
And I was making about $8,000 a month, and I was only 15 years old.
So, that's when I first became a real entrepreneur.
But then when you get to high school,
you want to chase girls and get fancy cars,
so I sold everything.
And it's funny how I circled back in the card industry
almost 30 years later.
[INAUDIBLE]
Initially, when I first got back in August of 2020,
I thought it was kind of crazy.
I limped in.
I had a dealer send me $100,000 in cards, diversified box,
and thinking I was gonna buy it as a, you know, just a diversified asset class.
Once you hold these cards in your hand,
then you realize it's American history.
Think about Jackie Robinson's 1948 Leaf, his rookie card,
and Michael Jordan's rookie card.
And once you hold these things,
it brings back all that excitement of a kid and also brings back...
You learn more about the player, and the sport, and the history of it,
and you become addicted, and it's exciting and fun.
And I think when more and more people kind of just dip their toes back in,
they go in their garages and they grab their cards
and they kind of get that feeling again,
it gets them so excited and back into the hobby.
-Ooh! Wow! -Oh, wow, that's cool.
-BOY: Look at that. -Yeah.
Tom Brady with Ronald Jones Jr. and Mike Evans, the Super Bowl champions.
That's fitting.
MAN: For me, I stand at a Target
probably 6:00 in the morning, every Friday,
just so I can get myself 500 bucks' worth of Pokemon cards.
And, you know, as an adult, people laugh at me that I'm looking at Pokemon cards,
but I'm having fun, 'cause I'm revisiting my childhood.
At the same time, I'm monetizing my future.
And it's... Instead of having to invest the boring way
with, like, you know, stocks, trusting somebody,
at least I have control over my future
and I'm having fun at the same time.
So that's why I dove back into it.
The rise of the sports card market has even seen
a number of celebrities get involved in the industry.
For instance, Steve Aoki even had his own set released by Topps.
So we're seeing more and more celebrities pour into our industry.
STEVE AOKI: That was really cool,
to have my own auto in the Topps set was very cool.
I mean, I did my first Topps card as a first pitch card.
You know, whenever I get into any industry,
I always want to be creative in the space.
You know, 'cause I throw cakes at my shows,
we splattered a cake theme on the parallels.
It's a lot of fun to work with them.
Influencers, celebrities entering the space is incredible,
and they're coming in on a daily basis.
I think athletes are the best person to come into the space,
because, one, they know the industry better than anybody.
They know the players.
They know how they're gonna perform.
They know how they're working on the off season.
And also, they're kind of many VCs.
They make a phenomenal amount of money doing what they do,
so as they come in, it's like having a new VC come in.
VEGAS DAVE: I had a federal case.
I was the number-one sports better in the world,
and the casinos banned me and they didn't wanna pay me.
So I fought for my money, and when I fought the casinos,
they teamed up with the feds and they indicted me on 19 alleged felony counts.
So while I fought that federal case,
which was a 40-year prison term, 19 alleged felonies,
during that time, they banned me from sports betting.
So I had to figure out another source of income.
So I started consulting, selling picks.
But the other thing that I did was get into sports cards.
I was known as the King of Futures.
I have all the biggest payouts in the history of sports betting.
I could predict teams that would win the World Series at very long-shot odds,
including the record-breaking Kansas City Royals, 100,000 to win 2.5 million
for a team that never won a World Series for 30 years.
So, I was the king of futures. I just had a vision.
So when they banned me,
and eventually I did beat the case, no felonies, no prison time.
But I'm still banned.
So what I did when I got in the sports card industry,
I just parlayed my visions of sports cards, um, kind of like futures in sports.
MARK WARSOP: The Panini business was founded in 1954,
and was actually originally a newspaper distribution business in Italy,
based in a small town called Modena.
Essentially, what they did is they bought some small soccer images of players
and inserted them into the newspaper to try and sell more newspapers.
And very quickly found out that the demand for the actual collectible
figurine sticker inside the newspaper
was more valuable than the newspaper.
So it morphed into the very first sticker collection,
which was for Calciatori,
which in Italian simply means "players. "
And that was launched in 1961,
and took off incredibly quickly in terms of demand.
And then, Panini very quickly established itself across all of Europe,
buying up rights predominantly for all the major soccer leagues,
branched into South America,
and then in 2009,
started an operation in the U. S. after acquiring the assets of the Donruss business,
which became available here in America.
JOE DAVIS: The sports card industry looks so much better today
than it did over the last 10 to 20 years.
I've been in it full time since 1991,
and in 1991, we were in the middle of a boom.
But it quickly declined by the mid-'90s.
We've seen spikes and valleys in the industry over the years,
but I can say for sure, without question,
the last five years have been the strongest I've ever experienced.
When I was collecting cards as a kid,
your big brands were Topps, Fleer, Donruss and Upper Deck.
And those brands actually still all exist today,
although the ownership's a little different.
The four major U. S. sports have given exclusive licenses to the card manufacturers.
Right now, Panini's got the exclusive license for football and basketball,
Topps for baseball, and Upper Deck for hockey.
The licensing with sports cards is really interesting,
because, as a kid, I grew up collecting Topps.
That was my favorite company. I love Topps Chrome.
My most favorite memory of being a kid
was grabbing a Topps Kobe Bryant rookie card from a dollar bin.
I can't do that anymore because Panini now owns the license for the NBA and NFL
while Topps is focused on baseball.
DAVIS: When you think about brands,
first of all, you start with different manufacturers.
Each manufacturer has multiple products,
multiple brands of cards that they produce.
If you take Panini, for instance, they make a number of great products.
But in my mind, I categorize them as kind of the entry-level products,
the mid-tier, and then the high-end.
On the entry level, you've got products like Score,
and Hoops, and Prestige, and Donruss.
Then as you move up the scale more into the middle tier,
you've got products like Mosaic, Prizm, Select, and Optic brands.
And then as you move up to the very top end,
you've got products like Flawless, National Treasures...
Great cards all the way up the scale,
but a lot of different variety there.
I remember going to the store as a kid,
and they would have boxes of 89, 90 Hoops on the shelf.
I would buy a handful of packs,
and then somebody else would come in and buy a handful more.
And I would come back the next day and there'd be another box,
and maybe even two, and so on, and so on, and so on.
They never ran out, it seemed.
Nowadays, if you see a handful of boxes on a card store shelf,
once they're gone, they may be gone forever.
So, the big difference between modern trading cards
and trading cards from 20, 30 years ago,
when there was a crash within the marketplace...
If you go back 20, 30 years ago, you were buying products
and essentially what happened is manufacturers got greedy
and they left the machines running for a long time.
So you would find a rookie card in that product, think that it was rare,
but essentially there'd be thousands of them.
You'd put it in the loft, bring it down 20 years later
and find out that eBay had come around and your cards were worthless.
And everybody gets afraid of that.
You know, it's a "bubble. "
When the bubble burst in the '90s,
will it happen again, or are they gonna increase print runs,
and are they gonna do this and that?
Of course, that's something that longtime collectors are never gonna forget.
WARSOP: The difference with modern-day cards is we now print on every card
the volume of which we're buying.
So if we say this card is numbered to 10, there will only ever be 10,
and you know there's 10,
which means that you can be assured that it's gonna continue to remain
in value and increase in value based on how that player might perform.
For us at PWCC, we consider a vintage card 1986 or older.
Modern kind of starts when you get into the late '80s or '90s.
The kind of middle ground is about '87 to, let's say, '99.
But a lot of the really important parts of our industry
were produced from '96 and on.
'96 was the first year that they did serial numbering.
So that was super-important.
There's only two Kobe rookies that have serial numbering on them,
and that's really... that was the start that propelled our market
to the modern market that we have today.
When I got back into sports cards,
one of the early mistakes that I probably made
was putting too much money in risky young players.
And I didn't know how their careers were gonna turn out,
but I liked the upside potential.
But that meant that I invested a lot of money in guys like Justise Winslow
and Mitchell Robinson,
names that I thought could go on to become great players,
but never really played out that way.
So their card values didn't go up the way I was hoping.
ROB GOUGH: If you look at vintage versus modern,
for me, I'm more of a vintage guy.
And the reason why is I'm not gonna put $5 million
into a guy that's currently playing baseball.
The guy could slide into home play. He can get hurt.
He can say something stupid in the news.
He could do something illegal.
That $5-million card then goes down to nothing.
He could retire early without a championship.
You never know what's gonna happen.
