1953 Topps PSA 10 Mickey Mantle IPO on Collectible App a Game Changer

[japhi]

Originally Posted by Dpeck100

When I started the thread I knew the lion share of this group would poo poo it and I also thought it would be a good idea just to let people know what is about to hit the memorabilia market.

Here you have a PSA 1 Wagner that just sold for $1,146,000 through Mile High.

https://www.milehighcardco.com/1909_...-LOT72191.aspx

Wagner prior sales

Two PSA PR-FR1 Honus Wagners sold for $109,638 in 2004 and $132,000 in 2005

A PSA PR-FR 1 Honus Wagner sold for $400,000 in 2009

A PSA Poor 1 Honus Wagner sold for $402,900 in 2013

A PSA Poor 1 Wagner sold for $609,294 in 2017

A PSA Poor 1 Wagner sold for $1,169,875 in 2020


Every single one of you would have said the same thing at each of these times.

Perhaps this card doesn't turn into a home run but there will be some that will for sure. The creation of mutual funds and pushing them to the masses helped stock prices move from single digit price earnings multiples to some north of a 1000.

I am not suggesting this is as novel of a concept of Jeff Bazos coming on CNBC in 1999 and basically forecasting the future of commerce and having multitudes of people laugh at him only to go on to the be the richest person on the planet but do not full yourselves into thinking this won't have a dynamic impact on the collectables market. Many will choose to participate and many will choose not to but this is going to increase demand. It is that simple.

Sure the wags has performed well. The SP 500 was under 700 bucks in 2009. Sits around 3500 today. And yes I get that is a cherry picked example but so is the Wagner.

And the problem with this scheme as an investment is you aren’t coming in at market price - there is likely a significant premium attached to the 2.5mm - and the fee’s are most likely outrageous. When the card sells, fees will again be outrageous.

So as a roll the dice, have fun, I think it’s cool. 10k is a nice vacation in Hawaii so I’m not going to knock anyone that likes to play with expendable cash.

But as a traditional investment these things are a joke for the reasons above.

[Dpeck100]

Originally Posted by japhi

Sure the wags has performed well. The SP 500 was under 700 bucks in 2009. Sits around 3500 today. And yes I get that is a cherry picked example but so is the Wagner.

And the problem with this scheme as an investment is you aren’t coming in at market price - there is likely a significant premium attached to the 2.5mm - and the fee’s are most likely outrageous. When the card sells, fees will again be outrageous.

So as a roll the dice, have fun, I think it’s cool. 10k is a nice vacation in Hawaii so I’m not going to knock anyone that likes to play with expendable cash.

But as a traditional investment these things are a joke for the reasons above.

It is hard for me to take your post seriously when you cherry pick the March low. We don't know when that card sold during 2009 and it came back to end the year over 400 points higher.

I will cherry pick now. In 2004 the SP was was higher than where it ended in 2009. The Wagner went from $109,638 to $1,169,875.

Completely destroying the SP. Bare in mind most people with money don't have all of their money in the SP and what has driven a massive amount of the recent move is 6 stocks. Investor returns have not tracked the SP even remotely.

[Snapolit1]

Would love to know if some of the folks who think this is a swell idea and just happen to have talking points, detailed statistics, and the like readily at hand are actually investors and/or funders.

[JeremyW]

I can assure you that I don't. The idea that baseball cards are an investment for some, sounds like a good thing for the hobby to me.

[Dpeck100]

Originally Posted by Snapolit1

Would love to know if some of the folks who think this is a swell idea and just happen to have talking points, detailed statistics, and the like readily at hand are actually investors and/or funders.

As I stated above no. I knew nothing about this until a few days ago and downloaded the app. I got an alert this morning that it went live and I logged in and did my purchase.

To answer another question below when I bought the shares it was at 41% sold out. It shows you how much is left. The 41% was of the 1 million offered.

[japhi]

Originally Posted by Dpeck100

It is hard for me to take your post seriously when you cherry pick the March low. We don't know when that card sold during 2009 and it came back to end the year over 400 points higher.

I will cherry pick now. In 2004 the SP was was higher than where it ended in 2009. The Wagner went from $109,638 to $1,169,875.

