Episode 3, S3: Business Rules For Disciplined Card Buying | Market Trends, Strategy & Discipline

what is happening everybody and welcome to the sports card C E O this is little Matt and big Matt today and we are diving into some listener questions and some market chat in a season unlike any other in nature league baseball history from Rodel the Coney Jr. There's the drive to right, Bob the man of the corner and what a amazing he is having. He hits this one hard, he hits the line of the left, Mike Traubt has ripped him over on. What's up guys Mike Traubt and listen to the sports card C E O his current bump on hand. We've got a lot of our listeners asking us hey boys we all speak to the market for those of you who might be new to the show Matthew is 16 years old but I would trust his market since against anybody and we're going to talk a little bit about this wild crazy sports card market that we're in and kind of how we got here and maybe give you guys a few tips and tools on navigating that in the days ahead so Matthew how you feeling today. I'm feeling great today I'm pumped up woke up early this morning had a good team lift with the basketball team, drank some coffee so I'm fired up I'm ready to be on here tomorrow. Matt Foley motivational speaker you've been in the basement for an hour drinking coffee you're ready. I know you're ready to go I know that great skit I mean we always make those references like we have a couple of references you always make and Matt Foley is always a trusty reference. You know the most awkward moment of my life is probably because you get Matt Foley because I'm your dad right and I've shown it to you but I was doing all on stage and no one laughed I was on stage it was a group of like middle schoolers or high schoolers and I did a Matt Foley reference and nobody knew what I was talking about. You got to know your environment like no one knows that you were showing me Matt Foley videos and I was eight thinking it was the funniest thing ever. I will say that the Matt you did it on the college game day a while back you put the pillow and you like dressed up but those are good times college game days where we started everything the guest speakers but look I'm ready I'm fired up today about the market I'm just I'm ready to get talk about some cards today let me let me qualify what you just said there so a lot of folks that follow us hamhouse sports on Instagram who follow the podcast talk about little Matt nah being a father son and how cool it is to watch us interact and just see how we have evolved in the card hobby or card business or whatever and I just wanted to say this to our listeners so when Matt he was probably six years old seven years old he had such an interest in sports he was always looking at statistics he was always memorizing stats and we always love college football because we cheered for NC State at the time we've given up on that pathetic pursuit no but no always going to be wolf packers but nonetheless math you and I I started putting him on camera and he's probably six years old we called it hamhouse college game day we would review the games of the week we would talk about our picks our players and all this kind of stuff and we had a little small social media following folks would jump on live and that was really the genesis of like hamhouse sports and then fast forward a few years he comes to me and says hey dad I want to get into sports cards and it was the same gift set of you're being on camera you being able to talk your market knowledge your memory of data that's really caused you I think to be super successful here so it's just cool man to see how that's transpired it's funny when we used to tell people told me we were in sports cards we tell them sports cards is basically a mix between fantasy football and hamhouse college game day you know tracking players and you know talking on camera but it's you know it's kind of how it started so it's cool to be on sports card CEO now much bigger platform and audience than college game day but it's cool to see where it's come so weekly wrap up Matthew you mentioned you know basketball is up and running you've been doing some lifting any kind of things in your life you want to share I mean no just been pretty busy with basketball and then on the card front I bought a cup been buying a couple of cards in auction here and then I'm going to share one of my favorite pickups Victor Wembe Nyama Rookie Kaboom PSA 7 when he's on one this year he's literally averaging four blocks a game third most in points MVP front runner right now so just picked up his rookie kaboom PSA 7 cheapest one the sold in six months so I really think that was a good buy and I could see a card like that a rookie kaboom of Wembe being probably $100,000 card one day I think Wembe will eventually end up being a top five basketball player of all time he's got the skill set he's got the mental composure and