A few options
 

1) As previously mentioned - whatever the card you choose - be picky about the "right example" - be willing to pay a premium over grade for a card with strong eye appeal and unusual qualities for the grade - especially centering.

That said, I dont know what the 15K gets you in terms of grades of these cards off the top of my head, but these are the cards I would respond to your question with:

1921 Ruth Exhibit
1933 Ruth #144
1952 Willie Mays
1953 Willie Mays
1951 Bowman Mantle
1952 Bowman Mantle
1953 Topps Mantle
1952 Topps Jackie Robinson
T206 Green Cobb
T205 Cobb

Let’s hope you’re right!

I’d recommend buying the best early playing years Ruth caramel you can 1921/1922 or his 21 Exhibit. Myself I’d personally purchase the best early career Ruth or 33 Goudey I could for my PC.

Ruth. Preferably something from early 1920’s, and not a premium

Wagner portrait - D322 tip top, e103, e90-2, M116 (preferably blue)

Cobb- e102/101 pose is reasonable and I like D304. Although red and green t206 is most liquid

1933 Goudey Babe Ruth - Ruth is the greatest player of all time, 1933 Goudey is one of the big 3 sets in the hobby.

T206 Ty Cobb - T206 is the greatest set in the hobby, Wagner is way past 25k, so Cobb is the choice.

This gives you 8 cards to chase. The batting Ruth or green Cobb are ideal, but look for the best eye appeal and value for your 15k card. These cards offer the perfect combination of rarity and demand.

This. I would favor Ruth, but either way hard to go wrong here.

Another contrarian view
 

Here’s another hot take that I don’t think has been expressed yet, although Peter will correct me if I’m wrong:

If I were looking to INVEST in cardboard, I’m not sure that I would do it now.

If I wanted to buy for my own collection and enjoyment, then all day every day, to the extent that my budget allows. But the OP here seems focused on investment first and foremost.

To my mind, the runup in prices over the last two years has just been breathtaking, often as much as 500% or more, depending on the issue and the player. If I were investing right now, it’s hard to imagine that I’m not buying at or near the top if I’m investing today, particularly if I’m investing in vintage.

Now, I’m sure that the majority of the forum will heap scorn on this idea, and I fully respect that and expect nothing less than to be roundly condemned for my craven approach.

But for my money, if I’m investing strictly for a return, now is not the time that I would invest in cardboard.

People who try to time the market more often than not, if not usually, get it wrong. From DJIA 8000 to DJIA 20,000 I bet I got three emails a week telling me we were at a top and about to crash. In my humble opinion the time to invest, if you are so inclined, is when you have the funds. Don’t try to time. The vast majority of crystal balls don’t work.

1921 Exhibit Ruths are great cards and are a good investment as all of them are however I believe that card as many others have seen such rapid growth in a short time that you maybe able to find others with more upside.

However as a potential real long term investor as you mentioned that maybe a non factor in any that you chose

If you are looking for shorter term I would consider the 1925-1929 Exhibit Ruth Postcards. they are underappreciated in my opinion and have more upside potential.

However I do not believe you can go wrong with any thing that is mentioned in the thread especially over the long term.

Perhaps the only thing to try and avoid cards that are to obscure even from the big Names because sometimes if it is to obscure and does not sell often(in years) the potential buyers do not know what the true worth might be and it also shrinks the number of people that might want to buy it

So what you are saying is that I have a collection of cards to avoid? LOL

F272- Unc...

The big takeaway from all this jolly, carefree banter is...if I had (someone gave me) $15,000 I wouldn't spend it on baseball cards, or anything hobby related. I would probably remodel my kitchen. If you're rolling in money, while the rest of us real people try to get by, then go ahead, buy that Ruth or Cobb.

For me, it is Ruth, Ruth and Ruth. I'd add an Exhibit Ruth(s) that I don't have. It's pretty hard to go wrong over the long haul with Babe Ruth. I mean, he's Babe Ruth.