Completely destroying the SP. Bare in mind most people with money don't have all of their money in the SP and what has driven a massive amount of the recent move is 6 stocks. Investor returns have not tracked the SP even remotely.

Yes I understand all that, even mentioned it was a cherry picked sample.

Tesla was what, 80 bucks a few years ago? 6x in 24 months what can we take from that? Outproduced almost every widely traded sports card. Trades at 1000x earnings. What does that tell us? We are in a crazy asset bubble, context is I’m down on anything that isn’t a value play. I’ll take JPM long term over a 53 Mantle or TSLA.

I’m low risk, long term, etf / bluechip / dividend investor. So I am definitely not the target market here. But I do love the hustle and as a spec play/ gambling I get the appeal.

Question for you since you are big on this as an investment. What do you have the market value of that card being today? Asking sincerely , I have no idea what that card would sell for.

Either way interesting discussion and I don’t root for these things to fail, I hope your 10k becomes 100k, this isn’t a sum zero game so ideally we are both right.

[Dpeck100]

Originally Posted by japhi

Yes I understand all that, even mentioned it was a cherry picked sample.

Tesla was what, 80 bucks a few years ago? 6x in 24 months what can we take from that? Outproduced almost every widely traded sports card. Trades at 1000x earnings. What does that tell us? We are in a crazy asset bubble, context is I’m down on anything that isn’t a value play. I’ll take JPM long term over a 53 Mantle or TSLA.

I’m low risk, long term, etf / bluechip / dividend investor. So I am definitely not the target market here. But I do love the hustle and as a spec play/ gambling I get the appeal.

Question for you since you are big on this as an investment. What do you have the market value of that card being today? Asking sincerely , I have no idea what that card would sell for.

Either way interesting discussion and I don’t root for these things to fail, I hope your 10k becomes 100k, this isn’t a sum zero game so ideally we are both right.

I am a diversified person. I own my car, I own my condo, I have a cash account, I have my retirement accounts which are my largest asset, and I have my card collection that has rocketed to levels honestly I can't believe. In the baseball card world a guy like me is a small fish. In my genre which is primary wrestling I have the most valuable collection of anyone. There really isn't probably another space where a guy my age and with my net worth is at the top. I have had tremendous luck with cards and perhaps that will change and current values are fantasy but I am sticking with my long term vision. I own some of my old baseball cards but nothing of value and for ten years I have been beating the drum that the best cards had no where to go but up. We are now in a phase where I have never felt more strongly about that and time will tell how it plays out. For me I would love to own some cool cards from the major sports but either they are one too much capital commitment or I just have no connection to them and just would want them for investment purposes. This card is clearly one of the best baseball cards that exists. Some will say well it is only that because it is a 10. Well guess what since 1999 those same people have been saying the same thing and 31 years later the disparity just continue to get wider. That is their personal preference but the market which is a collective of all interested parties completely disagrees and they do so with their money. Buying this card at 2.5 million is not going to be a TSLA return. I am the last guy to ask about that stock because it is mind boggling to me. That said it has continued to shock long term market participants in mass but on the other side of the trade is Ron Baron who routinely comes on CNBC and says he thinks it is going to the moon. So far he has been right and most have been wrong. I have gambled away 10k before on an options trade and so there is no scenario where this goes to zero. I honestly just wanted to give it a shot and I actually think you will see a scenario where this sells out and then there won't be much turn over and the small amount of trading will push the shares to a premium. In the stock market this happens all of the time with low float stocks and with one shareholder controlling 60% of the pie and not in the float this is a likely outcome. As I stated I would love for a Jordan to come up where I could take a larger stake and perhaps a 52 Mantle and so forth. I think the fair market value for this card is debatable and I am not really in a good position to even know. I believe cards like this are like art and once they become such a coveted item they can go to levels no one can imagine. It may be a scenario like an IPO in 1999 where they sell at a huge valuation and there is little upside and so maybe this deal isn't a great one but there will be plenty more to come and I will certainly look to put a few more bucks to work. Under no circumstances do I see this as a 10X play. But I do think the goal from so many investors to find alternative assets is huge. In the example where it was 2004 to 2009, the Wagner was up from just over 100k to 400k and the market actually fell nearly 40% and simply rebounded during that timeframe. There will be rolling periods where certain assets classes outperform or underperform but monster baseball cards from what I can see have held up great and attracted great interest from wealthy people and that same holds true for high end art, comics, cars, stamps and just about anything you can think of. This is an apex item and it will always be.

