someone explain the new card market?
Kid has 10 ABs in the bigs. This card isn't even rare, there are 150 of them. And it's a 9 not a 10.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/2016-BOWMAN...p2047675.l2557 |
My guess is that prospectors are trying to hit on the next 1952 Mantle now. If they're right, that's a good investment. But my best guess is that 99.9% of all these limited, numbered, superfractored, etc. cards are going to be worth far less than what people are paying today. Sort of like my 1986 Donruss Jose Canseco.
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It's a lottery, nothing more, nothing less.
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It's not really a lottery though. Juan Soto has only experienced success at any level he's played at, so it's not like you're investing that in a guy who just got drafted. He's hot right now though so it's definitely not the time to buy but if you bought the corresponding Trout card for that price at the time I'm pretty sure you'd see a decent return.
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Well, I have to say this about him.....he's the first player in a looooong time, where you can actually read his autograph!
Steve |
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A few years back I bought a rookie of a kid named Cody Bellenger. I got his elite rookie for 3 bucks I sold it last year for 275 dollars. I felt like I won the lotto. |
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I'm hoping that's the case because I really don't like that Bowman card. In reality I really don't like most Bowman cards. I'm guessing that the Topps Heritage will be Soto's nicest rookie and that's the one I'll wait for. Those sets are always my favorite.
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Topps has really stepped it up lately in my opinion. I used to think their cards were bland like I do the Bowman sets but this new 2018 product was really cool. I bought the Andujar. I loved it:
https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1723/...0367ddd8d0.jpg |
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I liked what I seen and even though I don't normally purchase "modern" I thought, for the very affordable price, I'd purchase one of his cards for the heck of it. I haven't followed him at all this year but I think long term, he is going to be a great player? |
Anyone can turn into a pumpkin tomorrow. Even guys that have had success at the major league level. A bad injury can kill the career of someone that otherwise had multiple All-Star seasons. If all you care about is flipping a card I can't imagine you have much fun in the hobby. But I think for a lot of people getting in early on a player who has shown serious potential also brings fanfare. Just about everyone under 35 plays fantasy baseball and are used to rooting for players not on their favorite team because of it. It's an entirely different landscape than all the previous generations. So if someone hits a big Ozzie Albies rookie and becomes a fan of his I think that's cool in my book. As long as you're having fun and collecting within your means I say go for it.
Arthur |
I posted this in the Topps Now thread but I'm also going in hard on Gleyber. Maybe it's the hype but I see him as bigger than Jeter when all is said and done and I liked this card way more than his Bowman. I've got no interest in him being in a Cubs uniform:
https://farm1.staticflickr.com/953/2...ed1d02ba5c.jpg |
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Yuck that card is horrible. The one I bought is so much nicer.
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From what I've seen the modern card market is all about gambling for a lot of collectors. Buying expensive cards hoping that a players performance will exceed the hype. And breaking boxes or cases hoping for the big pull. A few guys I know break cases right when they come out and immediately post most, if not all of the big cards on Ebay.
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True but there are diamonds in the rough. Mookie Betts is a good example. He was pretty unheard of before he broke out as a rookie. The highest he was ranked on any Top 100 list was 62 and only once.
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I used to follow Baseball America. Everyone sounds like a superstar. But very little of it means sh*t until we see if the guy can hit a major league curve ball, or if a pitcher can keep his control and composure under major league pressure.
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Just look at the prices for Guerrero Jr to see how crazy things have gotten. He is in double A and the base auto is over 1k
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There is a video from 2010 on YouTube of a card shop owner opening a box of 2009 Bowman Chrome Draft for a customer. The guy pulls an orange Mike Trout auto card numbered to 25, I think. He says "I can't remember if this dude is good." Ha! If you read the video's comments, the customer sold the card for $450 and was thrilled about it. Fast-forward to now... The last one on ebay sold for a Best Offer (so you can't see the exact price) but it was over $55,000.
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I don't understand why these Bowman minor league cards are so expensive when the 80s and 90s minor league cards, also sometimes issued years before the ML rookie cards, sell for next to nothing.
Example, you could probably pick up a Mint 1986 Palm Beach Randy Johnson, a top 10 or so all time pitcher, three years before his RCs, for under $100. And the pops are nothing compared to the Bowmans I would imagine. |
It really is crazy. The prospect first bowman cards go for insane prices and then it starts all over again five years later when their first RCs come out.