Second choice would be Jackie Robinson, probably either a 1949 Bowman or a 1952 Topps, or both if I could swing it. I'd probably lean towards upgrading my 52; it's a bit ratty.

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...20Robinson.jpg

But still one of my favorite cards.

Again, it's pretty hard to go wrong with Jackie Robinson.

Most players pass through baseball history, but Ruth and Robinson are baseball history.

A Babe Ruth Exhibit, the earlier the better.

And all of the people who bought bitcoin at $67k thinking it would go straight to $1M wish they had waited instead and bought today at $19k.

We all have our opinions about the current market for cardboard and where it’s going over the next few years. If there was any doubt about my opinion, now you know it. And naturally, others will disagree, as is their God-given right.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/eugene-...me-the-market/

https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/...he-nobel-prize

Almost every time I bought a (for me) significant card, people I know and talk to regularly told me to wait until the price dropped because it had gone up so much recently. That would have worked out real well.

In the face of withering and indisputable evidence, please consider my earlier comments to be withdrawn. Go nuts and buy everything you can while you still can. Cardboard only goes up!

Now you're talking my friend. :cool: To the moon, Alice. And meanwhile, you wait patiently because the crash is surely coming and you surely can time it perfectly. :)

To infinity and beyond!!

In all seriousness, I’m not buying cardboard strictly to invest. If I happen to make some money, then all the better, but my personal enjoyment and the fun of collecting is as important if not more so than any return on my investment. Disclaimer: this statement is not intended to preclude my ability to assert my status as an investor for tax purposes…

And when cardboard prices are incredibly high, then I have other priorities in my life that bring me joy that I can allocate resources to. For the last 24 months, I’ve been focused on other priorities, while continuing to add to my cardboard collection at the margins, for pieces that I’m feeling I can get at a price that works for me.

And if prices only go up from here, that’s cool too. I’m happy to sit on my collection and just let it ride, without adding to it. Heck, if it goes up another 500%, maybe I’ll even sell, just to put my money where my mouth is.

And another Buffett quote, since he’s the man:

“Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.”

To my mind, it’s less about timing for jumping in and out of the cardboard market, and more about relative resource allocation. Allocate more when the market is down, and less when the market is triple the all-time high.

I don't look at any card purchase as a true investor would, but at the same time, with lots of exceptions admittedly, I try to buy cards I think are good long term value. So at this point for example I probably wouldn't buy anything but a rookie card of most players other than the very top of each sport. Post war that is, prewar I don't think the RC thing is that meaningful.

This comment clearly has undertones of much more going on. Real people? Rolling in money?

I make no apologies for having some $ that I would like to spend on baseball cards and that my kitchen satisfies my wife, as that certainly doesn't make me less of a real person, lol

T206 Cobb bat off/red
48 Leaf Jackie
51 Bowman Mays

pick two, highest grade/eye appeal you can find.

Thank you for the wonderful feedback on this thread. What's it's helped me to do is actually consider a wider range of cards that I may have not considered. In addition, given me jump off point to study and learn more about some of these items (as my knowledge and experience in prewar and early vintage is still limited).

A year ago, if someone asked me that question, I would have probably said "easy, go grab an early Mantle or Mays", which isn't a terrible answer, but short sighted and limited in scope.

After much banter and discussion, I've begun to put pen to paper and make a list (albeit long) of players and cards/sets that I love and want. These include the obvious suspects.

I lean towards Babe and Cobb in early cards such as exhibit, t206, caramel, sporting news, etc. While I understand the draw of Goudey and early Topps/Bowman, I believe I would enjoy owning something a bit older and a bit more scarce/harder to find.

Really appreciate all the great insight, advice and banter.

This seems to be a recurring theme. I do like me a good-looking early Babe Exhibit. ;)

Now that we've heard everyone's opinion on player/card/set, the real question is "at what price point", which has been bantered about earlier in the thread.