[kailes2872]

Originally Posted by Dpeck100

It is hard for me to take your post seriously when you cherry pick the March low. We don't know when that card sold during 2009 and it came back to end the year over 400 points higher.

I will cherry pick now. In 2004 the SP was was higher than where it ended in 2009. The Wagner went from $109,638 to $1,169,875.

Completely destroying the SP. Bare in mind most people with money don't have all of their money in the SP and what has driven a massive amount of the recent move is 6 stocks. Investor returns have not tracked the SP even remotely.

Lord knows I feel this. It was like there was a party going on and I wasn’t invited... the Russell 2000 has been lagging since 2016 and I’ve been lagging right along with it.

[japhi]

Originally Posted by kailes2872

Lord knows I feel this. It was like there was a party going on and I wasn’t invited... the Russell 2000 has been lagging since 2016 and I’ve been lagging right along with it.

Everyone is invited. Just buy the index.

Buffet vs Hedge Fund was pretty fun to follow:

https://www.investopedia.com/article...-brka-brkb.asp

[glchen]

While I respect the OP as he is a financial advisor, and I think that in general, he has very sounds investment advice, I think the concept here is a bad idea for most folks. I also saw a similar article on SCD here: Link. When I first saw these articles, I was thinking this is one of the factors that is causing such a spike in the market recently for marquee cards. It's like another buyer's group out there, scooping up cards for this purpose.


The immediate red flags that I see are:

(1) 90 day lockup before you can sell your shares

(2) Owner retains 60% shares of the card

(3) Unknown liquidity of shares

(4) As far as I know, the cards are not stored by some objective 3rd party in case the cards need to be sold to pay out shareholders.

These issues will lead to potential for abuse. If the card values goes up, everyone wins. If the card value goes down, only the original owner of the card and the app will win. There are too many questions. Who's the market maker? Can your shares get diluted? Can the lockup be extended? Who sets the price of the shares? Instead of dealing with all of these complexities, just buy the entire card yourself or buy yourself a few shares of Apple stock, where the investment potential is known.


I remember a few years ago when the price of oil was sky high, and I thought that I was being a market genius by buying this ETF called USOIL, which seemingly would track oil prices that way. However, the strange thing was when oil prices went up, the ETF price barely moved. I thought I should have been making a killing, but ended up losing money instead. The excuse some something like there were a lot of complexities in the ETF like fees, the way they bought oil futures, etc that didn't translate into a 1:1 correlation of the price of oil and the ETF price. The point here is, if the investment is a black box where you have no clue the pricing structure, etc, it is best to avoid it before you lose your shirt on that investment.

[conor912]

Originally Posted by glchen

While I respect the OP as he is a financial advisor, and I think that in general, he has very sounds investment advice, I think the concept here is a bad idea for most folks. I also saw a similar article on SCD here: Link. When I first saw these articles, I was thinking this is one of the factors that is causing such a spike in the market recently for marquee cards. It's like another buyer's group out there, scooping up cards for this purpose.


The immediate red flags that I see are:

(1) 90 day lockup before you can sell your shares

(2) Owner retains 60% shares of the card

(3) Unknown liquidity of shares

(4) As far as I know, the cards are not stored by some objective 3rd party in case the cards need to be sold to pay out shareholders.

These issues will lead to potential for abuse. If the card values goes up, everyone wins. If the card value goes down, only the original owner of the card and the app will win. There are too many questions. Who's the market maker? Can your shares get diluted? Can the lockup be extended? Who sets the price of the shares? Instead of dealing with all of these complexities, just buy the entire card yourself or buy yourself a few shares of Apple stock, where the investment potential is known.


