棒球卡是好的投资吗（Are Baseball Cards A Good Investment?）

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Sports cards are back.
People are buying and selling cards with
enthusiasm not seen since the heyday of
collecting in the 1980s.
I think what you're seeing right now across the
industry is one of the most healthy and vibrant
times that we've seen for our industry.
It's tough to pass on the money to be made Right
now. 20 20 has seen record breaking numbers for
cards sold at public auctions.
Over 10 have sold for five hundred thousand
dollars or more. We sold a mike trout card
limited to one the super factor for three point
nine million. These are the two most expensive
basketball cards in the world that have publicly
traded. The resurgence has been building over the
last several years, largely driven by those in
their 30s and older who collected as kids and are
now adults with income to spare.
We all had this crappy experience of the card
companies flooding the market and then our cards
being worthless. But you fast forward 30 years.
You kind of have a remembrance and nostalgia for
how fun that was. With the onset of the pandemic,
card collecting exploded and now Wall Street and
Silicon Valley are taking notice.
What we have never had in the business are wealth
managers, money managers, hedge fund guys,
alternative investment funds.
And so what we've been doing is just buying the
best of the best. We created a 20 million dollar
fund. Card Collecting is different from what it
was 40 years ago.
But the crash of the 90s is still haunting.
Card makers and collectors are determined to
avoid repeating their mistakes and cash in on
this popular alternative asset.
I think cards are definitely having a moment.
But if you take a long term view of this, the
cards are here to stay from a from as an asset
class.
If you were a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s,
more than likely you collected baseball cards and
your father told you they'll one day be worth a
lot of money. That's because your father saw his
card collection from when he was a kid become
valuable in the 1970s when a generation of boys
came of age and rediscovered their card
collections. For example, in the late 1960s, a
1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card, considered one of
the greatest vintage cards of all time, was worth
about a dollar. A decade later, it was worth
about a thousand dollars.
In 2006, a near perfect version of this card sold
for near two hundred eighty three thousand
dollars. And in twenty eighteen, a similar card
sold for just shy of two point nine million
dollars at auction.
A lot of people in my age in their mid 40s, you
know, we grew up in the 1980s and the baseball
card boom and going to going to shows.
So there are a lot of a lot of adults out there
now in my age range that grew up collecting
baseball cards and enjoying it and having fun
with it. It's difficult to put an exact value on
the card industry at its height.
But David Liner of the Topps Company says around
its peak in nineteen ninety one, sales were
between one and two billion dollars in a given
year. What's hard is if you look back at the late
80s and the early 90s, it was really a boom about
baseball cards.
It was less so about the NBA, NFL and the NHL,
which today are much bigger properties.
And then the industry crashed all the cards niños
kids collected worthless.
That bubble is driven by oversupply.
Well, restricted supply initially.
And then it burst when the company said, you know
what, we're going to make two million of these
Ken Griffey rookie cards but tell people that it
was much fewer. Most of my friends were similar
ages in the 30s, 40s, like our collections are
frankly worthless from that period of time.
And that that's why is the card companies,.
About 20 years later, those same kids grew up and
began revisiting their old card hobby.
In nineteen ninety six, That's when the junk wax
era, the mass production era ended.
In nineteen ninety six was the first year where
they really started serializing our cards and you
started getting real scarcity.
The reason that's really important is that people
who grew up in nineteen ninety six, they were
about eight to 10 years old collecting now
they've reached disposable income.
Right. So all the cards that I wanted when I was
a kid that I couldn't afford, now that I'm
working and I have some disposable income, people
like me are like I want to go and finally buy
that. The industry had seen some major changes.
In the late 1990s, card grading became popular
for a fee. Companies like PSA, Beckett and SGC
rate cards on a scale of one to 10, taking into
account the quality and rarity of the card.
The higher the grade, the higher the value.
It's a commodity. People know the general rating
when the age is going to go for.
It allows a lot of people to buy and sell trading
cards sight unseen that change the industry more
than anything else. When I was a kid, rating
wasn't a thing like you'd walk into a card shop
or a card show and By raw cards, which just means
cards that were pulled out of a pack and they're
in some little spinny sleeve or whatever.