Versus vintage...
You know, he's already kind of past.
He's already created his legacy.
It's a very consistent history.
You know what you're getting,
and the price is not gonna fluctuate because of it.
So, for me, it's a lot safer.
I think of it as Apple/Google stock,
and I think of a current player as a penny stock.
That he has a great game, the price goes up 10X,
but he has a really, you know, something terrible happens
and it goes down tremendously.
So, for me, it's a safer play and, um...
And it's also there's just so many rookie cards.
Like let's look at, you know, a LeBron James rookie.
Yes, they're gonna have a couple very expensive LeBron James rookies,
but there's so many different versions of his rookie card.
There's so many different population of it.
Whereas let's say Mickey Mantle, there's only one card.
And that's very important for me from a collection standpoint.
I chose to invest in a modern-day player.
I'll never understand vintage.
How can that guy's card go up while he's in the grave dead, collecting dust?
With Mike Trout, I wanted to buy a card and a player
that could improve his stats every year,
'cause if he could improve his stats every year, the card value would go up.
So I don't believe in vintage.
I don't believe that a Babe Ruth can keep going up.
That's why I think the Mickey Mantle buy is so stupid.
The two dumbest buys in the history right now
are Luka Doncic for $4 million, which is a joke.
Guy's been playing three years,
and you're gonna pay $4 million for a guy that's played 3 years.
And Mickey Mantle? The dude's dead.
Card's not gonna keep appreciating.
You know, in 2009,
when Panini came into the U. S. market, you know, there are three things they did.
They got the exclusive in the NBA,
they bought Donruss
to put that foothold in the trading card space here in Texas,
and they went out and signed Kobe Bryant as a global ambassador.
And he was super-important for us because, you know, as a kid, he lived in Italy.
He understood the Panini brand.
He collected Panini stickers.
So there was already that connection.
Kobe really became like a brand ambassador
and a launch platform for Panini in the U. S. ,
and we've had that exclusive relationship, obviously, all the way up until today.
Obviously, Panini was very distraught
at the passing of Kobe so prematurely,
but we'll continue to develop
high-quality trading cards for Kobe for many years to come.
This Eminence Collection is a beautiful collection
of my career
and some of the great moments that were captured within it.
As I sit here and sign card after card,
I play a little game with myself in terms of trying to remember
the exact moment on the card that I'm signing.
And I can pretty much remember every single one.
Which is a little frightening, I would think.
But it's awesome to take a trip down memory lane as I sign each card,
and all of these things seem like they just happened yesterday, so...
It's pretty cool of Panini to create such a beautiful set.
When Panini came into the U. S. market,
Kobe wanted to do something different in the trading card space.
And really, what's happening in the trading card space right now
is kind of what Kobe's vision was way back in 2009.
He wanted to change it.
He wanted to create disruption in the trading card space.
And so, you know, just like Kobe, that mentality that he carried on the court
is kind of... it's in the Panini America DNA.
When Panini develops a new product,
we're always looking to have a unique item in each box,
which makes sure that collectors will come in and buy multiple brands.
So, the manufacturing process of a trading card
is very much dependant on which brand we're looking at,
because there's so many different print technologies that we use.
In fact, the trading card industry
stretches the boundaries of print and technology like nothing else on the planet.
In most places in the world, print is dead.
Everything has moved to digital.
So trading cards are really leading the way
in stretching the boundaries on new print technologies.
For example, if there's game-used equipment in there,
we have to get that game-used piece of equipment.
We de-seam it.
We put a lacquer on the back, which has a unique barcode
that will identify that piece of memorabilia forever.
So even if you were to grab that trading card in 20 years,
we could take that piece of memorabilia,
scan the barcode on the back of it
and tell you exactly which jersey it came from.
That process takes place.
We have to collect all the autographs from all the players.
This can take many weeks.
A lot of the time some of the players in soccer, for example,
are all over the world.
And then when all of these components come together,
a majority of the cards are printed on press.
However, a lot of the memorabilia and autograph cards are still built by hand,
and this process can take some time.
So, again, where most people think, "Ink and cardboard, easy, turn the machine on, "
it's just not the way that it rolls.
Memorabilia is one of the other things
that's really transformed and differentiated
you know, the modern-day trading card
compared to the vintage category,
in that you're getting autographs from the players.
In the products nowadays, you're getting game-worn, game-used jerseys
that are cut up and then put into cards over here.
You won't see is a mess in my office
of Cowboys jerseys and Rams jerseys
and 49ers jerseys, all waiting to be cut up to be put into trading cards.
WARSOP: Although we have a vast number of brands,
one of our key ones is Rated Rookie,
because rookies are a key driver within the product,
so it wouldn't be unusual to see an athlete
wearing a Rated Rookie T-shirt whilst walking down the street.
The brands have become iconic over the years, not just within trading cards.
Just thinking about what Rated Rookie means
to the hobby community, the trading card community...
Every kid remembers that Rated Rookie in that royal blue
and the iconic logo that was on that card.
That Rated Rookie legacy is continuing today.
Think about, you know, all the guys that kind of come through.
It really starts with the moment they declare for the Draft,
or announce that they're gonna be a pro.
We've had so many players come through,
whether that's, you know... I think about Josh Jacobs,
a guy that really kind of stepped out and emerged,
in week three of his rookie year,
-and that's that Rated Rookie moment for him. -[REFEREE WHISTLES]
COMMENTATOR: His third of the day!
And for collectors knowing that they had picked up that card back in August,
before he'd even stepped on the field.
You know, that's that prospecting culture,
that's that Rated Rookie, why everyone loves to collect it.
During Draft night we had a lot of interviews, a lot of different things,
and even leading up to the Draft.
Oh, man. Panini was the first to really, like,
show me how huge the card game was.
They showed me the Rated Rookie cards.
They were showing us the limited edition.
They let us put on the chain, you know what I'm saying?
Walk out, take pictures, and things like that.
So it was just a dope experience, really.
The 24th pick in the 2019 NFL Draft,
the Oakland Raiders select...
JACOBS: So, people don't know about the Draft and I tell people
it was a blessing to be there, but it's the longest day ever.
Like, you have media interviews, all before the Draft.
And then, like, the... the longest part is sitting in the room and waiting,
hearing all the guys go in and being excited for your friends and things like that,
having your family there with you.
And then you hear your name called...
Josh Jacobs.
And I remember just walking out,
and it was weird, because I was like,
the only thing I was thinking about when I went up the stairs was, "Do not fall. "
Do not fall when you walk up these steps.
Oh. But, man, hugging Roger Goodell
and seeing that "1" on the jersey...
Man, seeing the excitement from the crowd,
um, it was definitely a blessing.
Due to the overwhelming demand for trading cards
and the fact that we're not manufacturing any larger volumes on the hobby,
this has pushed a vast number of people into retail.
You see people lining up outside of hobby stores.
We have people sleeping outside of Targets and Walmarts,
waiting for that product to drop and get on to the shelves at those stores now.
It's insane.
One of the challenges the sports card market is facing
is the fact that it's really difficult to find products
in big-box retail stores anymore.
And the reason for that is because flippers are taking advantage.
They are going to big-box retail stores
the day products are put on shelves, buying as many as they can,
because then they're able to resell them online that same night
for three times, four times, five times, or more.
Because these flippers have been raiding retail stores
and then selling boxes online for several times more,
it can sometimes be hard to find a box at a reasonable price.
It can be really, really difficult
to get anything of value out of that box
based on the price you had to pay.
I believe that anyone that buys something at MSRP
to flip it for 50%, 100% right there and then...
I mean, there should be some type of law against it.
In the future, it's three years down the line, a year down the line,
they stopped making it... I get it.
But not when it's attainable at a card store like this,
I can come walk in and say, "Hey, can I get a UFC box?"
Instead of right now, after today, those boxes will be $1,300.
2020, there still was stuff at the beginning of the year
that would sit on the shelf for literally 6, 8 months.
And every time it came in, you'd kind of cringe.
About March of 2020, stuff like Heritage started disappearing.
Opening day, it would fly off the shelves.
I mean, they would just take anything there was.
I still wasn't seeing people around me,
but the stuff definitely was not there when I went back the next week.
Slowly, I'd start noticing people around me.
They, you know... They come up, talk,
be nice, you know, blah, blah, blah.
Got a little bit creepy when I was doing other work in the store
and they'd come at me, "When are you putting out the cards?"
After March 20th, there would start being crowds around me.