I remember a few years ago when the price of oil was sky high, and I thought that I was being a market genius by buying this ETF called USOIL, which seemingly would track oil prices that way. However, the strange thing was when oil prices went up, the ETF price barely moved. I thought I should have been making a killing, but ended up losing money instead. The excuse some something like there were a lot of complexities in the ETF like fees, the way they bought oil futures, etc that didn't translate into a 1:1 correlation of the price of oil and the ETF price. The point here is, if the investment is a black box where you have no clue the pricing structure, etc, it is best to avoid it before you lose your shirt on that investment.

+1

Too many ways to go sideways, but I'm happy to watch some other canary fly down into the coal mine.

[Dpeck100]

Originally Posted by glchen

While I respect the OP as he is a financial advisor, and I think that in general, he has very sounds investment advice, I think the concept here is a bad idea for most folks. I also saw a similar article on SCD here: Link. When I first saw these articles, I was thinking this is one of the factors that is causing such a spike in the market recently for marquee cards. It's like another buyer's group out there, scooping up cards for this purpose.


The immediate red flags that I see are:

(1) 90 day lockup before you can sell your shares

(2) Owner retains 60% shares of the card

(3) Unknown liquidity of shares

(4) As far as I know, the cards are not stored by some objective 3rd party in case the cards need to be sold to pay out shareholders.

These issues will lead to potential for abuse. If the card values goes up, everyone wins. If the card value goes down, only the original owner of the card and the app will win. There are too many questions. Who's the market maker? Can your shares get diluted? Can the lockup be extended? Who sets the price of the shares? Instead of dealing with all of these complexities, just buy the entire card yourself or buy yourself a few shares of Apple stock, where the investment potential is known.


I remember a few years ago when the price of oil was sky high, and I thought that I was being a market genius by buying this ETF called USOIL, which seemingly would track oil prices that way. However, the strange thing was when oil prices went up, the ETF price barely moved. I thought I should have been making a killing, but ended up losing money instead. The excuse some something like there were a lot of complexities in the ETF like fees, the way they bought oil futures, etc that didn't translate into a 1:1 correlation of the price of oil and the ETF price. The point here is, if the investment is a black box where you have no clue the pricing structure, etc, it is best to avoid it before you lose your shirt on that investment.

There is no doubt this is a new concept and time will tell how it plays out. The client who first brought this to my a attention few years back through the art world so far has seen some solid results. What has happened there is as they create new issues it forces the the investment group to go out and find new pieces of art and thus driving up the value of the existing supply. As they can showcase that the value of the art they have already purchased has gone up it attracts new interest. I believe the same will hold true here. One of the primary reasons people want into cards so bad right now is they have done well. When guys like Justin Beiber are "flexing" their Pokemon collections on Instagram it makes others want them too. This in my view is why Gary V has had such an impact on the card market. I only keep up with a few people in the hobby and one used to post here and he has sold cards direcly to NBA players and has others contacting him on IG (Instagram) saying they want in.

I think the comparison to the USO is a poor one because it is not an apples to apples comparison. In this case one can call the Mantle 10 a commodity I suppose but there is only one other direct substitute and no futures market to artificially positively or negatively impact the market. The reason the USO did so poorly is two fold. One as they take in assets they must buy more futures contracts and can have a significant impact on the market as they put those funds to work essentially becoming the market and two those ETF structures have to buy front month oil futures contracts where there is generally a time value premium embedded. The oil futures market is generally in contango which is what destroys an ETF like this ones performance. The only time you have a positive role is when it is in backwardation meaning the current oil spot price is higher than the futures market. For example if oil is currently at $40 and the following month futures contact is $38 you experience no negative role and so the underlying value of the ETF structure doesn't deteriorate. Most of the time the market is in contango where you have an upward sloping futures curve and so as time goes by the premium gets drained out of the front month contract as it comes closer to the spot price and the ETF will lose value and then must start the process all over again. This is why if you look at the VXX a popular trading vehicle to attempt to trade the VIX you will be losing money every month if the VIX stays flat. The front month futures contract has at least a 7% premium so over the course of 12 months it will naturally shed at least 84% of its value unless the VIX rises. Hence why it has had numerous reverse splits. These are very complex vehicles and most when purchasing them don't realize what they are up against.