he's just the beast man so I'm all in on buying Wembe right now yeah shout out Gary V our original interview with Gary V at the 2023 national you said Wembe boomer bust and he said boom he said boom and he said it's because of his mental game and everyone was worried about his injuries but his pregame ritual before like I mean he's not going to get injured if he keeps doing what he's doing and hopefully he can stay healthy but I'm all in on Wembe right now yeah cool cool on my front man we snuck away or I snuck away to the mountains last week a nice little getaway as we talked about with Bubba on the first episode of season three you know really using November as a opportunity to reset and look at where was the last year what was good about it what's in the year ahead you know that that's a little bit of a moment for me so I snuck away last week to the Blue Ridge mountains and had a couple days with some buddies and just relaxed and took a deep breath and kind of hit reset we are in the middle of a transition at early oak for the work world we've hired two new producers which brings our total to six plus myself so the businesses growing you know it's a challenging moment in time right now for for growth and economics and all that kind of stuff so certainly keeping our eyes on a lot of different things but nonetheless the the card thing we're trying to wrap the year up and put some pivots on there but today we really wanted to attack this episode twofold it's no secret that the card market is changing and shifting okay and we're going to talk about how we have approached that and how we would encourage other people and we've got a couple of listener questions as well so one of the things that I want to go ahead and start off with is one of the reasons why I believe the sports card market is in an interesting state right now it's the same thing that drove it up is the same thing that is causing it to be more volatile and that is the corporate involvement yeah just the theory I have I have no clue if this is true or not but sports card market this summer was probably the hottest it is it is the hottest ever been since covid we saw recently in the last two weeks that underdog very big sports betting app traded repack and prize picks huge sports betting app created a repack was the pump this summer because of these massive literally these repacks they spent $40 million on these cards yeah so was these repacks this summer was all of the money come in like was the market hot because of prize picks and underdog preparing for the repacks yeah like because obviously they're not buying anymore because the repacks are to set but do you think that the market was up because they had to fund the repack early yeah I definitely think so the corporate involvement in the sports card game is what was driving the values these were not end users buying cards to collect these were businesses buying inventory and trying to corner the market on certain rare goat type cards and those of us who were in the market could find our way through and navigate that and and capitalize on it and sell to those entities or sell on auction and then the fury or feverish kind of interest in the hobby with people trying to buy in and getting inventory it just created an atmosphere where cards were going over comp everything was getting sold and if you had the right acquisition channels and liquidation channels you were making good money yeah and and we did so I want to kind of open up the episode and talk about gamblings influence on the sports card hobby yeah I mean obviously we see fanatics is one of the biggest sports book companies in the country and this summer they implemented I mean we posted a real bad it got a like from Michael Rubin in about 20,000 views of people at the national protesting no fees no fees fanatics offered no fees if you take fan cash which fan cash can either you can either buy stuff on fanatics collect or or use the money and your fanatics gambling account and doing that I literally talked to someone last week runs a card shop and they were saying yeah we just sold a hundred thousand dollars on fanatics and we took zero percent fees and literally took all fan cash yeah so so one of the rules if you've not seen the movie yet because it's probably a little outside my comfort level letting you watch it yet but the movie casino fantastic movie Scorsese you know Joe Pasci Robert De Niro sharing stone it tells the story of the mafia's involvement in Las Vegas in the early days of Las Vegas's development and one of the things there's a there's a monologue in the movie and it is Robert De Niro who manages the casino he said something to the effect of don't let leave the building like if if a gambler's in the room and he's doing well go and offer him a sweet and offer him a dinner yep keeping in the system getting back to the table and he tells the story about he's like some some guy took