Most Upside in Next 5 Years

[Rhotchkiss]

I acknowledge and respect there are many on here who view themselves as pure collectors and consider their "stuff" purely collectables. They apparently don't care about value and do not consider collectables assets. This thread is not for them/you, and I respectfully request that those fitting this description do not post here unless its constructive to the topic.

It seems to me that certain card-adjacent collectibles are becoming more mainstream/accepted as assets. Specifically, tickets, photos, game-used, and historical sports items that I will call ephemera (contracts, magazines, advertising pieces, programs, etc), all seem to be gaining in popularity, and value.

Here is my question: of these (or other) areas, including cards, which do you think is the best investment/has the potential for highest relative returns over the next 5 years, and why. Or, put differently, if you were given $10k and told to invest in sports stuff to generate the highest return in the next 5 years, which item would you invest the $10k in and why:

I believe the answer is tickets. I believe this for several reasons: (i) tickets are naturally rare and limited in supply (they only made one for each seat in a venue on that day; (ii) tickets are specific to a date, thus they represent the true rookie/debut event and/or reflects the occurrence of the actual event (vs a 1954 Aaron which of his entire rookie year); (iii) they are most closely adjacent to cards -- they are paper, they fit in normal PSA flips, they connect people to the sport in a personal and unique way, etc., (iv) despite that they are much rarer than cards, they are currently only a fraction of the price of cards, meaning there is embedded upside; one could argue that they should be worth more than cards, not just to equal or fewer multiples of card value, and (v) it is a fragmented asset-class in its early stages, which usually allows for upside as the asset class becomes more institutionalized, uniformly graded, and more widely collected bought/sold.

Cards are now an established asset class. At least once per day I hear them talk about cards, including Pokemon, on Bloomberg. Does this means that cards take off even more? Perhaps. Does it mean that card-adjacent things take off too, and perhaps more than cards because they are currently undervalued and less widely accepted? Perhaps. That's the topic of discussion.