You know, I got cards graded in the late 90s when
I was a teenager, when these companies were just
getting going the concept of having a official
grade like its mentor or instrument or whatever,
and then it's authentic, I think is very
critical. The card makers went through
consolidation and sports leagues, signed
exclusive deals with one card company.
Today, Topps produces cards for Major League
Baseball. Panini has the rights to the NBA and
NFL and the NHL is signed with upper deck.
These brands further increased exclusivity by
offering limited edition cards better known as
hit cards. Finding a rare card that includes an
autograph or a piece of a player's jersey could
instantly be worth five or more figures.
All of the manufacturers, we are all well aware of
what happened in the eighties and nineties, and
not wanting to repeat those mistakes.
our licensors, Major League Baseball, the NFL,
NBA, they are all well aware.
Also, it's not over licensed for the most part.
We're able to manage within our lane of those
four licenses to ensure that we're creating great
products that will resonate for years to come.
In the early 2010s, Breaking started to gain a
following online.
It offsets risk when buying unopened cards and
has amassed a following on YouTube and Twitch.
That box sells five hundred dollars and you've got
ten packs in the box so people can buy slots in
that box. That said, everybody can buy a pack and
the person opens up. How could this package for
this person got Brian Podres, Michael S
Nationals', Kamron M Royals', Michael C res and
it's all done online.
It's all done up front in front of the camera.
And you don't know what you're going to get. You
know, you're going to get a pack in that box.
So somebody may get something worth twenty five
dollars. Somebody may literally get something
worth fifty thousand dollars.
Logo man patch auto one of one.
Look at that change.
Oh, dude, somebody has to get rich on the stream,
breaking to the trading card community is our
version of eSports, and it's great and everybody
knows everybody I know. After an injury landed
Rich Leighton at home for an extended period of
time, he rediscovered his card hobby and stumbled
upon breaking.
I haven't collected since I was a kid and cards
and changed a bit, I saw a relic of I got a relic
card with a piece of game used jersey inside of
it. I received an autographed card in the box and
I was blown away.
Those things did not exist in the mid to late 80s
when I was collecting when I was younger.
One thing led to another.
This took me onto YouTube.
I even came across a couple of people that called
themselves Breaker's and I saw their videos and I
thought to myself, Man, I feel like this is
something that I could do well.
Rich founded Leighton Sports Cards in 2012 and has
been breaking cards ever since.
The company has eleven full time employees,
boasts one of the top YouTube channels for
breaking with over thirty thousand subscribers
and nearly doubled their sales each year since
the start. The jump from twenty nineteen to
twenty twenty. This current year we're expecting
to double our sales again.
This year, We have not stopped demand for our
breaks and the demand for products and the demand
for just sports cards in general on all
markets and all facets of the industry as has
never been better, at least since since we
started in 2012.
It's never been better.
This past decade, people in the sports card world
noticed a significant increase in value and
demand. I noticed the industry really taking off
in twenty sixteen.
We really noticed a giant jump in doing the amount
of breaks and doing the amount of product really
in the beginning of twenty seventeen.
The trading card business has been growing
significantly the past five or six years.
What we've seen in the last six months during the
pandemic has been an acceleration of that growth.
People are stuck at home and looking for things to
do. So they're getting back into maybe hobbies or
interest of theirs and collections.
There's no sports on TV at the time and they're
not spending time or money on going out to dinner
or going on vacations at that time.
So it looks like more people are putting their
money into into collectibles and in their
hobbies. I mean, heading into before covid, if
you will, in January and February of this year,
we were hitting record numbers for our business
already. When covid started and people had to
stay home, we took off even more from there.
In a pandemic, you'd think that business would be
slow. And right now it's the best it's ever been.
Obviously, we would rather have a healthy
country, but you know we're here to take
advantage of it as much as we possibly can.
But overall, I would say the market, whether it's
a card and autograph game used jersey, bat things
have gone up a lot.
Then ESPN moved the release date of the hotly
anticipated Michael Jordan documentary series,
The Last Dance from June to April.