us for a million dollars so we upgraded him to the penthouse you know we we entertained him or whatever and guiding back the next day and he ended up losing that million and he lost a million chasing back he said so we were up basically a million dollars on this guy because we kept him in the system. One of the things that's super interesting, if people are putting money into the system in sports cars, let's say they take five grand, they go buy into a repack. Okay, let's say they hit, right? They're five grand now, 10 grand, you know, and it keeps this fault since of I'm up. Well, I mean, it's the same thing. Like, there's a college basketball player here in Wilmington, North Carolina. He wants to buy a Cooper flag autograph. He's like, I don't want to spend $1,000 on it. I'm just going to go buy $200 box and chances are you're not going to hit one in 10 cases. He opens one box, hits it. He goes, opens more three more boxes didn't hit one. So he was up the $500 in the beginning. Yeah, you should take your win right there and he opened three more boxes and didn't hit anything. So, so the idea is the nature of opening boxes of cards, all right? It is a gambling edits, at its core, it is gambling. You're going to open the cards. Most people, not because you're collecting them. So I tell you a perfect example of us. So, y'all know stories for kids that you know, listeners. We go to Bubba's house and Bubba convinces dad. So let's open a boom and case and we pull a Zaire Hope bread. We're running around the house, throwing our hands up and Bubba says, you want to go for one more? If we wanted to hit the Zaire Hope, I promised you we wouldn't vote for another one. We would have been three grand in the hole. But since we hit it, you know, you hit the one big card. You have to go back and big mass like wall and room. Let's do it. We open another one. Barely hit anything in the next case and trash and trash. And that just shows, I'm taking psychology right now as a class and just learning about the human brain and gambling and addictive, like it's crazy to learn about this stuff and how just because they chase you and something with sports books, 50% profit boosts on the Monday night game. Oh, this is definitely a lock and it doesn't hit. I mean, it's so like, it's such like psychology and like that they implement it. And so what you saw in the in the card hobby was kind of those rules of engagement for casinos being applied to a consumer product here. And you see the investment component to like comparing it to stocks or alternate investment classes. And it just went nuts. And now, you're seeing it settle out. And it'll weed out some of the bad money, you know, some of the the bad players, the bad actors. And again, the collectors are always going to be here. And so in this type of market, I told them that the other day, I said, but we've never done high-end cards in a volatile market. We've always been doing higher end cards in a rising market. So it's a false sense of security about a your skill set because you're like, oh, dude, I'm a genius. Not you, but this anybody's like, oh, I'm a genius. I'm crushing it in cards right now. It's like, dude, you have to be dumb, you know, to some degree, yeah, to not to not do do well over the last few years with the rising, you know, kind of environment. But that said, it gives you this false sense of security. This is always going to be there. So gambling influence on the hobby drastically changed it. It got a lot of people in. The hope is is that those people will love the hobby. And they'll start collecting cards. And it will build collectors. And as you have organizations like fanatics putting programs together to keep collectors engaged, it will weather the storm of that capital that just gets thrown in. But what I've noticed, and I know you've noticed this is a lot of the repacts now are moving to ultra low end and ultra high end and ultra high end. I saw a picture yesterday, someone posted on a Facebook group, I need only 90 to 100 K basketball, 60 to 90 K baseball and 80 to 100 K football. That's top zero, zero, 0.001% right there that we've never even owned a card worth $80,000. And we've been doing this for four years to have like, that's like top, top ranges. And then the ultra low end and let's get into this conversation of low end. I had a big, big repat company come to me this summer and say, I really want you to start doing low end for me. And I wouldn't do it. And low end's different when you you're dealing with, you know, one card, two cards at a time. But there are people that were dealing in massive cards that literally like almost sold out their whole business just to sheet low end cards for these repackers. Like repackers, what I found out, they pay strongest on the cheapest cards. Because they need the answer. We see people post need one to a $100 cards paying 105%. And you know why they need the cheap ones