And maybe it started out at some stores two or three, then three or four.
People started following me to areas nowhere near their home.
It did get worse.
I mean, people would come up, grab stuff.
I'd be accused of holding product for different people and all that,
and anybody who doesn't get product feels that they were messed with,
because it's all their right to get it all.
Security did change.
They started roping me off,
and I had a security guard with me the whole time I was working,
and with the option to be escorted out to my car if I wanted to be.
I would come in different doors to try to lose people.
I would work odd hours.
Shoppers at a Brookfield Target were forced to run and hide
after a fight this morning in the parking lot.
Police say it all started with a disagreement over trading cards.
Recently, Target implemented new rules.
Trading cards are only sold at 8:00 a. m. on Fridays,
and customers are limited to one pack per person.
Just 20 minutes after sales began this morning, things got physical.
REPORTER: Brookfield Police say a 35-year-old man
was physically assaulted by four other men in the parking lot
after an argument over sports trading cards.
The victim pulled out the gun he was legally carrying,
and the four attackers ran away.
All four later arrested.
OFFICER: Let me see your hands. Put your hands up.
REPORTER: Officers found the other four men around the area,
putting each in handcuffs.
What's so big about these right now?
MAN: It's, like, a craze for it.
So people are buying it all out and, like, reselling it.
-OFFICER: Yeah? -MAN: Because they're like...
They're kind of selling for double or triple more than what they go for in the store.
It is crazy. The marketplace is insane right now.
It's unbelievable.
Even from just a year and a half ago when I got into the hobby,
they weren't going for that much.
But now, it's like, a new box of baseball is, like, $1,400 now.
It is getting harder and harder to buy some of the newer stuff
'cause it is just... it is so expensive and a lot of people want it.
So, it's hard to get your hands on it sometimes.
I got here at 9:00 p. m. last night.
There was about almost 100 people sitting in line.
-INTERVIEWER: Wow. -It's getting bigger and bigger.
INTERVIEWER: Do you go...
Do you guys go to each spot every day?
Nah, you got to know the drop zones.
[CHUCKLING] It's a secret society.
You're just player, all right? I'm just getting in.
Like I say, you don't know, you won't know.
You're gonna miss every day.
MAN: The reason why everybody is in line is mostly to flip.
To make money, to profit from it.
Um, these boxes might cost 20, 15 bucks, and you can sell them for hundreds.
So, a lot of people just... They're after the money, mostly.
And then, like, there are some hobbyists that just have to do this
because you won't be able to get cards in retail. So...
INTERVIEWER: Do you consider yourself a flipper?
You know how everybody calls people flippers?
Yeah, of course. Of course.
I mean, I wouldn't be here if I wasn't. [LAUGHS]
In 2020, people started bringing a lot of product back to Target,
and I actually had one reseller tell me he likes buying from Target and Walmart
because they take returns.
So, anything he cannot sell online,
he gets his money back for.
The problem with that is
some people know how to reseal the product and put junk in there,
that it is basically useless to anyone
and it will not get caught until the next person buys it and then returns it.
INTERVIEWER: Nothing?
I just got a Pokemon because they ran out of Optics.
My friend got all the Optics and then I got NBA Hoops.
-Oh, you did get a Hoops, though. -I got a Hoops.
So, we're gonna get some Ja Morant.
We don't go to sleep until we get the money.
As an owner of an actual TCG company like MetaZoo,
it's not up to us what the secondary market price is at.
We're gonna sell it as MSRP, at that price,
and we allow the secondary market to dictate what the value of this box is,
what the value of these items are.
The secondary market is incredibly important
in defining the rarity or the desirability of the actual product.
Hi, Joe. I gotta pick up something for my son here,
I gotta take him back maybe a little football to break.
If you're gonna go buy boxes,
you could go to a local card shop or an online card retailer
where you're gonna find what are called hobby boxes.
They're more expensive, but often packed with better cards.
We're gonna have a big rip party.
He'll have a lot of fun with this.
-Hope you get some great pulls. -Excellent.
DAVIS: I started GotBaseballCards back in May of 1991.
At the time, I was doing card shows
with a college friend named Jeff Porter,
and we would travel around the southeast doing shows.
And he was working in a card store
and the owner had decided to close.
And he called me and said, "Hey, you know, we can buy out this store. "
So, we partnered and opened the store in May of 1991,
and then I bought him out a few years later.
So, I've been going at it for over 30 years now full time.
We went through some of the most transformational changes we've ever seen during COVID.
First of all, our retail store shut down.
We've actually been closed for regular walk-in for about a year now.
The market actually grew exponentially during that time.
We shifted all of our focus to online.
The changes in the industry were staggering.
When COVID first hit and all the leagues started to shut down,
we were very concerned about the impact it was gonna have on the industry
'cause it was... We felt it was like a strike.
I've lived through a lot of strikes in this industry
and I saw how it hurt the industry.
But we had a fear it was gonna impact it the same way.
But instead, it seemed that it fueled the fire more because people were at home,
fathers and sons were collecting together,
reigniting the passion they had had as a kid,
and the dads were teaching the sons, and so forth.
So, we started seeing an incredible growth of new business,
new customers we'd never dealt with before
who were approaching us wanting to place orders, buy cards,
sending us want lists, filling old sets.
So, it was... The growth in the last year has been unbelievable,
something we never expected to see.
MAN: I'm Parry Solomon. I run Wonder Water Sports Cards Comics & Games.
We've been doing this since March of 1989.
So, I've lived in Clearwater, Florida for the last 32-plus years.
I think the one thing that we've done is that we do a lot of everything,
we're not just a card shop, obviously.
We do comic books, we do games, we do toys, we do memorabilia.
There's a lot of things that certain card shops don't do.
We try to be more of a one-stop shop
for whatever collectors in the family... Whatever they're into.
Early on, we would do whatever it took to try to get product.
We would visit candy wholesalers locally.
My father would drive to Canada to get hockey cards.
We're from Canada originally, so he had contacts there business-wise
that he would get stuff from.
But it was always very difficult
in those early years to get product.
So, in 2017, things started changing,
and our relationship with the distributors started to change.
We, you know...
We were now given limitations on what product we could buy, at what price.
They would raise the price.
And it became...
So now, like, the price rises daily.
You know, when I call, if I bought something yesterday,
it's probably more today to buy that same item.
We do our absolute best to obtain as much product as we possibly can
that meets the demands of our customers.
I pay attention to our Facebook group.
I pay attention to emails. I watch social media.
Everybody starts asking me, "Hey, when are you getting this product?"
"Hey, when are you listing this product?"
I know that I'm gonna need a large amount of that product.
In order to obtain it, I go through distributors,
they're massive wholesale distributors
that supply all the different releases to retailers by release day.
We kind of rely on our relationships with them,
and what we've done in the past years
to build up what they call "allocations, "
uh, for different products.
So, basically, the more you would spend on products,
the more you would then get of that product the next time it came around,
or the more you would get of other products later in the season.
PARRY SOLOMON: We can't get enough of anything.
Uh, we get a small portion direct from the manufacturers,
and then we get another small portion from the distributors.
And that amount, depending on how hot the product is,
may not be enough to last us for an hour.
There's plenty of things that we're sold out of...
We open at noon. There's plenty of things we're sold out of by 12:30.
Quite often, if I wanted to, we would be sold out before a product comes out.
I could make two phone calls and be sold out of everything.
Today, due to the raise in demand
um, for breaks and for boxes and for cases,
we are currently, uh...
We're paying close to going retail price,
uh, just to replenish stock.
The rise in price in particular products, currently...
I think a lot of it was driven from, you know, the beginning of the pandemic.
I don't know that he industry has fully caught up to the demand.
I don't know that it ever will.
INTERVIEWER: Could you ever imagine shutting your doors down
because you're too busy?
SOLOMON: I do that now. We're closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.
I'm here... Like, I'm here on Mondays and Tuesdays.
All I do, for probably eight to ten hours on Monday and Tuesday
is call different distributors to look for more product,
try to redo things in here to get it ready for the next week
because Wednesday, when we open up again, it's full blast.
New release of something, new comic books are every Wednesday.
So we're busy.
Those big releases, there's so much anticipation for them,
and it's amazing, just the buildup that we go into.
There's this eight-month process where we're producing a product.
That release day is like its birthday.
It's the celebration of a new product coming to market,
and people opening up that product all over the world, globally,
through case breaking or live streams.
