Future of cards shows

[perezfan]

Originally Posted by Jewish-collector

I think the kids (with all the money you see at the shows) are just the children of these wealthy non-collector guys, who recently have been buying the record breaking Michael Jordan rookies, Trout rookies, Lebron rookies, etc,... and they give their sons $20,000 to make it grow.

You might be right. Check out this 15 year-old kid. He's already a skilled negotiator and really knows his stuff ("stuff" meaning the cards' values). It's a long video, but if you forward to the 6:35 mark, you'll get a quick glimpse of his '52 Topps Mantle and '53 Topps Jackie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUlCGQDbUQc&t=1358s

Those 2 cards appear to be afterthoughts to the prospective trade partner, as he rifles through the kid's collection to look for Brady, Wade, Mahomes and some soccer cards. No idea how the kid got this kind of money, but would guess his parents played a major role!

[John1941]

I think that it's somewhere in the middle. I'm 14, and I (obviously) am an avid card collector. On the other hand, I know only one other person who seriously collects cards, and only a handful who collect cards at all. No one on my little league team collects baseball cards.

Originally Posted by buymycards

That is totally untrue. My 3 11 year old grandson's are avid collectors, as well as my 12 year old and 24 year old grandson's. Every kid on their Little League team collect's baseball cards. They go to card shows and card shops and trade with their friends. The only downside is that they can't go to a store to buy packs because the "investors" have cleaned out all of the stores. Even the online products at Wal-Mart have tripled in price during the past few months.

As far as Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic The Gathering, etc., they have been around for over 20 years. There are many tournaments and many young people getting together to play each other. Take a look at the tens of 1000's of these cards on the TCG player website and the 100's of people selling cards for a couple of bucks or less.

And, I think that overall, disregarding the very limited number of people who are buying the expensive cards, the heart of the collecting market and the lions share of collecting money is coming from the hard core collector's.