is because not everyone can afford a $15,000 repack. But your classic dad and your son can afford a repack. And they're going to do it every time. Like we were talking to a guy, we went to a real estate event. There's a guy's like, I get on what not. I put my kids to bed. I swipe on there for three hours. And just get into $20, $50 repacks. And they need the low end. And my thing to y'all is like, let's just say I did go out. And for a whole week, I worked my butt off to buy cheap cards at 95% because you have to pay strong for cheap cards. And let's say I average a 50 bucks a card paid 95% sell them at 100. So I'm making 5% on what's that five grand? When I literally could go just buy a card for five grand, sell 5,500. And the same amount of time that I could just do one of the 100 of them I could do for one. Well, that was that was part of our transition a couple years ago. We said rather than deal with 10 $500 cards, let's deal with $15,000 card. And being able to level up like that was a big, big, you know, jump for us. And it ended up working out extremely well because the same rules from most part apply to a 50 dollar card, a 500 dollar card or a $5,000 card. You know, it's the same kind of market, the same kind of percentages or whatever. And so when you start to kind of find your niche, I mean, you can buy and sheet low end cards. You can buy low end cards and flip, you know, you might have people who, I mean, when we first met David, David had gone and graded his entire childhood collection. And he had hundreds 500. He has a seven Kevin Garnett cards where if you find a situation like that and somebody's looking to generate capital, you can buy out collections and then turn around and flip them. So there's there's opportunities anywhere. But again, right now the market is trending towards really low end product or really high end products. And I love the point we just made about going out and buying out collections. I think that this market downfall is going to scare a lot of the people that gambled out. And recently, I can think of two deals in the last few months where $20,000 plus deals of people that have just gotten into repacks and literally just have all their cards are to show, like don't even, they don't even price them. They're like, hey, what is this worth? You're telling me what you're going to pay? And these are the type of guys that are not collectors and they see the market starting to go down and they're going to want to get out. So if you have the capital right now to take advantage of people wanting to get out of cards, then that's free money for you. Like that's that's one thing you got to look at. And a low mark, like I think the biggest question that kind of the main idea today is how can you make money in a bear market? Yeah. Well, the saying goes bears make money, bulls make money, pigs get slaughtered. Right. You can make money in a bear. You can make money in a bull. But if you're greedy, if you try to be a pig, you get slaughtered. And so again, one of the things that you just mentioned is you have to have conviction in the market overall and an understanding of the market overall to want to weather the storm. If you panic sell and it's called in investment terms, it's called the liquidity pinch. Okay. If on my shelf right now, I have a Michael Jordan star rookie. Okay. We talked about it yesterday. The card values 60 grand. If somebody comes to me and says, hey, I'll give you 60 grand for that Jordan star rookie. We said no. It'll sit on my shelf at 60 grand. If somebody comes and says, how off are you 75? Done. Why? Because that card at $75,000 makes more sense for me to have the money than the actual card itself, right? And again, that's where you have to look at the market and talk about this liquidity pinch because if there's a liquidity pinch and people are selling cards, they're readily available price goes down. But if they're selling cards that are rare cards. I mean, we've noticed that with the lot. Let's just look at, I mean, I think I mentioned this last time on the podcast, the Jordan scoring kings versus the Jordan thunder and lightning. The Jordan thunder and lightning sold in June for $16,000. Same exact card, same sir, everything. So for $33,000 on finance. So a double in price on that card, one of the rarest Jordan inserts. There's only 300. There's only 300. And there's only 25 in a PSA. And then the scoring kings PSA, $6,100 national and one like they're under 4K now. Really? Yeah. And so literally they've almost half because there's not enough end users on the back end to keep up with the demand for the liquidity pinch of people. It's a collector's card. It's a Jordan. But there's 6,000 of them. Are there 6,000 collectors of a Jordan scoring kings PSA? And I would say they're probably are, but there's more that probably need the thunder and lightning that with their 300 exactly. So this leads us to I think this