Well, release date is, depending on what the product is,
is very much a lineup at the door.
You know, I've said that the first time we had a lineup at the door
was with The Death of Superman back in the early '90s,
and, suddenly, we went from, you know, wondering how a product would sell
to wondering how long it will last us
and how many people I can try to make happy.
Because the lineups at the door...
I get in here any given morning, 8:30, 9 o' clock in the morning,
and there's already people sitting outside, waiting for us to open at noon.
So, Prizm Football, the first guy, allegedly, was here at 5:30 a. m.
MAN: People realized that there was money to be made in this industry.
New people that were not in this marketplace before said,
"This is fun. This is really exciting.
"These are my favorite athletes and I want to invest with these cards. "
And it started to spike, spike, spike,
month after month, to where we are now.
Cards are pouring in, thousands of orders per day are coming in the building.
Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cards per order are coming in.
And it's a real challenge to keep up with the demand of the market that we have now.
The prices are escalating everywhere,
whether you're talking online, eBay, or whether you're talking stores,
at the distributor level, everywhere.
The money that's flowing into the industry has never been seen before.
INTERVIEWER: Do you have to stand in line elsewhere? Do you ever do retail?
I don't do retail anymore.
I mean, I got to the point where there was never anything there when you wanted it,
and you just hear the horror stories about these long lines of people,
and they're just pouncing on this stuff,
you know, the people that are flipping it for double the price.
I mean, it just got to the point where it's ridiculous.
So, I don't even bother with that anymore.
I always just find it way harder to find any product when I go to Target or Walmart.
Everything is just so sold out,
and it's just... Ugh, it's a mess trying to find everything.
Yeah. To discuss the differences in hobby and retail boxes, there is a vast difference.
Hobby boxes are ones that are distributed to hobby retailers like myself
directly from the manufacturers,
whereas "retail products, " those are ones that go to mass market,
like a Walmart or a Target.
And they have different cont... They have different cards,
different special inserts than you would get in a hobby box.
SOLOMON: There's very few products in the retail, you know,
Targets and Walmarts and things like that, that are more than $50.
But in general, a retail product has only certain odds
to get certain types of desirable collectible cards.
In a hobby product, it's a lot more money,
but you get a lot more guaranteed items in a box.
A little blaster box for $19.95 has no guaranteed item in it, usually,
or the item that's guaranteed is, you know, not that special,
where a hobby box, you get a certain amount of guaranteed autographs,
certain amount of guaranteed relics,
um, and that content is more clearly spelled out of what your possibilities are.
INTERVIEWER: When you talk about individuals that get it from Target,
they're considered flippers nowadays,
what do you think they've done?
Are they a positive or a negative to the industry,
and how it's happening currently?
"The flippers are part of the problem, " is the easiest way to answer that.
Because most of those people aren't buying it because they're collecting it.
It makes it very difficult for...
You know, I have parents come in here all the time
that are just looking for some football packs for their 9-year-old kid.
And they're like, "Target and Walmart don't have any. "
And so, it has become very much just about making money for those people.
They don't care about what the product is.
They just care about how much they can sell it for.
And so, that ripping and flipping idea,
some people rip it open to sell the singles,
some people just buy the wax to flip it in that manner.
So, it depends on what level of hobbyist you happen to be.
You know, sometimes, it's a little off-putting.
You know, a lot of the people out there are scalpers.
They're not really collectors, you know.
It's good for the hobby as far as increasing
the value of everything that I am going to get.
But at the same time, you know, it does take away that joy.
Buying individual packs of cards instead of a sealed box can be dangerous
because, unfortunately, what some people do is, they'll buy a box,
they'll find the pack that's got the really big hit in it,
and then, they'll sell the other packs
that aren't as good on the market.
So, we have... All of our product is behind the counter,
other than right up front where the new releases are, and I'm always standing there.
We don't let people mess with packs.
We have people who have walked in the store in past years,
carrying their scale and ask if they can weigh the packs.
You'll see it happen at Target or Walmart, you know, all the time.
So, yes, there is a difference between the weight of a specific pack
that has a relic in it or doesn't.
Topps Museum Collection has one metal card per case of 12.
So, that box is heavier, and guaranteed.
If you're buying boxes of certain things,
there is that potential for it to have been weighed
and they're selling it for that reason,
'cause they know that item's not in there.
We've always had that type of challenge with people buying stuff online.
Searching cases is not new, but now the money is so much bigger.
So, the old thing was that you always had a specific content per box or per case,
and people would sell packs or boxes of whatever they didn't open.
So, they might get a box or a case,
and they might rip open until they hit that big card.
And then they put the rest of those packs or boxes on sale on eBay,
and you don't have any chance of hitting that big card.
Obviously, we have no way of knowing when people walk in
if they bought the box that has the good card in it,
but at least we don't do that to you on purpose.
MAN: Hello, everybody. This is Chris with HOTT Hott Breaks,
coming at you with another Break.
2020 Topps Heritage High Number.
We are looking for what's considered a hot box,
and, hopefully, that's what this is.
When you look at hot boxes, they come with one purple Chrome per pack.
That's why they call it a hot box.
I think we'll just pull every pack right now.
All right. Let's get into this.
Oh. My gosh, we have a hot pack.
Let's go to HOTT Hot Box!
We're actually going to get one of those per pack.
All-Star rookie Mike Soroka.
Today, the sports card market is more protected because we have scarcity.
We have manufacturers that are actually building scarcity into their products
through numbered cards and through other mechanisms.
We've got grading, which inherently adds scarcity
because it's really hard to get cards in perfect grades.
We've got really strong online community
and social media around sports cards.
People are into investing and collecting more than just for the money.
They're in it for the community as well, which keeps them there.
And then, we've got online breaking.
And that's a big deal as well, because it's entertainment.
It's a big piece of people's lives now
to sit on their couch and watch an online break on TV.
Watching online breaks can be an incredible spectacle.
It's so much fun to watch,
and even if cards being pulled aren't the ones that you bought,
just simply getting to watch them is a thrill.
I've seen huge cards, like a Honus Wagner cut auto,
get pulled out of a box of Transcendent.
Oh, man. How about that?
Honus Wagner.
Kaboom!
WILSON: Online breaking is an incredible thrill.
You can often buy into these breaks for not very much money,
but you've got the opportunity to strike it big.
You can hit that big hit card
and make that break worth it a hundred times over for you.
Oh, my gosh!
Oh, wow!
Superfractor rookie auto, one of one,
Fernando Tatis Jr.
Justin... I'm shaking so bad. I'm sorry.
Justin Herbert, NFL shield art PA, one of one.
Boom!
Logoman Patch auto, one of one, Luka Doncic.
Boom!
So, Sarah came home one day with this box of cards.
Uh, I believe it was 2011 Topp Series 2.
I believe it was.
We opened the box together.
It takes me down this rabbit hole.
We start doing research and I jump on YouTube
and I start seeing videos of people opening cards.
I never saw this before. I did not know this existed.
There were a couple of people doing what they called "breaks. "
I didn't know what it was. I started watching.
I started actually even participating.
I bought into a couple of breaks, and I had a lot of fun.
I thought it was really cool, being a part of something
that was taking place live on the Internet,
and this is 2011 to the end of 2012.
So, streaming live was a very new concept at the time.
I immediately thought, "This is for me. "
I knew then and there that this was something that I could do,
and I can hopefully do as good, if not better,
than other people that were already doing it.
VLOGGER: It's Friday night. We're opening Pokemon cards.
Let's see what we got next.
Instagram @thecoffeebreakers.
Let's see what it is right now.
-A Chansey! -[PEOPLE CHEERING]
Yeah. Breaking boxes online is that treasure...
that treasure hunt, like finding that treasure.
You know it's in one of these boxes.
You know it's sitting there.
There is, like, the possibility of getting
the extremely rare, uh, refractor or extremely rare card
that is worth, you know, a gazillion dollars.
And that's what's exciting.
MAN: Oh, Mahomes!
-[BOTH EXCLAIMING] -Silver. [BLEEP]
-Nice. -Oh, we got that second pack.
Group breaks have existed for quite some time,
well before anyone was streaming live or opening boxes on camera.
A group of people can get together
and decide to split the cost of a case or box
or any number of cards together as a group.
You can go to a card store, and you and five of your buddies
want to buy a case of baseball, we'll say.
And you could split it up by division, six spots.