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I didn't think I had ever seen a Sandberg PSA Reading Phillies card sell for under $300 (at least not since I started following the card). When I looked at PSA's auction results listings, the cheapest Sandberg Reading Phillies card listed sold for $300. |
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I remember reading, from a member here, who posted up what he sold a 1 of 1 Nathan MacKinnon card for a fews years back and posted what it was currently selling for. That, in itself, was enough for me to steer clear! :eek: He sold it for $4500 U.S. and the current owner had it on E-Bay and the highest bid he received was $400. That was quite the loss if there was no reserve on it? Nathan Mackinnon had a great year this year so I assume most of his cards rebounded some but checking out the current lists on E-Bay, there are literally 100's and 100's of his cards! https://www.beckett.com/news/nathan-...ey-collectors/ I guess to play this game, one needs a lot of expendable money. |
If you guys keep trying to relate different era of cards to each other you’ll never understand it. It’s a different beast, it’s more like a very volatile stock. It has nothing to do with the old performing stocks. It’s all about the here and now.
Like I said last year I sold a Cody Bellinger for 275 after buying it for 3 dollars. Now that sell for half the price. It might never see that price again.if he has a chance any good year it might get close. |
I do pick up some low end rookies to speculate...went with Judge and Thames last year. Did great on Judge, should have known better with Thames...he's too old, but I saw him in spring training and his arms look like engine blocks.
There are a lot of promising rookies over the last two years, but take if from a guy who owns an 800 lot of Tommy Gregg, it doesn't always work out. |
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SP Authentic has the same weight in hockey. There will always be a premium for these sets. When Bowman Chrome came out in '97, Jose Cruz, Jr. was the biggest name in baseball prospecting. Did he pan out, not really-but people went absolutely crazy to see Chrome and Refractor versions of his cards. It never slowed down! |
The Bowman cards generally go for the most money because of their "First Card" status. Usually the Bowman Chrome or Bowman Draft set is the first appearance any player has in a card set as a "professional" which is why other minor league and Team USA cards are way cheaper even if they technically came out first. You can have Bryce Harper's Team USA autos for a significant discount over his Bowman rookie even though the USA cards were issued much earlier. Same goes for Kershaw, Scherzer, etc.
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Soto is an apparent stud. So was Joe Charboneau for that matter ….
The modern card market is fast and furious. People made a boatload on Judge last year, and this year Torres could be the new guy. Unless Soto gets three hits in one game …. then the price skyrockets lol Want to make extra money on a Trout you are looking to sell? List it after a home run! |
When I was a kid in 1985 Dwight Gooden rookies jumped up to $15 or so. There were millions of copies from the three card manufactures and they still brought 30 times what a pack cost.
Fast forward to today and the production totals are a fraction and while the demand is not as high for the product you get similar explosive results that are just wildly exaggerated per card because of scarcity. If you look at this from a purely financial perspective let's say you have 1 million copies of the 1985 Topps Dwight Gooden mentioned above. It has a market cap of $15 million. From a quick EBAY search it looks like there are roughly 1,000 Mike Trout Bowman Refractor's from the various copies in total. Lets assume a $15,000 average price. You once again have a $15 million dollar market cap. |
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The Update could easily go the way of the 89 UD Griffey, but I think this could very well be a $500 card in PSA 10 and perhaps even settle at that level. For the record, if it hits 500 I'm a seller lol! |
There are really only a few products that carry any value though: Bowman, Topps Heritage, Topps Pro Debut and Topps regular series cards. The Finest and Sterling, Panini, Donruss, etc. don't hold a ton of value. But Trout's Elite Extra cards do sell for a pretty decent price too.
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In 1986 the Donruss Jose Canseco hit $100. Unheard of at the time for a pack pulled rookie. Donruss may have had a lower print run than Topps but there was plenty to go around. The card market has evolved during this time frame and with higher values paid for cards so some of it is simply buyers willing to part with larger sums to own cards. That said if you reduce the overall supply by 99.999999% like they have today for the best copies you get exponential increases in price. It isn't really that hard to understand. I agree personally that the speculation element can be a challenge to understand but once again with the supply being reduced so dramatically it doesn't really take that much interest to push prices up. If you follow the stock market you will see a small amount of volume move thinly traded stocks quite easily. This is why you get parabolic moves in modern cards all of the time. People like to speculate and they always have and with the internet making commerce so easy it just adds fuel to the fire. I have no interest but can understand why some do. The example earlier of buying a $3 card and selling it for $275 is like crack. Very easy to get addicted too. I went to high school with a guy that plays the modern game and it does produce winning results for many so I say if you have a high risk tolerance go for it.
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Baseball players are so hit or miss (literally) even among the elite prospects that I would be very surprised if people can successfully speculate over a long period of time. Sure, you can hit it real big if you pick the right guy early enough, or get lucky on timing (buy a guy before he goes on a tear and his cards double). But over time, I am skeptical. This is by far the most difficult sport to predict success, just look at how many top Baseball America prospects never pan out.