is a perfect opportunity to talk about the flier versus the star. The flier is down the star is up because there's only 600 stars greater with PSA. So the end of the day it becomes like I have a star Jordan and you don't. And there's never going to be any more printed. The fliers there's 60,000 of them graded like you can literally go on eBay. There's over it has to be over a thousand fliers listed. There might be two or three stars listed. Yeah. And that's why I think the star will always be superior to the flier Jordan. Well, when you start looking at specific cards and this goes into this next little thought here is right now is an awesome opportunity to keep your eyes open for getting PC rare cards at value. because when you have a liquidity pinch and people are looking to sell. That's when you can take advantage. I will tell you, we have bought more high-end cow ripkin in the last two months than we've bought in the last year. Two, three years. Yep. Because they got put on auction. For two years, you did not see a PMG ripkin go on auction. I don't even think we share that we bought the PMG ripkin, but there you go. Yep. PMG ripkin purchased. Yes. Credentials ripkin. The Credentials ripkin and the PSA-9 have not seen it on auction in two years. Just bought it. The certified mirror, gold, ripkin. These are cards that they're literally less than 20 graded. And again, they've been sitting in collections. And when they come up, you just have to get them. Yeah. I mean, and I think we almost look at it like, I, something I do is like, when I have a conversation about anything, I try to find a way how I can relate to the cards. And yesterday, I'm talking my grandma. And we were, she'd got to leave the house and tell her by. And she's like, yeah, we have a meeting with our stock brand, like Time to Sell. And she's like, I ain't selling my stock. It's always funny because I have a little bit of stocks and I always get on them because they love stock market. But it really opened my eyes and they're like, well, trust me, it might go down in that, this year, but give it two years and we'll be back up 10%. And just thinking about that, like those ripkins, they might go down in the next three months. But you honestly, you put them in a shoe box under your bed and you leave them in two years, they'll be double your money. Well, you're talking about the rarest of the rare cards of that player, you know what I mean? And there's always going to be a market for that because of the ego, the human ego goes, I have it, you don't, what you just said. And it is, oh, I thought I got a notification. Oh, they're a great order. Yeah. We have a grading order on a couple of autographs at PSA. And I got a PSA notification. I thought we're going to do it live on air. That would have been sick. I was freaking a PSA. That orders what a month overdue. A month overdue. A month overdue right now. And they just opened up the value tiers again. So, and again, you look at the perfect storm though. PSA grading delays, right? The liquidity pinch, like all of that happening at the same time midterm elections, economic, boom. I mean, all of it is kind of like this perfect storm. But to your point, it does come back around, especially on rare collections. I mean, and always you can look at every year that like November, November, December, January, always to soft times in the market, especially for us. We've been in the last year. We bought more bummin and November decent. Like, you got to think, a year back to this day, we were probably behind Conner, Conner. Yeah. Just starting to buy Conner. So, so again, just the the topic of conversation is just understanding the market, understanding where the opportunity is, how the market's flowing right now. And I would say we've done a really good job of limiting our exposure, limiting our risk. We've got capital available when the right moment comes when the right opportunities come along, we can pick them up. And so it's being positioned to manage the market well, instead of being over leveraged, over extended, you know, talk about people with rental properties all the time. There's people that have rental property portfolios and they leverage every house max value on their equity to go acquire more assets. Therefore, they're required to have cash flow. You don't have to sell off an asset or you have to just get absolutely blasted. It's no different. Before we get into the next topic, I have a game that I've thought of before. I think we don't we did it maybe two years ago on the podcast that we're going to do and the listeners can play along with. So I'm going to be five cards and you're going to tell me if it's up or down in six months and up and down in a year. A year six months in a year. Yep. Okay. So start off, we're going to go with literally one of the most high selling cards of all time. We're going to go with the King Griffey, like it sells for the most, the King Griffey upper deck 1989 rookie card PSA 10. I think lower in six months and lower in a year. Really? You think so that card was like 3,500 last December 6,500 right now. So you think that card is less than 6,500 dollars in a year and six months. I do. What about the Brady crew? The Brady crew of 10 got the 34,000 dollars this summer back down to 20. You think over under 20K in six months in the year. What's the population on 10? 