Everybody pays the same amount of money and we split it six ways,
and then we can open the cards and all decide,
"All right. He's gonna get the AL East and I'll get the NL East, "
and so on and so forth.
And everybody would split the cards.
That's essentially what a group break is.
Got David Montgomery Patch, to 25 NFC North.
AFC West, Larry Rountree auto to 25.
And AFC South RPA to 49,
Trevor Lawrence. Boom!
What it does is, it allows for consumers
to get into a product that they may never be able to afford.
Uh, you're getting in for a portion of the price of the case of cards.
[CHUCKLES] Good luck, guys. Team old Topps is going to win it.
Lucky seven. And number seven, good luck.
Packers!
Madison. Congratulations.
How about that? Hell of a hit.
Back in 2012, '13, '14, I would...
I said "Boom" one time and everyone's like, "Yeah, that's a boom. "
VLOGGER : One of one, Jeremy Lin.
Boom!
RICH LAYTON: "You've got to say 'boom. '" Oh, everything's a boom.
I have customers to this day that get...
They're, like, upset.
They feel like they were left out if their card didn't get a "boom. "
They've set a value on our level of entertainment. They expect us to deliver.
And that's a big deal to us.
Forrest was yelling "Coleslaw" the other day.
We don't know why.
I mean, they were like, "You've got to have your own thing, Forrest. "
And he was like... He started yelling out, like, "Kablowie" and "Kachow. "
They were like, "No, no, you got to say something random, "
and he's like, "Coleslaw!"
And then, of course, the chat got crazy with it, and everything was "coleslaw. "
Hey, everyone. Forrest here, ripping one box of 2020 Contenders Optic Football,
and on the back is a Tua Tagovailoa Rookie Ticket Silver auto.
Nice. Coleslaw.
Layton Sports Cards has been breaking for a long time.
We started in 2014 and did it through about 2017.
We got in probably six months too early.
But we got to a point where we didn't wanna be up till 2:00 in the morning.
I have a kid and a wife. So...
But, now, there's not just breaking online in the traditional formats.
Now, Instagram is a big deal. Facebook is big deal.
A lot of my customers are breakers on various platforms, YouTube.
So, that has grown immensely.
Two of my best young customers started when they were 17, breaking wax on Instagram,
and they went from buying, a couple of boxes a week
to now, they spend a couple thousand dollars a week easy on most new releases.
They want as much as they can get.
And they're 18 now, so...
A big part of what we do is community,
um, and the building of that community
and making sure that our customers feel like they're part of a family.
We created a safe place for our customers to buy, sell, and trade on Facebook.
Everything we do is family friendly.
No swearing, no cussing, no acting out.
And we try to make it a safe place for them
to come and enjoy collecting and enjoy watching boxes being opened.
I mean, everybody should be able to enjoy our hobby.
Everybody, no matter who they are.
Like any industry where there's a lot of money involved,
there are scams that take place.
You have to be careful.
The easiest way you can get scammed
is to buy a card that's different than the one you think you're buying.
People can make misleading listings when they put things online,
or they can take photos that maybe don't show damage that exists on a card.
Be careful. Do your homework.
Make sure you are buying the card that you intend to buy.
And then, when you receive it,
inspect the condition thoroughly.
Make sure it's all on the up and up.
You also have to watch out for fake cards.
Because there is so much money in higher-end cards these days,
you do, unfortunately, have people that are out there
trying to create counterfeit versions of really expensive cards,
like Wayne Gretzky rookie cards or Michael Jordan rookie cards.
That's why it's always good to buy cards that are graded,
because that means that they're also authenticated,
assuming that they're graded through a reputable grading company.
-AOKI: This looks like a fake card. -WOMAN: It's fake.
MAN: That is one that is fake, Steve.
AOKI: So I got... I mean, it looks fake.
MAN: It's 100% fake. That's not live ink.
It's Cracked Ice. You bought a Cracked Ice.
That thing should be sparkling from here to...
AOKI: I feel sick, getting ripped off like that.
WOMAN: We can get the money...
AOKI: 'Cause this is gonna be expensive...
-It was 11K. Eleven thou... -WOMAN: It was 11, right, Elizabeth?
-WOMAN 2: Yeah. -AOKI: Holy [BLEEP]!
MAN: But this one's 100% fake. So...
-AOKI: Clear as day. Like, it's a printed laser copy. -MAN: Yeah, feel that.
You got to be careful. So, on the back end of cards,
not only are there people chasing,
there's also people manipulating a little bit.
So, maybe they'll buy, you know, 100 of a particular card
and then they throw it at auction and bid the price up a little bit.
So, now there's a new price point.
And then, they go and try to sell some of their collection.
So, you've got to be careful, you know?
Just because one sells for a high price,
doesn't mean that that's the real price of the card.
You've got to look at how many cards have sold at that price
before you can really say that that's the value of the card.
There's a slew of options in selling a trading card.
But, really, the the biggest and largest platform in our market is eBay.
eBay is a publicly traded company.
There's 180 million users. They're international.
So, if you're looking for a card or looking to sell a card,
eBay is probably the first place that I would go.
Also for that market research to see what a card might be potentially worth that you own.
Until a couple of years ago, it was rare to see any card go for a million dollars or more,
and there were a lot of big auction houses doing big auctions,
but they were driving cards in the tens of thousands,
or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But in the last couple of years, auctions have boomed.
And now, there are a ton of cards that have sold in the millions of dollars.
JESSE CRAIG: So, PWCC has historically been just an auction house
selling cards on eBay for over 20 years.
And we've transitioned into kind of a full-stop shop for our clients.
We have a vault, an online marketplace,
and we lend, and we digitally archive people's assets.
We image it, title it, price it,
and it's all put away and safely insured and stored.
Our vault here is a Class-3 UL rated vault.
It's actually constructed of 750,000 pounds of concrete.
We have two huge vault doors that weigh 11,000 pounds apiece.
And our facility, we consider it the Fort Knox for trading cards.
We have over 65 cameras on site.
Um, you know, it's all gated, key-coded, and 24-hour surveillance.
Since, you know, probably the beginning of 2020, I would say,
the demand for having assets graded is massive.
People want graded assets, they want them verified and authenticated.
And that's why that's all that we sell anymore.
At PWCC, we only sell slabbed or factory-sealed products
because the third-party authentication
for our market is so important.
It gives the buyer the confidence
that they are getting what they're seeing.
JACOBS: That's lit.
-They come in these cases like this? -INTERVIEWER: No.
That's a graded card from Beckett.
Oh, that's lit.
Not once have I bought a raw card.
I see so many people make that mistake, beginners.
It's like playing the lottery.
Get a card cheaper 'cause it's raw and get it graded? Think about it.
The person that sold you the card sells cards for a living.
There's a reason he didn't get it graded himself because he sees a defect on it.
So, again, your local dealer lying and manipulating you.
So, for me, I mess with big dollars, millions of dollars of cards,
Why am I gonna buy a raw card?
I'd rather pay the premium price and have it graded
than buy a card for one-fourth the value,
and take the chance of it getting lost in the mail,
someone stealing it, or it coming back with a four or five grade.
The grading aspect changed everything for me, too,
'cause it's one thing having a raw card,
and another thing having a graded card.
Those are two different things.
Like, having a raw card is really, really great.
But until it's in the slab,
a slab that's trusted, PSA, BGS, SGC,
and even, I'm trusting these other ones like HGA.
As long as it's in a slab and it's protected,
it's framed, it's authenticated, it's graded by a professional
that the whole market respects and knows that's the value,
that's when, like for me,
that's when the card itself has changed into an investment.
Beckett was doing price guides in the '80s and the '90s,
just print magazines that were being distributed to stores and retailers across the country.
And then, we slowly adapted and got into the Beckett Marketplace,
and then Beckett Card Grading in 2000.
So, the grading industry started to really catch on
when people realized that they needed to have
a third party examine their pieces,
especially as online platforms started selling cards.
And when you want to sell stuff around the world,
it was much, much easier to say, "I have a BGS-graded this card"
instead of just going out and saying,
"I personally think that I have a mint card. "
WILSON: One of the most challenging things for someone new in the hobby
is to understand if the condition of their card
is good enough for it to get graded.
Because when you send it off to the grading companies,
they're really going to scrutinize it.
They put it under a ton of magnification,
and if it has any flaws, it's not likely to get a wonderful grade.
They're going to look at the sharpness of the corners, the sharpness of the edges,
how well-centered the image is on the card,
and then, also, if the surface of the card
is in pristine, scratch-free condition.