My own thought is that the best recipe for success would be to wait a couple of years to form a reasoned judgment that someone who has been solid but not spectacular has the tools to become a superstar. Although the cards of these players surely have moved up, there is probably still a fair amount of upside, and perhaps less downside given that they have demonstrated they can play at the major league level. For example, a guy like Jose Ramirez. But that said, I am not about to invest a lot of money in Jose any more than I am going to buy up Vlad Jr. or Juan Soto. |
It is impossible for every person who speculates on cards from any era to all win. I think your point is well taken and this guy is a baseball fanatic so his chances are immensely better than the person just playing momentum. He does research and really attempts to understand the players fundamentals on the field and lets that drive his speculative activity. Just like stocks you have to sell. So this means you will miss out on some monster gains and you must get comfortable with that. This is a major headwind for the participants chances of success as outliers can make it appear that ones ability to consistently be right is much better than it really is so if you get an outlier on the way down you can be toast. For the most part every hot card is better to be sold into the hype and fast thin markets push a few sales much further than can be sustained in a short window of time and in many cases permanently so most of the time you should take the money. Some of the moves have been simply incredible. Jeremy Lin was an obvious sell! Probably a ton of others could be named.
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Peter just for the record I have no valid opinion on the long term for Trout cards or Curry or whomever that is a current player. I just understand the reason the prices are so distorted compared to vintage or more sure fire items and it is simply because of on purpose scarcity to try and lead to this outcome.
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2007 1.Daisuke Matsuzaka 2.Alex Gordon 3.Delmon Young 4.Phil Hughes 5.Homer Bailey 6.Cameron Maybin 7.Evan Longoria 8.Brandon Wood 9.Justin Upton 10.Andrew Miller 2008 1.Jay Bruce 2.Evan Longoria 3.Joba Chamberlain 4.Clay Buchholz 5.Colby Rasmus 6.Cameron Maybin 7.Clayton Kershaw 8.Franklin Morales 9.Homer Bailey 10.David Price 2009 1.Matt Wieters 2.David Price 3.Colby Rasmus 4.Tommy Hanson 5.Jason Heyward 6.Travis Snider 7.Brett Anderson 8.Cameron Maybin 9.Madison Bumgarner 10.Neftali Feliz |
One thing to remember is that plenty flame out but there is massive upside volatility where someone wins and someone loses.
Short term gyrations in tradable assets create opportunity. Plenty of that here. |
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I think you are right. That said not all strategies carry the same risk. When I have had good runs in trading options it was actually lots of singles and doubles that produced the results not home runs. When I have gotten killed it was going for home runs. I am sure this applies to modern day baseball card traders. I call them traders because that is what they are. People like you and I work on collections. Entirely different mindset.
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Sure, people do get very lucky, but it's only with hindsight that it looks like an obvious move. For example, as a Sox fan, I had a hunch Mookie was due to have a breakout year. And of course had I bought a ton of his cards at the beginning of the year I'd have made a big profit as his best cards have really climbed. But ex ante, was it a good risk? I easily could have felt the same way about Carlos Correa, who is mired in a massive slump. |
When I first got back into collecting around 2010, it was the modern card speculating that drew me in. You're right Peter, for every Trout (obviously) but even guys like Arenado that I "hit" on, there were at least ten guys like Rasmus and Snider that were big misses. Then I got into pre-war and vintage in 2013 and sold a lot of my modern. While I did make out very good on my "hits", my profits were limited due to the amount of misses. I still did ok though due to hitting more often with football.
Now, I just do a little prospecting for fun. I'll pick a few guys each year and not top-100 prospect guys. I do spend some time researching and I only buy hitters as pitchers are just way too risky and injury prone. I'll buy the lowest #'d chrome auto I can get for under $20 which is normally a /250 or /150. Then I just throw them in a box and see what happens in 5 years. I just checked on a guy I bought a couple years ago named Hudson Potts (although his last name was Sanchez when he was drafted). Apparently he hit 20 dingers last year in A ball with a ton of K's though and is doing well in high-A now and striking out less. I think I got his chrome auto #'d/150 for like $15 and it's selling for 4 to 5 times that right now. I should probably cash out, but I'll roll the dice and see how he turns out. Like I said, it's just for fun. |
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For Trout they're valuable but any rookie auto is going to sell for him. Harper's Sterling and Platinum cards sell for less than his Draft auto. His Heritage auto outsells them all I think.
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You have a retirement investor mindset in a day trader world. So do I, which is why I couldn't play this game. :) Even a few months in a season is a relatively long time for these traders. It's not so much that those successful in this know much more than others, it's just that when there is movement, they move (more) quickly (than others). |
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