15. I think I don't see anything as 1,500. But 1,500 double check that real quick. I will double check that. But I do know it's around a 20,000. You're talking about the Bumman, 2000, Bumman Chrome Brady, PSA 10. Yeah. I think bingo 12, 1250. I was really close, but 21,500 was the last sale. Double check, double check the Griffey population on PSA 10. 5,000. Okay. I would say the Brady crombs are down. So there's 4255 Griffey's. And if you look at match grade on the Griffey, if you skip it back to, let's just go to, September 9, 6,350, 6,200, 6,200. Yeah. What's it doing right now? Right now on November 1, 51, 51, 40. Yeah. That's in a month. It's down in a month. So that's the Griffey. So for those of you who can't keep up with the pace of things, Matthew's talking about the 1989 upper deck, Griffey Jr. Star rookie in a PSA 10. There's 40. How many copies? 42, 5, 4200 PSA 10s. It got up to 6200. It's currently sitting around 5. I do think it is lower in six months and probably lower to flat in a year. I mean, again, with the market cap, if you do four, what's what's the number here? So if you look at 42, 55 times 42, 55 times 5,000, yeah, that's 21 million dollars. So is there 21 million dollars of interest in in the Griffey? I don't know. I think the card goes down about, I think it hits that to where it was. So, so now do that with the Brady. There's 15 or 1200 or 1250. Yeah, and then and it's doing what 21. That's 26 million. Yeah. So it's about the same market cap. What I think is probably interesting is is I think you would find the market cap of the Griffey and the market cap of the Brady to be fairly similar. The problem is as Griffey had one rookie of that kind of caliber. Brady had the couple. But that's still the iconic. So I would say Brady is my for your game. My Brady would be down and down. You think what about 1986, Fleur George? How about this? PSA eights were 21,000 dollars at the national. One just sold for 13,800 dollars. So the PSA eights got up to what? 21k. Now they're a down a third. They're down 30%. That's insane. I like, and I normally, I like the last sales, 13, 8, 16, 2, 14, 6. So it's around 15. One population population 9,450. She's times 13k. No, no, no, times 15k. 15k. Times 15k. That's 141 million dollars. So that goes to show you that's the market cap on a PSA eight Fleur Jordan versus the market cap on a PSA 10 chrome Brady. Dude, it's nuts. So I don't think the market cap's that much higher on Jordan or should be. Yep. I think Jordan, I think the Jordan Fleurs are probably overvalued. I think they come down again. You think lower and lower again. Yeah, I just, I just, it's market cap. It's how much money is being willing to be put into on those three cards that you've just told me. I'm saying down. So what's the next one? 1984 star Jordan PSA six. This is up. And here's one. So the last sale was 82,000 dollars and it's a pop 148. And which grade is this six? 12 million market cap. Yep. So you think some of the market cap from PSA eight Jordans are going to move into the star Jordans? Oh, yes. Absolutely. Yeah. If you look at PSA graded 712 PSA eight value 560 grand PSA. So the market cap on a PSA eight Fleur Jordan is 10 times the market cap on a PSA six star. Yeah. 10 times. And it's not. Well, I guess the only deciding factor is is are people willing to buy into a card at 82,000 when they can go buy in one. And then, I mean, I remember everyone calling, I mean, so everyone, I don't know if you know Dave high speed card chase. He's your star Jordan guy, right? If you want to start Jordan, you go through Dave. And Dave sold Jeff Wilson a star Jordan PSA eight at the national three years ago for 100 grand. And Jeff and Dave made a comment. He said star PSA eight will outsell Fleur PSA 10 in two years. Yeah. Everyone called nuts. It's literally triple. Yeah, it is. It's triple. So again, this is kind of nuanced guys for our listeners. This is very kind of nitty gritty when you start to really analyze and understand the sports card market and look at the market cap and the population, all that kind of stuff. It's fascinating. It's what drives the market. The availability, the regulated cards, every card that you've said, the Jordan Fleur, the Brady Chrome, the, the Griffey, you can get your hands on. It's hard to get your hands on last card. And we're gonna make it quick. 