So, there's now a lot of different companies that do grading.
So customers also have to choose
which company do they want us to submit through to do the grading.
The industry leaders, PSA and BGS,
those are the big boys who you normally recommend.
Right. We've been working with both PSA and BGS for decades.
They are the two industry leaders,
though there are a lot of up and comers
who are vying to take that market share from them.
JEROMY MURRAY: When a card is received here,
it's received in our logistics department, and the cards are counted
to make sure that it matches up with the submission form for our customer.
It then moves on to our invoicing system where the customer receives an email.
"Congratulations, we've received your order.
"Everything is working. We'll be in contact if there's any issues. "
At that point, it goes on to our verification team.
Verification team will identify the cards.
These are guys that are encyclopedias of cards.
Their knowledge is amazing and stunning,
and they can mow through an order and identify cards.
There's times that you have to do some research on those,
and they spend time researching the cards.
At that point, it either goes in our vault to wait to be graded,
or it moves on to our graders, depending on the service level that you select.
At that point, the graders will sit down, examine the card,
make sure the card is authentic,
make sure the card as not been altered
and then give a grade on the card, with subgrades.
Break it down with each of the four categories.
So there's four main things that the grading company is gonna look at
to determine the overall grade your card gets,
and of course, Joe is the expert on this type of stuff.
Yeah, Geoff, when I'm assessing a card,
the very first thing I will look at is the centering
because that's the first thing to see when you hold it in front of you.
You can tell, "Is this card well-centered?
"Is there a wider border at the top or the bottom,
"a wider border at the left or the right?"
After that, I move on to the corners
'cause those are the most noticeable after that.
"Is there white showing on the corners?"
And then I move on to the edges after that.
Because often cards, especially as you get into vintage cards,
are gonna have chipping on the border of the card.
And then last of all, look at both the front and the back for the surface,
because often there'll be a crease, there'll be a scratch.
Like with newer cards, there'll be scratches on the surface.
There can be print lines of all different types,
sometimes on the front or the back.
So you've really got four key areas to look at
that could all impact the grade of the card.
MURRAY: After that's done, a label is produced for the card.
It moves on to our slabbing and production room where the card is encased
and then it's shipped out as quickly as possible.
There's been a lot of innovation with new companies coming about.
You've got companies like HGA, with their really colorful labels
that a lot of people have been really attracted to,
the design of their labels and the design of their slabs.
So, HCA started because we noticed
a lot of inconsistencies with companies that we were grading with,
some of the larger companies we were cracking cards or having to resubmit
and over 50% would come back with different grades.
At that point, we realized that there needed to be some change in the industry.
So we wanted to go ahead and see if there was a way to bring in AI for assured,
um, some better technology into the grading field.
The three biggest differences with us are, one, the AI. Obviously, the grading.
Two, our labels. We have a plethora of options so we can do color splash.
We can do the neutrals type labels.
We also do custom labels, which I'm sure many people are now aware of.
The other third biggest thing is we were hitting our turnaround times.
So a lot of the companies were getting behind because of the infiltration
of so many cards, base cards and everything coming in.
So we're actually hitting our turnaround times.
Imagine the hobby being so busy that the leading grading company literally shut their doors
from new submissions for months
'cause they couldn't handle the volume.
But that's actually what happened to us.
DAVIS: Yes, that was a staggering day.
It sent shockwaves through the entire industry.
I couldn't believe it. I got no advance notice.
And all of a sudden my inbox was full with,
"Did you hear PSA shut down?" "PSA shut down. "
"What are you gonna do?"
It spread fear through the industry.
Everybody was in a panic mode, like, "What are we gonna do with our cards?"
And so we immediately had to transition.
We were like, "We've got to offer something. "
And 'cause we were offering just PSA at the time
we had to recalibrate and say,
"Okay. There's some other really good companies out there. "
We started offering BGS submissions,
started offering CSG submissions
to fill that void for the cheaper grading for cards.
Because PSA continued to offer their express services, their really high-end grading.
But for the bulk submitter,
the guy that has a bunch of cards that he...
$10, $20 rookie cards,
that doesn't work at $300-plus a card for grading.
So, yeah, we call it "the Day that Grading Died, " because PSA just went to a halt.
And it's amazing to think they were that many millions of cards behind
-where they had to shut down. -Thirteen million cards.
Thirteen million cards in their backlog.
That's absolutely incredible to think about,
that, literally, a company that is leading an industry
shuts its doors for months
and says, "No new customers. We can't handle the business right now. "
Like, as a business guy, as an entrepreneur,
as someone who started a ton of different companies,
I can't even fathom ever doing that with one of my companies.
But that's the decision PSA had to make
because the hobby is so busy and has so much heat right now.
DAVIS: Yeah, they kept raising prices and raising prices,
saying, "That'll slow submissions down. " It didn't.
In fact, people kept submitting more 'cause they said,
"We're gonna get our cards in before the next price increase. "
So, none of us saw it coming.
But, hey, it's what they had to do.
BRAD DE COMARMOND: My first year of investing,
I was so excited about my first PSA submission
because I had all of these Kobe Bryant cards I was gonna send in
and I was gonna make a killing off of it.
But I had a mental lapse where I signed up for the wrong submission level,
which cost me an extra $3,000 for that submission.
And that should have negated every single bit of profit that I was anticipating making.
Fortunately, money flooded the hobby,
and I was able to still make a profit,
but it was just a horrible, horrible mistake,
especially for your first submission.
So, as the grading companies grade cards,
they keep track of how many cards they've graded
of each type of card in each grade.
That is called a population report.
The population reports can be very helpful to consult
because they give you an understanding of how common or rare a card is.
And if you're gonna be investing a lot of money in a card,
you often want to invest in a card that's got a low population report,
meaning, there's not many other cards out there
of that particular grade in that particular type.
If I'm looking at brands, let's say for modern,
I'm not gonna really go for the generic, the base,
just because the supply is so large.
So, personally, I'm gonna go more towards the limited supply.
But again, you look at Zion Williamson,
which was a big boom in 2019,
in his rookie year, you know, there's...
I heard that there were 1,300 different versions of his rookie card.
That scares me. Again, why I go back to vintage.
But if I'm gonna buy his rookie card,
I'm gonna do a Panini Silver Prizm versus a normal rookie.
So that's kind of...
I like to be smaller in quantities.
I think all the cards are garbage.
I think all the cards are inflated.
They're manipulated prices.
All you guys out there, you auction houses,
"big industry leaders, "
you know you're getting butterflies watching this
'cause you know I'm spitting facts.
You know there's fraud going on, market manipulation going on,
fake sales going on, fake grading going on.
Why am I the only person that wants to speak about it?
One of the reasons I believe the sports card industry has grown so much
over the last five years,
first of all, the economy has been good
when you're just talking about the U. S. ,
but also, we're seeing a trend both locally, I mean, in the U. S.
and globally, where people are looking for alternative investments.
So the card market's not the only thing that has been growing,
but that's what I'm most experienced in.
But people are looking for alternative investments.
And what better alternative investment
than sports cards that you can have fun with, you can experience.
You're not buying a stock that's just out there.
You actually have something you can hold in your hand.
You can enjoy. You can treasure.
You can follow the player on ESPN or wherever you're watching each week.
you can keep up with statistics.
So I think it's the best alternative investment out there.
You also have a lot of people putting in money into infrastructure,
you know, vaulting companies, or grading companies,
or just putting a lot of money into technology.
There's a reason why they're doing it.
I think they're also predicting that this card market's gonna continue to rise
and you're having a lot of art collectors.
A lot of my good friends,
in addition to the athletes and things, but wealthy individuals
that are collecting, you know, Picassos and Warhols,
they're now allocating a piece of their resources to cards.
So, I think the future is bright.
DE COMARMOND: The great thing about the hobby is that
there are so many ways to buy low and sell high.
And at the end of the day, investing is just buying something today
and selling for more in the future.
For me personally, I like singles.
I like looking at players and specific cards
that I can buy now and sell in the future.
But people make great money with sealed wax
and all different types of other investments.
When it comes to any type of investing,
data is everything, and sports cards are no different.
You need to understand how the market is changing.
You need to understand what is going up and down.
And of course, you want to buy during dips
and you want to sell during peak periods.
So when I got back into sports cards,
I naturally saw tons of business ideas,
but I decided to start with my YouTube show, and there were two reasons why.
