General Forum

The amount of money that gets tossed around in this hobby is really quite unbelievable when I think about it.  I recently came across a video online regarding a Kaboom football card which is a recent insert set talking about how they are selling for 20-30 thousand dollars.

Who is buying these cards for that insane amount of money?  It's hard for me to even fathom someone going online to ebay and dropping 20 thousand dollars on something like a trading card.  Where is this money coming from?  I must be missing out on some financial secret in life.

I even know someone who goes to Goodwill to buy items for a few dollars, then sells them online for hundreds of dollars to people on instagram.  

Who are these people who spend this kind of money?  And it doesn't seem like there is any shortage of people who spend like this.

I am a collector and I have never sold a card before, but sometimes I wonder if I will end up regretting not selling some of them to someone who wants to pay me a ridiculous amount of money for a piece of cardboard.

I'm with you. I don't sell cards. I only trade on here. But even cards on a smaller scale can get kind of crazy. Like when this year's Topps set came out and people were paying low level dumb money for the Wander Franco base card. I feel like I was pulling one every other blaster I opened. I should have been selling them instead of trading them and at least getting my money back.

I'm thinking the same thing all of the time.

Everybody has their limit, or should have, based on what their financial situation is.  I am by no means wealthy, but have spent $100 or more on a card that most would cap at $20 or so.  Sometimes, it's one that has eluded me for a long time. But many times I have refused to bid on a card, or refused to go higher, based on what my personal limit is. I've seen plenty of common cards on EBay that someone listed for thousands of dollars.  That's a buyer beware situation.  If someone is willing to pay whatever someone wants, who can really stop them?   I'm retired.  I spend my hobby $ on cards.  My wife buys plenty of purses and shoes, some, pretty high end, though not super high end.  I guess a '52 Mantle rookie for me is like a Birken bag for her. Neither of us owns either item.  But I have some cards I've paid a decent amount for, as has she, with her items.

    The guy bidding $30K on a Kaboom card might be a multi millionaire. If he can afford it, more power to him.  The Goodwill story is hard to believe.  I'm sure you can make a small profit reselling items like this on line, but the people who get "Antiques Roadshow" rich, are as rare as hen's teeth.

I wonder the same thing often. Every year it seems that the newest top 10 Rookies for each sport have their RCs start at a couple of $100 even before the cards get released. 

I have sold a few cards over the years for chump change compared to that. The most I have ever sold a card for, I personally wouldn't pay as much as I sold it for, was $62 for a 2006 Contenders Football #165 Devin Hester RC sticker auto that I started off at $75 and accepted the $62 offer.

Actually what I think is even more insane is the looneys that "store" their maybe $50 cards on Ebay and list them at grossely exagerated prices in the $10,000s or even $100,000s+

A new window into the hobby has been opened. Well, it's like an old window with a twist. There are investors investing in sportscards instead of some other avenue like the stock market. This isn't so new but the new twist is there are investment groups where you might have say 10-20 people going in together to buy a card as an investment. They can all afford their piece of the pie.

We can all have our opinions about if investing in a baseball card over the stock market is good or bad but I believe this contributes to some of the crazy prices.

I have a theory on the reason that fairly common cards are sold on eBay for outrageous sums.  For example, a while back a 1990 Fleer Jose Uribe sold for many thousands of dollars.  This is a card that is barely worth the effort to pick up a nickel, let alone being worth the nickel itself.  It was always my belief that people were using trading cards in order to launder money.  Put in dirty drug money on one side and have it come out sparkling clean on the other minus some eBay fees.  I have no proof of this, but it makes sense. 

As far as "hot cards" go, I think it is mostly just a case of "tulip bulb fever" for most people.  People get convinced that certain commodities will always continue to go up in value.  Just like the tulip bulb market in the Netherlands in the 1600s that basically started stock market speculation.  However as most of us know, the value of trading cards goes down 99.9% of the time after their release.  The people paying thousands of dollars for Bowman autographs will one day sell them for a massive loss or be stuck with a signed card of a guy that never made it past a cup of coffee in the majors, if that. 

Me? I have sold cards.  On eBay and on Sportlots.  But I didn't really like selling, I was just doing it to support my own collecting habit.  I love to trade and I love to collect, but the whole selling game just felt dirty to me.  I don't know, maybe I just needed to rant.