1952 tops Mickey Manor PSA 2. Do you think this is a tough card, man? It is. Do you think it's up down flat? Because the market's going down. I think it's up because it's, it is a card that that everybody wants to own. And from a population standpoint, there's not six thousand of them, 10,000 of them, eight, whatever. There's only what, whether 3,000 of them total grade. 3,000 total grade. Yeah. So I just think that there's enough demand on that card as one of the most iconic of all time. It makes me feel strong and confident in the value of that card, not much, but I do think it would be up and up. So fun little game. All right. Moving on here. So the final thing on the episode today, I want to talk about is when you have a market that's changing. We talked about this yesterday. And this is what I really want our listeners to take home. The word discipline becomes more and more important. All right. And we were on a call business call with Bubb at the other day. And we talked about the difference between an opinion and a rule. Okay. And what I mean by that is in the business, it's fine. for you to have an opinion against the five cards that I just said. You could say, "Hey, my opinion's different," right? But then we establish rules that we operate by, and here would be a rule. We are not holding a Griffey PSA 10 for longer than 30 days. I mean, and we literally establish, establish a couple of rules on this business card. I don't know if you want to mention them, but one of the rules was, we can't. And this is the business side of the hobby, guys. This is not our personal collection. So we have our personal collection, as we're duality here. We have the Ham House, which is our collection and our cards that we go after. They sit on the shelf. And then there's the business as far as trying to break consistent revenue. So from a revenue standpoint, one of those rules is no card held over 30 days. Yeah. And we did an awful job at that rule on some cards, but bubble was pretty clear about how it's kind of like. There's no card we hold more than 30 days, another rule that we implemented. A card is either at grading, coming in the mail, or on auction, that we don't have cards sitting in our house. Yep. Now, again, if you buy a card, it goes back to a rule that every card has to have a game plan. Right? What are we doing with it? What's our time frame? What's our expectation? And then everybody in the business gives it the thumb up and we move on or we say thumbs down and we don't move on. So we're just getting really strategic and limited on what we buy. But the good news is, it's like you said, if people are selling collections and you can cash them out and you've got a game plan with those cards, then you can make it work within the model. So I would just say as an encouragement to our listeners, if you do operate the sports card, your business, have a rule, okay? Here's an example. If you want to have it as part of your business strategy to buy into repacks or buy on what not or open cards and breaks, that's fine. But you better have a rule on limiting yourself and on selling profitable cards when you hit them to keep your cash form. And no thing is like, if you're a seller on what not, I think that you would take a massive hit. Like if the economy like took a big hit, like if we had another like stock market crash or something, because all your buyers, your buyers aren't people that are flipping cards. Your buyers are people that just want that are like grown men going on what not 11 o'clock at night, buying cards to kind of sit them away like for dubbing hits. They're not going to buy cards. If their stock market account is down 10%, or if they're in debt. So I really think that what not sellers can take a hit if since that's 90% of the audience. Yeah. Yeah. When you understand kind of what it is. But again, it's about the kind of card, the type of card and kind of the stretch. So it's fine for you to have an opinion that the market's up, the market's down or whatever. But the question is, do you actually have a rule and are you disciplined to follow that rule that would include things like not getting over extended? One of the rules that I've always held on our PC set of things is I want as much cash in the business as we have inventory. And right now that's a little bit offset because we've had a just massive increase in the Star Jordans value, buy in some of these rare ripkins or whatever. Well, I think we should aim look about value. I think we should look at purchase price because Star Jordans literally almost tripled because we got it. So it's not even fair. You have as much cash available as you have cash exposed. Yes. I agree. Yeah. And that's a rule that I like to follow. And you'll be like, why can't we buy something else? I'm like, nope, we got to go sell something before we can buy something because I like to have that balance. Right. So, all right. Final kind of thoughts for the episode. We had two listener questions. If what we'll deal with the AI one last, but let's deal with