First of all, I knew that if I could build a successful following
that that would validate my business ideas,
validate that there was a market for them.
And second of all, that would give me a built-in base of people
to market my products and services to.
My name is Geoff Wilson.
By day, I invest in tech companies,
and at night I invest in sports cards.
Join me on my journey to profit from the hobby we all love.
The YouTube show got off to a great start,
so I immediately went forward with building the concept for what is now Market Movers.
And I had a real pain point, and that was the fact that
it was really hard to understand
what the fair price of sports cards should be,
and how prices were changing over time.
There was no good tool on the market
that would give you that information,
and that was the vision for Market Movers.
Hey there, sports card investors,
my name is Tyler Nethercott, better known as Teapot,
and I'm our VP of Product Development here at Sports Card Investor,
and today I'm excited to give you an updated overview
of our sports card analytics tool, Market Movers.
Market Movers is a sports card data and analytics platform
that helps you understand the marketplace,
see the price movements and pricing of different sports cards
and track your entire sports card collection.
And we track tens of thousands of sports cards
and how they are changing in price every day.
So you can call up graphs of cards of your favorite players who you might invest in.
You can also enter your collection
and track how the value of your collection is changing over time.
Initially, when I got back into cards, I really didn't know what I was doing,
so I started buying multiples of individual cards
because if if the price goes up on a card, then you know,
you've 10X-ed because you have 10 times the cards.
Then I realized I'm not a card dealer.
That's not what I do for money,
and it's a very hard way to make money to the scale that I like to make money.
So, if a card goes from 1,000 to 2,000,
I've got to sell 100 cards to make 100 grand.
So I...
realized that and then pivoted and started going for the bigger price points
that make more of a difference in my life.
Most of my art, street art... Most of my art is actually done by Japanese artists.
Those are the things...
I'm Japanese, so Japanese art and street speak to me a certain way.
Those are like the...
My big inspiration.
Even what I wear, like wearing an Akira shirt, you know.
Like, I love... I love Japanese culture, those kinds of things.
When I follow the sports, I follow Japanese sportsmen,
Ichiro and Shohei Ohtani.
Like, those... those guys, Rui Hachimura.
You know, like, these guys, like, they might not be...
Some of them might not be necessarily
big breakouts, but it's like what speaks to me.
When investing the position of a player, it does make a difference.
In football, for example, quarterbacks
are always the ones that people chase the most in the hobby.
Although, in recent years, running backs and wide receivers,
they've gotten more attention.
As new people have come into the hobby,
they've started buying their cards as well.
But quarterbacks are still the ones
that are most likely to go up over time.
Josh Jacobs, for example, the up-and-coming running back,
his cards went up 600% during the off-season before the 2020 season.
[SIGHS SOFTLY]
I never could imagine my cards
being that high, like, even being that valuable, honestly.
Um, like I said, my dream was always to get to the league,
and I didn't really think about all the other things that came with it.
So, just to see that it's valued that high,
I mean, seeing that my hard work is paying off somewhat is huge.
INTERVIEWER: Could you see your card being worth as much
-as Barry Sanders or Walter Payton in the future? -[LAUGHS]
Man, I don't know. Them are some legendary guys.
They're... They are so different.
Um, just to be mentioned with them guys will definitely be an honor.
GEOFF: In 2016, the sports card world was rocked
when a Honus Wagner card sold for just over $3 million
and that was a huge record at that time.
But now, just in the last couple of years, we've had modern players,
like, Mike Trout sold for 3.9 million,
Luka Doncic, sold for 4.6 million.
And then, of course, we had the Mickey Mantle that sold for 5.2 million.
I knew Mike Trout was the best player.
Everyone told me, "You're never going to get it. "
"You're never going to get Mike Trout. " Those are personal collections.
But guess what? Money talks.
So, what I did, is find out who had the cards
and offered them double, offered them triple.
So, they had to sell it to me. So, when cards were going for like 30, 40k,
I'd fly to the airport,
pay him $100,000 cash and everyone would talk [BLEEP] about me
on the card forums like, "This guy just has money. He's laundering money. "
But I had a vision that if I could monopolize the market
and collect all the oranges out of 25 and the reds out of five,
then I could do something special.
So, I overpaid everybody where they thought they were getting the deal.
And then, what, two years later, all these cards, ten, fifteen times.
I just went all in with two people, Mike Trout and Derek Carr.
But with the Trout, you know, I got the superfractor for $400,000.
It popped up on eBay one day, so I messaged the guy in Taiwan
and I said, "What do you want for it?" He goes, "To be honest,
"I'm not going to take less than $400,000. "
So, instead of nickling and diming for like $350,000, $300,000.
I said, "You know what? I'll buy it now. $400,000. "
Then he Googled me and he's like, "Oh, my God, you might be a scam.
"All these people are messaging me. " And I said, "Listen, man,
"what's your PayPal? I'm going to send you 1,000 bucks right now.
"You can keep it and screw me over.
"This is how much I'm into this and I'll buy you and your interpreter
"a first class ticket for tomorrow to come from Taiwan. "
Everyone said I was crazy,
stupid, I'm a joke, I'm a loser.
I could have bought a house.
Two years later, I executed my vision,
flipped it for the most expensive card at the time, beat the Honus Wagner record.
And that's how I got into Trout cards,
and I really believe if I did not take that chance,
of the Mike Trout, the industry would've never blown up.
It's because of me, the hobby went to a big business.
This dude just took a card for $400,000,
flipped it for four million within two years.
That's when the card market got huge.
So, for all the hate I take,
people should thank me because if I didn't have the balls and vision,
the market wouldn't be where it's at right now and that's 100% facts.
Vegas Dave likes to anoint himself
as some sort of sports card investing experts
because he bought a Mike Trout card for $400,000
and sold it a couple of years later for 3.9 million.
And, yeah, those are big numbers. Congratulations.
But that's less than a 10x return.
In just over a year, LeBron James cards went up 19x,
Michael Jordan's cards went up 23x,
and Kobe Bryant's cards, they went up 50x.
So, Vegas Dave, you would have been better off investing in one of those guys.
So, when I was in the process of finding the Mickey Mantle card,
I was going to different dealers.
Every dealer I could find, every auction house I could find,
every private dealer,
and one of them, you know, I'm reaching out to them on a daily basis,
"Hey, what do you have? What have you heard?
"Who's selling, who's willing to sell?"
And I'm looking for multimillion dollar cards.
And, obviously, I want the Mickey Mantle because it's the most iconic to me
and because I've already purchased the four, the five,
the six, the eight, and I wanted the nine and the ten.
So, finally, um, PWCC,
they said, "Hey, we've actually found one in our vault.
"One of the customers has one. "
One of the beauties of the vault here at PWCC is, you know,
we have access to inventory that nobody else has access to.
I can log on online and I can take a look at everything that we have in the vault.
So, you know, a lot of these private sales happen
out of buyers reaching out to us telling us they're looking for a specific card.
And then we go, take a look in our vault.
Now that card might not be publicly available for sale,
but I'm able to reach out to the owner of that card, see if there's any interest.
And that's actually how the Mantle that we sold in January 2021
for 5.2 million, that's how that all transpired.
The buyer contacted me and was looking for the specific card.
We had it in the vault.
ROB: And, so, we reached out and the guy,
you know, was possibly up for it, with the right price.
So, in two years before this... I'd say January, 2021,
two years before, he bought it for $2.88 million.
And he wanted, you know, let's say six million.
I'm not quite sure... the price, and I start a lot lower.
And then we settled on the 5.2 million bucks.
And that was, you know, so exciting because, one, you found the card,
you found the Mickey Mantle, the holy grail and the nine
and it's the best nine out of all the nines.
And then you've negotiated a deal to where
less than 2x what it was last paid for two years ago.
And if you look at the same time period, other cards, other iconic cards in the hobby
have 10x, 20x, 30x...
So, for me to find the most iconic card, um,
and to only get it for a 2x was, in my eyes, an absolute steal.
The most important thing I think people need to understand is,
do you actually love the card culture?
That's the most important question you ask yourself.
If you don't, then it doesn't matter if it goes up or down.
Just don't get involved. Get into something you like.
-MAN: Oh, dude... -Oh, my God.
Can you believe it, I have the holy grail right now? This is like...
I'll never forget this, man. This is [BLEEP] crazy. I'm sorry!
You collect because you love it.
And, of course, you sell when the market's hot, you know, that's great.