Personally, I (in my limited knowledge) see some value/upside in:

25-29 Exhibit Babe Ruth
1949 Bowman Jackie Robinson
1951 Bowman Willie Mays

Myself, I am eager to learn more about some early 20's items that some may feel haven't run up in price compared to others.

Is there such a thing as undervalued early 20th century items?

Timing the market, in the sense of absolute peaks and highs, is a fools errand.

However, it is usually very easy to see when things are on the higher end, or the lower end. If everything has doubled recently, it's usually not the best buying time. When everything has been falling for awhile, it's usually a good buying time.

When the government shifts signaled that there was going to be an economic boom in 2016, I bought quick and then held. When government shifts later signaled that they were going to kill the economy, I stopped buying. A few more months and it will be time to start looking at more buying as things have fallen significantly this year. Will I buy at the bottom? Almost certainly no, but I will be ensuring I am buying at a low point in the market and not a high one.

It's pretty similar for cards. Just like when stocks 'go bad', some actually do well and make big gains if you picked the right ones, but the majority tend to follow the same basic rules. You can't time perfectly, but you can generally ID the better buying times.

Everyone thinks his favorite cards are undervalued. I would stay away from that whole subject, honestly. You're not going to get any consistent answers asking a few random people participating in a thread.

The research I have seen suggests that over the long haul, you can't really even time approximately and beat the market. Look at all the countless professionals out there trying to do it. Over a long period of time, most of them do not beat the indices. Unless they have insider information.

Another word of advice....when everyone is saying the same items are guaranteed to go up....they already have, and smart money is getting out.

For decades low-mid grade t206s and 33 goudeys littered auction houses. They were likely the most collect and printed cards of the prewar era. Couple that with people saving everything of the superstars of the day, newpapers, photos, etc and you have a big supply. Demand is always the other side of the coin, but the supply side is only curtailed when people want to hang onto their items.

Giving investment advice is so difficult, because it is unique to your situation. If you are 50 years old with two kids in college with hefty 529s to pay for it, live in a house that is paid off, have $200K in your checking account and $4 million in the market, then $15-25K in sportscards as an "investment" can be fun and arguably sensible. If you are 30 with two kids under 10, have $40K in the bank and $50K in your 401K/IRA and are saving $500/mo after expenses, then a $15-25K investment in sportscards can be a different story.

If you have $4 million in the market, are you in your lifetime going to even notice the extra $25K deposit you make today vs opening that box, digging through the packing peanuts, removing the bubble wrap, separating the cardboard to reveal a nice 52 Topps Jackie or a 33 Goudey Ruth (especially if this card becomes the crown jewel of your collection)? I think there is a psychological dividend to holding a grail card when you already have enough in traditional investments. And when you see your portfolio swing $25-50K a day, it sure is nice to go back and look at that grail card and see it is still the same.

You absolutely can, and it is not hard. Most don't, because most people are putting money in when things look all sunny and happy because they follow the narrative of the moment. Many people then panic at the next downturn, and sell.

It takes about 30 seconds to determine if the market is generally high or generally low. We know in real time if things are generally speaking good or bad in the stock market. We know it's low right now. If you buy a diversity of blue chips and/or into properly managed index funds (which are not difficult to identify, less than 20 minutes of research) when it's low and hold, it is incredibly difficult to lose over the long run.

It does not take me to partake in insider trading to do this. It takes a little patience and common sense, no more. It barely takes any of one's time even.

Buying and holding blue chips and index funds is, I would absolutely agree, a winning strategy. I would doubt though that ex ante you can determine the optimal times to buy with any consistency. The vast majority of professionals out there can't do it, research shows. Let's suppose we each had a hypothetical amount to invest and we agreed on how to allocate it. I invest X percent of it at regular, predetermined intervals over a Y year period. Your timing is at your discretion over the same period. I bet you don't beat me.