[ajjohnsonsoxfan]

I love this concept. There are quite a few cards that have increased in value so exponentially that most collectors will never have the opportunity to own. This gives them the ability to participate as investors in those cards. Yes others have said you're not really an "owner" not having the card in your possession, but how many of us have the ability to own outright a Ruth RC, T206 Wagner or a PSA 10 Mantle? The real value though will happen if this takes off and you can easily buy/sell gaining liquidity on your investments.

[glchen]

Originally Posted by Dpeck100

There is no doubt this is a new concept and time will tell how it plays out. The client who first brought this to my a attention few years back through the art world so far has seen some solid results. What has happened there is as they create new issues it forces the the investment group to go out and find new pieces of art and thus driving up the value of the existing supply. As they can showcase that the value of the art they have already purchased has gone up it attracts new interest. I believe the same will hold true here. One of the primary reasons people want into cards so bad right now is they have done well. When guys like Justin Beiber are "flexing" their Pokemon collections on Instagram it makes others want them too. This in my view is why Gary V has had such an impact on the card market. I only keep up with a few people in the hobby and one used to post here and he has sold cards direcly to NBA players and has others contacting him on IG (Instagram) saying they want in.

I think the comparison to the USO is a poor one because it is not an apples to apples comparison. In this case one can call the Mantle 10 a commodity I suppose but there is only one other direct substitute and no futures market to artificially positively or negatively impact the market. The reason the USO did so poorly is two fold. One as they take in assets they must buy more futures contracts and can have a significant impact on the market as they put those funds to work essentially becoming the market and two those ETF structures have to buy front month oil futures contracts where there is generally a time value premium embedded. The oil futures market is generally in contango which is what destroys an ETF like this ones performance. The only time you have a positive role is when it is in backwardation meaning the current oil spot price is higher than the futures market. For example if oil is currently at $40 and the following month futures contact is $38 you experience no negative role and so the underlying value of the ETF structure doesn't deteriorate. Most of the time the market is in contango where you have an upward sloping futures curve and so as time goes by the premium gets drained out of the front month contract as it comes closer to the spot price and the ETF will lose value and then must start the process all over again. This is why if you look at the VXX a popular trading vehicle to attempt to trade the VIX you will be losing money every month if the VIX stays flat. The front month futures contract has at least a 7% premium so over the course of 12 months it will naturally shed at least 84% of its value unless the VIX rises. Hence why it has had numerous reverse splits. These are very complex vehicles and most when purchasing them don't realize what they are up against.

Thanks for the input, David. You definitely know ETFs much more than I do. How about the other red flags I brought up? You really don’t see significant risk there even in a down market?

Frankly, I think cards still have more room to run because I think it will eventually replace coin collecting as the top hobby with all of the news happening on ESPN and so forth. However, the greed that led to the 80s/90s bust can always repeat itself so folks should be wary.

I don’t collect cards purely for investment. It’s a hobby that’s fun and not one that I’m trying to beat the stock market on returns. However, I prefer that after I sell my cards, I can at least break even especially after the 15-25% in seller fees on eBay or at an auction house. And if I come away with more money to buy more cards, all the better. However, I really like having the card in hand. If it can’t hold the card anymore, it’s not a hobby anymore. It’s pure investment. So something like this needs to be looked at in purely those terms.

[bounce]

Originally Posted by Dpeck100

What has happened there is as they create new issues it forces the the investment group to go out and find new pieces of art and thus driving up the value of the existing supply. As they can showcase that the value of the art they have already purchased has gone up it attracts new interest. I believe the same will hold true here. One of the primary reasons people want into cards so bad right now is they have done well. When guys like Justin Beiber are "flexing" their Pokemon collections on Instagram it makes others want them too. This in my view is why Gary V has had such an impact on the card market. I only keep up with a few people in the hobby and one used to post here and he has sold cards direcly to NBA players and has others contacting him on IG (Instagram) saying they want in.

Not being flippant, but is this not also potentially the "greater fool theory" at work?

Everything goes up, until it doesn't.