Markets will dip, just ride it out.
In 2018, I predicted the card market would boom
before anybody else did.
I showed the card that I bought for $400,000,
and I said this will break the Honus Wagner record. And it did.
I was the first person to tell the world
the market was going to boom in the sports card industry.
And then in February, this year, 2021,
I was the first person to predict the market will collapse and it will.
And I even posted a video on YouTube about a million views,
and I burned a Michael Jordan sticker rookie that was worth
"a quarter million dollars" at the time and I lit it on fire to prove a point.
-It's ringing. - All right.
Yeah, they're just shooting me right now.
They're going to... they said they're going to your place next.
Oh, [BLEEP]
This is for you, which you wanted.
But I got a burn one more corner before I give it to you.
Just to keep it fresh, huh?
Yup. I gave you my word this is yours.
So, they're going to bring it over to your place next.
Got a special delivery from Vegas Dave.
Ooh! [CHUCKLES] Oh, this hurts my heart.
But at the same time, like, this is history right here.
Everyone saw this card and had an emotional reaction to it.
And that's why it's so special.
It's more special than holding a pristine Michael Jordan.
Wow.
I'm going to cherish this thing.
Well, first, I'm going to have Vegas Dave sign it for me,
and I'm going to grade it.
You know how I am about grading. I need to have it graded.
I wonder what PSA is going to say when I bring this in.
This is Vegas Dave's rookie card.
My 101 superfractor.
STEVE: This is special, really is.
It could be an auto ten
with a card grade of...
I mean, can you get below one? 0.5?
Once it's in the slab, this will be a piece of history,
you know, which talks about all the opinions
of where the sports card industry is going, where it's not going.
Is it going to go up? Is it going to crash?
This is a very volatile time.
2021, for all the varying opinions of sports cards,
this is one of the loudest right here.
I gotta speak what's on my mind.
The market was all manipulated.
Why would I light a card on fire that's worth a quarter million dollars?
To prove a point that it's worthless, it's worth trash.
It's the truth.
When I held that card up, I said this will break the record.
They all laughed at me.
And now they all laughed at me when I said it was going to crash.
But every day, everyone messages me, "You were right. "
"You're right, it went down by 30%. You're right. You're right. "
I know I'm right. I don't need people to tell me that.
I think you're going to also have some rise in the industry and rising prices
because you have so much money coming in
not only from individuals, but funds.
There's so many funds being created.
And as those funds start infusing cash into the market again,
you've got more and more money coming in,
decreasing supply and big demand.
So, I think the funds are important.
I think they're jumping in, which should kind of give you
a little bit of a look into the future that the prices will continue to rise.
GEOFF: There's been a lot of recent innovation in the sports card world
around the idea of making it easier
for people to come in and invest in sports cards.
One of those innovations has been fractional ownership.
That's where groups will buy large dollar cards, really, really high-end cards,
but then, sell little fractions,
shares of that card to a wide audience
so people can buy into a really expensive card on a really small budget.
You've got people lending money on your collection,
which I think is a big opportunity
'cause now it allows people bigger buying power.
I mean, you can borrow money on your house, you can borrow money on your assets,
but you haven't been able to borrow money on cards.
So, I think that's a big opportunity.
and a great way for people to have more buying power.
But, you know, you've got AI coming in as far as helping,
you know, PSA grade or AI grading companies.
You just have so much technology,
so much money that's coming out of the hobby,
that it's... um, I think it'll only help it grow.
There are some really interesting companies
in the fractional ownership space.
My favorite is a company called Dibbs
because they're attempting to create
a real-time stock markets, for cards,
by using fractional ownership, so you can buy and sell
little shares of really high-end expensive cards.
But you can do it in real-time, just like a stock market type of experience.
It's unheard of. Ten years ago, you could never buy shares of a baseball card.
It's absolutely absurd and ridiculous.
All these people from Wall Street,
once they saw my card sell for $4 million,
their money motivated, so they got into the card industry.
So, now what did they do? They brought the mentality
of the stock market and Wall Street to the card industry.
So, someone will buy a card.
Let's say they'll buy a Michael Jordan rookie for $100,000
and they'll sell 20 shares to the public
at 20,000 apiece.
So, all these people that could never afford a card,
can own a piece of history.
They collect all this money, raise capital,
over-inflate the price, sell at an auction house,
have their friend buy it and boom,
the card goes up by 200% to 300%.
They get... The people get paid back, their investments back,
and they do it over and over again until one day they pull the plug
and the whole market collapses like a domino effect.
So, these are all artificially inflated prices because you're getting one card,
and you're selling shares of it,
ten, twenty, thirty people chipping in money to buy the card.
They over-inflate the price. You can't sell shares of a card.
It's absolutely ridiculous and that's why you can see all these cards
go up to $800,000, $900,000 that were $50,000 for years and years and years straight.
So, just like the stock market, it's going to collapse one day
and when it collapses, it's going to collapse really, really big.
I think we all have
some of that in us that want to own something
that is important to us rather than just have a picture of it.
That's why, beyond the cards,
you know, I'm a collector of NFTs.
Beyond the NFT, what's behind the NFT?
It's the rarity. And it's the fact that it's...
it's authenticated, that it has a contract
that the market has dictated.
And that's the same thing with the card.
That's like the same way you explain
to someone that doesn't understand sports cards, why it's valuable.
Because the market has dictated its value.
MAN 1: Initially, to launch our NFTs and our blockchain platform,
we were offering a physical card that would come with the digital card,
and we did this because we wanted our card junkies to come in
and figure out what the blockchain is
and buy blockchain products to get hold of that... that card product.
As digital cards have become more valuable and more in demand,
we're now looking at doing just digital cards and selling them on their own.
JASON: We spent, you know, the last two or three years
thinking about how we incorporate blockchain into the trading card space,
and we were the first manufacturer
to introduce blockchain trading cards.
When we launched blockchain in January of 2020,
we tied it to a physical card, so that, you know,
the collector could understand the value of what a physical card was
and then knowing that they had that non-fungible token
that was tied to blockchain as a digital asset to accompany that card,
really kind of created another level of value within the space.
Even though they didn't know what blockchain meant at the time.
Now, 15 months later, in 2021, March of 2021,
everyone knows what an NFT is or a non-fungible token that lives on the blockchain,
and we've been there for the last 16 months.
Now, back in the 1980s, we saw a huge boom in sports card popularity,
similar to what we're seeing today.
But then that was followed by a total crash in the 1990s
and there are people out there that are worried that
we might be facing that same crash again today.
RICH LAYTON: Everybody gets nervous of that. When their 20-dollar cards
became five-dollar cards in the '90s,
or even a dollar cards for that matter,
and their $100-boxes became $50-boxes.
Um, I think there's new measures in place that will prevent a lot of that from happening.
WARSOP: The reason for the crash in the past
was because people thought cards were rare,
when actually they were mass-produced.
That's no longer the case.
In recent years, in modern day trading cards,
you know exactly what it is you're buying,
how many of that card is on the market.
And that numbering system hasn't changed over the last three or four years.
So, the values will always remain there.
The only thing that can impact the card values
are whether a player performs on the court or not.
Since 2015, um,
every year we said there's no way it can get bigger.
There's no way it can get better than what it was,
and it's exceeded and exceeded and exceeded.
We're here in 2021,
um, and I don't think it's anywhere close to being done.
With the new people coming into the industry,
with more and more money being invested back into this,
with the international growth of this market,
there's not a crash coming soon.
The market is healthy, the market is early on, um,
and we're expecting big things coming up.
I've heard a lot of different varying opinions on a market crash coming.
I do not believe there is any type of crash coming.
Will there be a stabilization? There has to be.
Base cards are very over-inundated and submitted,
and once the larger companies are able to get them back,
I think we'll see a correction of the base cards and silvers that are,
you know, mass produced.
I don't think your numbered cards are ever going to go anywhere.
I think they're going to continue to hold their value.
Crash? I'm not... I don't like that word, it just doesn't...
I don't like that word
because... things go up and down. That is life.
Things go up. And, of course, it goes down.
And then, guess what? It goes back up and then it goes down.
I mean, I'm not in it like a stock.
So, if it goes down, I'm still in it.
I'm not like, "Okay, I'm done, I'm out, I'm already in. "
In 2021, people were talking about an impending sports card crash.
But the hobby was still untapped internationally.
What happens when every continent joins the party?
We're just getting started!
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