Like I said, it is a fools errand to try and time exact peaks. But it is incredibly easy to buy when the market is having a bad time and prices are low and to sell when things are high. It takes maybe 20 seconds to open one's favorite stocks app and look at the indexes to know if things are generally high or low in the present to make buy decisions for blue chips and index funds. People can absolutely do this. I ain't special, and I ain't important enough to have insider information even if I was willing to commit the felony.

If it's that simple, more people would do it. See my challenge above.

You only know ex post if they're low or high because there are too many variables and uncertainties to predict short term direction..

I feel like I must be missing an element here. You are saying we don't know in real time if the market is generally high or generally low?

I think it's very simple to know when we are in a recession or a lower/generally bad market. When the S&P is down 20%, it's not a high. It is generally low, it may go lower next week, next month, or even next year (hence the fools errand of exact timing), but we are obviously not at a high. I cannot understand how anyone would think that we are. Things in the market are generally bad. I think basically everyone is aware of this right now.

When the market was setting new index records constantly, that was a high and things were generally good in the market, as everyone was aware of. I stopped my buying, not because I am a financial genius but because of basic common sense and the knowledge that while the market goes up over time, it behooves to actually put cash in at the lows to maximize my eventual returns in 30 years.

It's not a special skill to know that when the market is setting daily records, we're high and one should probably wait to buy the blue chips and indexes later. It's not a special skill to recognize the market has dropped a lot right now, and might be a good time to buy into indexes. Definitely a far better time.

After the market bottomed in 2008 early 2009 at under 7k Dow, and it came all the way back to 14K or so, people with your philosophy would have been screaming sell because the market is so far up it has to come back down. A guy who was advising me begged me to sell and on top of that to buy VXX. Guess what, it kept going up and up and up from there without any really steep decline until the pandemic. You just can't know.

And I wish I had bought AMZN at every record high it hit from 50 to 3000. No you can't tell in real time.

My argument is to buy when the market is generally low and hold long term, not short term flip. Buy blue chips and indexes when the market sucks, hold it for the long haul. Don't let your cash get so low that you need to sell stock, sell it late in life when you don't have work income coming in, and sell it when the market is generally good. Don't retire with only a couple years cash on hand with a bad market.

Even in this example you have, the person doing this doubled their money buying at under 7 and selling at ~14K. They missed out on even greater gains, but they doubled their money in the short term using this basic strategy but as a short term hold instead of my long term hold. If only we could all double our money in the short term!

And by holding, or just investing at regular intervals not trying to time, I did much better. See my example. You cannot know if it's generally low in real time. It looks low today relative to 35K, but if it drops 5K, then it was in fact relatively high. I agree with WHAT you are buying, but I maintain just buying in at regular intervals in the long run is likely going to bet better than active management on timing.

Here's a somewhat different, and definitely outside the box, take in response to your question. Do some research into sets/issues that PSA does not currently grade, or that they have only started grading very recently so there are only an extremely small number of PSA graded examples from that set/issue out there, so far.

No guarantee you can easily find such an eligible candidate set/issue, if at all. But if you did come across a potential prospect, maybe go after raw cards of the major stars/HOFers in that set/issue, in the nicest condition you can find/afford. Then hopefully you can have them graded by PSA in the future when they do start to grade them, or if they've already started grading them, get PSA to grade them right away while the overall PSA graded pop of such a set/issue is still extremely small. This strategy may be highly time and timing dependent as well, so obviously no guarantees of success.

Certainly not a necessarily easy or predictable thing to do. But then, when has any type of such a riskier investment strategy ever really been that easy or predictable?

I am able to tell, within 10 seconds, that this might be a good time to buy blue chips (like Amazon, they're pretty stable nowadays) and index funds. They are all well off the recent peaks as the US economy is deteriorating in the short term. This is not a special skill.

Maybe I'm an idiot, but I'm really not seeing any rational argument that the market is high rather than low right now. I didn't buy in 2021 because the same data told me, and basically everyone in the world, that the market was high and not a good time to buy into a long-term hold strategy of 'safe' blue chips and indexes.