The Last Dance was a very well timed documentary
released when we were all starved for sports.
There was nothing, you know, 20 plus years
removed from Jordan's kind of his last three peat
in ninety seven, putting a lot of his highlights
out there and kind of reinvigorating the debate
to see the greatest of all time missing LeBron
James. But I think the last dance brought a lot
of nostalgia back and really showed a new
generation how significant Jordan was to to the
game of basketball. The last dance became the
highest rated documentary in ESPN history.
It brought back nostalgia.
It brought back memories of the greatness of
Michael Jordan and his cards and memorabilia
started going up.
And in our industry, it is definitely a case
where rising tides lifts all boats.
If a Michael Jordan rookie goes from forty
thousand one hundred thousand, then Charles
Barkley rookies are going to go up.
Kobe Bryant rookies are going to go up.
LeBron James rookies are going to go up, Steph
Curry rookies are going to go up and so on and so
forth. Sales of Michael Jordan cards on eBay
increased over three hundred seventy percent
after the film's release.
And eBay has seen an average of three basketball
cards sold every minute on the platform.
Out of all the stuff that's seen, significant
increases in twenty twenty and that we handle
Michael Jordan's percentage wise has seen them
the most. In the months after the release of The
Last Dance, several basketball cards sold for six
figures or more at auction, two of them a LeBron
James rookie card and a Giannis Antetokounmpo
rookie card for one point eight million dollars
each the buyer leader Avodart and Alt fund one.
For the fund, Try to get really good lighting
this, this is the multimillion dollar LeBron card
that we purchased. This is the best LeBron card.
And then and this is obviously our favorite card.
This is the Giannis's card, these are the two
most expensive basketball cards in the world that
have publicly traded. How much are we holding in
your hands right now? I would say well over five
million dollars, at least in today's market
value. I mean, people have been speculating that
this one is already in its self worth over five
million dollars. Leore Avidar has been a
collector most of his life, owning some of the
most valuable Kobe Bryant cards.
I am a Kobe collector, like through and through.
So my collection is like ninety nine percent Kobe
Bryant, I would say.
I think I have the most high end Kobe Bryant
collection in the world. For years, he's believed
sports cards are part of the modern age of
alternative assets or culture assets.
A culture asset, There's three things that go into
it. So the first is there's nostalgia associated
with it, right? Like, I mean, Kobe Bryant, I feel
attached to him. I really want something that I
can be part of his brand.
The second one, these things are really made very
well. It's a great picture.
It's a great pose. It is a piece of art.
And then the last part is like it is an
appreciating asset given the scarcity of these
assets. And so together you get this magical
being called what again, as I said, a culture
asset with greater awareness of inventory,
limited edition cards and a formal grading
system. This new era of card collecting proved
select cards could be a serious way to diversify
one's investments.
Back when cards were five dollars.
It was hard to kind of you physically had to have
many of them to have any sort of value, valuable
collection. Nowadays you can have 10-20 cards and
have significant portion of your net worth in
sports cards as an alternative asset.
And so I think there's also people treating it as
like a long term investment.
One of the things that we hear constantly is that
people appreciate people like the idea that these
collectibles are tangible.
They can get an item, they can hold it, they can
enjoy it. They have some safe store of value and
they get a little bit more than they would out of
company stuff. Babe Ruth isn't going to do
anything tomorrow that's going to hurt the value
of his collectibles.
On the financial side of things.
I think we've had such a bull run over the last
ten years that people are looking to diversify
their assets and also just find ways to make more
yield or just return.
The stock market over the long run makes around
seven percent. People want to take a lot more
risk, especially early on when they're young.
And so you're finding people thinking about, OK,
I guess I can make seven percent in the stock
market, but where can I make one hundred percent?
Where can I make, you know this is why
cryptocurrency became really big.
And so you're seeing people start speculating.
So you're seeing a lot of people move into
alternative assets because, again, they want to
make those higher returns.
For Leore, He saw this trend and realized there
was no way for people to manage and track the
value of their alternative investments.
So he founded ALT.