Ahh, but I think the point is what did those people do to invest after they sold at $14K? Since the motive for selling was the perception the market was too hot and you were selling at a "high," presumably the advice would be to just hold cash. For the past decade, you would be lucky to get 1% on your money. Since there was a decade without any major declines, until Covid in 2020, you would have been on the sideline during a great run-up.

The other extreme could be true today. We are down 20%. You could invest today, but there is nothing to guarantee the market will not fall another 40%. You are better than the guy that is down 60%, but still far worse than the guy "smarter" than you who wait for the market to go down 60%.

If you have a windfall right as the market has a major downturn, then you have lucked into a great investing opportunity. But, if you are strategically trying to buy and sell based on where you think the momentum in the market is, you are going to get beat by the "buy and hold" guys 95% of the time.

Well of course you're not an idiot lol. But if it was as easy as you think, then why isn't every fund manager in America just buying up AMZN? It could go up, it could go way down (antitrust risk for example, but 100 other reasons too.) Look at NVDA, I would have said it was a great buy 50 points ago and it keeps tanking. Buy low sell high is just not that doable in real time.

Yes, this.

We don't know where it will be in 3 months, but when the market is setting records and has already skyrocketed recently, it's not a good time to buy blue chips and index funds.

When the market has fallen 20-25%, your risk floor is way, way lower, especially factoring in the absolute risk floor. It's a much better time to buy. The market is not good right now and prices are way lower. Makes more sense to buy now than when it is setting records.

Of course, like I have said, it may be a better time to buy in 3, 6, 9, or 12 months from now. You can't time absolute lows or peaks beyond luck. But you can choose to buy when things are high or low. By buying this year instead of last year, that money is at 0% instead of -20%. All I'm gambling on when timing it, really, is that when in a new record high market, there will be a lower buying point in the future and I will just wait until it's lower. The odds of this strategy biting me in the rear are incredibly low. My gamble is simply that we will have periods of highs and lows and it is smarter to buy long holds during the lows, which the entire history of the market bears out.

If you buy at regular intervals, and hold, you will end up taking advantage of the best times to buy and that will outperform your attempt to time, in my opinion. This is why nearly all investment advisers will tell you to put each month's retirement fund contribution to whatever your preferred allocation is, rather than putting it into cash and trying to self-manage when you invest it.

Probably because hedge funds don't want a very conservative gradual growth for themselves, they need to set record numbers. I don't think hedge funds reward managers with those fat bonuses if they play a slow and safe game. But I'm not in banking, so I don't know. My strategy is for a normal dude trying to buy safe picks and hold for the long haul so that one day I won't have to sell my labor to another man to survive and may hopefully live out my last years in a modicum of comfort before death.

Some of my picks are down 3 months after I buy. Often, actually. Some are down 12 months later. But I'm doing a LOT better than if I'd bought those same stocks when everything was setting records, aren't I? We know at a glance when things are setting records its high, and when the market has plummeted 20%, things are relatively low. Probably not the absolute low, that's the fools errand, but I cannot possibly do better than I am now by buying these same stocks when they are setting records. Maybe I will lose, but I will lose a lot less when I actively manage and shave 20-25%+ off my buy-in price.

I am not sure you are using the correct but for world, but if it's working for you that's fine. For myself, I'm convinced trying to time isn't the best strategy.

You will take advance of good buying times some of the time doing that. Doing it my way, you take advantage of better buying times (you could still lose) almost 100% of the time. When the market is setting records every day, there will almost always be a better buying time down the road (the odds of this have got to be well over 90%). It behooves one to wait.

Timing with retirement funds rather than cash is different; because of the tax implications. If I didn't use my corporate 401K, took it as cash, and put it in I would be losing almost 50% of that money to the government immediately as taxable income before I even invest it at all. I contribute to my 401K without timing, because my timing won't overcome the fat income tax hit of the feds and my state.

I didn't limit my statement to hedge funds. There are tons of mutual funds that are not hedge funds.