I've been investing in alternative assets now
heavily since twenty sixteen, and I've basically
run into all these problems at scale.
And so ALT is really a solution to all those
problems. So the first problem that people run
into is what is my asset worth?
And so you can put in a card and they'll tell you
exactly how much it's worth.
So you can see everything all in one place.
It feels very much like fidelity.
The second problem is around insurance.
These are hard assets, right?
So we've created a dynamic insurance product
where you can upload your collection.
Mostly you're just managing it, but you click
insure and you're always insured up to the alt
value, which is kind of like our proprietary
estimate or Kelley Blue Book.
And then the last piece is around liquidity.
And so for the first time, you can actually take
a loan against your entire collection.
Not only did you create the platform, but he also
created alt fund one, a twenty million dollar
investment fund for sports cards.
The fund has already purchased over one hundred
cards and is up thirty five percent since
September. You are creating a diversified
portfolio of I would say seventy five percent
basketball. Twenty five percent football.
There are some speculative bets in there as well
as people who have already hit their career
accolades like Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Kobe
Bryant. Majority of the portfolio is buy and
hold, but twenty five percent is actually for
arbitrage. So given that we are the best at
valuing the assets, I would say we are in prime
position to find something that we can quickly
buy and sell or trade and make some good money
off of. Alt fund one is only available to
accredited investors, but other companies like
Collectible and Rally allow individuals to
purchase shares of cards and collectibles.
Leore hopes to securitize the fund so people can
trade it like a fund of the New York Stock
Exchange and one day display the cards to the
public. So here is one more card that we have not
disclosed publicly that we just purchased, which
is the 2011 Bowmen from Mike Trout Super Tracker.
So there is one of this in the world and his
rookie card as well.
And if you're investing in the fund, you get to
own own this card with us.
The sports card industry is hot, and it seems
everyone is profiting to some degree, our sales
in twenty nineteen were twenty seven million and
our sales for twenty twenty will top one hundred
million. Our auction sales for sports in twenty
nineteen were just over 70 million.
We're poised to do over eighty five million and
build twenty twenty ten auctions alone and
support an increase of at least 30 to 50 percent.
When you look at a high end car that was worth a
thousand, now it's twenty thousand and that's a
lot more. Collectors and industry experts believe
this era is different from the 1980s and 1990s.
It's a pure market.
It's just it's pure supply and demand.
What I can tell you at Tops is the demand today is
so far ahead of the supply, we're a made to order
business. So we start producing our products
months in advance. And when the demand is super,
super high, we never go back on press and make
more product. And even those sports are back.
Card collecting is not stopped.
There's even a strong chance the most valuable
card record will be broken in the near future.
I can tell you this the Luka Dončić, Logoman just
sold privately for thirty three point two dollars
million and not a lot of people know about.
So they're accelerating pretty quickly.
I will say we will see our first ten million
dollar card in the next two years.
There's no market that's just going to only only
go up. And so are there going to be corrections
in this market? I suspect there will like any
other, but I don't think I don't think that the
corrections are going to be as significant as
they will be in more traditional markets.
Whether you are an investor, collector or breaker.
It's a good time to be in the business of small
pieces of cardboard.
It's always hard to say where does this industry
go? The pandemic has definitely helped have a
step change in the growth.
And I think as long as the manufacturers do a
good job of creating products with value that are
high quality, that resonate with consumers, I
think we'll do a much better job of sustaining
this growth for many years to come.
There aren't as many shows as there used to be in
the eighties or as many brick and mortar stores.
But the shows that are left and the brick and
mortar stores that are left are using the digital
platforms to involve the same amount of people,
if not more people that were involved in this
hobby in previous generations.
So all those things are coming together to really
make it a vibrant and good market.
But I think it really traits back to this just
cycle of collecting. Things become vintage every
year. Thirty, twenty five, thirty years ago,
whatever was produced then is now vintage and it
cards isn't the aren't immune to that.
The cards that you're opening today with your son
or daughter that I'm opening, I can't imagine
they'll be worth anything in twenty years, but
they probably will be. So keep them.