this, talking about a strategy in the sports card market of buying based on future performance. Okay. Let's use a football example and let's use a basketball. You know what I look at it. I look at it as putting a bet on a player. And instead of a bet, you're buying a card. So let's just say you went and you, I mean, it's almost like educated. Okay. Patrick Mahomes is playing the third worst past defense in the NFL. I'm going to go buy a kaboom, Patrick Mahomes. And hopefully he dominates those for four touchdowns and the card goes up. Or you can. But I don't think it's that immediate though. I think in a bet that pays out, it pays out. But I think with cards, I think you have to have more of, hey, before the season, who's going to win MVP? Oh, yeah. That kind of thing. Or you can go equally if you would have bought a guy like Jamir Gibbs before David Montgomery got traded. He probably gone up because then he don't split carries anymore. He's the number one running back best fantasy player, one of the most valuable players in the league. Or if you would have bought a guy like Jackson Smith and Jigba, he's probably one of the, he's, am I opinion is the best receiver in the league? But if you would have bought him, I remember Gary was, or Bubba was buying really big Jackson Smith and Jigba. I watched him sell gold prism for $500 at the Atlanta card show because he was just this like wide receiver. And now it's probably $5,000. I sold a gold downtown Jackson Smith and Jigba for $1,500 and $10,000 on our card right now. Again, that's a fun game to play because you've got a guy's card that you get to watch on Sundays or, you know, whenever he's playing or whatever, but that is a much more volatile game because of things like Zion Williamson, because of things like Michael Penix Jr., because of things like Desmond, these guys are now pretty much nonexistent and their card values are not. But when you get into the speculation, you look at that 2022 to 2021 to 2023 quarterback class. Absolutely horrendous. I would be curious to see. No, no, there's not a single one, but he, his stuff crashed. I know, but I'd love to see what Trevor Mac Jones, Justin Fields, Kray Lance, Trevor Lawrence, those were the big four, Zach Wilson, those were the big five. One out of the five is still starting quarterback and his cards are still half from where they were. Two, Kenny Pickett, Sam Howell, Desmond Ritter, awful trash. If you look at 2023, 2023 wasn't Bryce Young, CJ Stroud. Who else was in that class? No, the next year. And that's why I stopped there. The next class had Jaden Daniels, Drake May, Bonix, Caleb Williams, Michael Penix, like they's all been decent. But dude, the three classes before that, rough. Yeah, it just goes to show you the longevity of players in the league for sure. So again, buying on performance is a strategy that you can hit with. But again, this goes back to, would we talk about that on the last episode? Who was the baseball player? We said his card's cheerio. His card sold for more when he was 19 year old in double A in any one of the world series. Now I think that's going to transition and trend upward over the next couple of years. It's the same thing. Doing more before he debuted and he had literally a top rookie season of all time, his cards do less. So again, the, and that goes to show you that gambling is what drives the sports culture. So why even gamble on the top? Your gamble is buying Jarlyn Susanna for $4 short base auto and it or Mizorowski, Mizorowski is your gamble. You gamble on a pitcher who threw hard and you bought his purple auto for 20 bucks and now it's doing 25. Well, it's like you either play in the big pond on the big players and you stay quick with them because everybody wants to get them. But I think you're going to see a transition in the days ahead, especially with the lockout and all the stuff going on. People are going to be less likely to buy the big name guys because their values do not hold up through where it's the deeper dives. The guys that you bought at $50 that go to $500. It's the Caleb Bonhamers. It's guys like that on the, on the Bowman side, the Mizorowski's. It's the guys like that. The problem is when the market gets so flood, everybody's looking for the next guy that everybody becomes the next guy and that's not sustainable. I know. And it was fun when we were talking about it like Conor Griffin, let's just say, you know, he won World Series, he got a batting title and he plays great in MLB. He'd have the same stats as Trey Turner. He'd have the same accomplishments as Trey Turner and Conor Griffin's words did 20 times more than Trey Turner's. 100%. 100%. Final kind of thought of the episode. And again, to our listeners, I appreciate you guys tuning in with us as always, your questions, your feedback, you know, the follows on Instagram and social or whatever are super helpful for us. We love talking about this. Obviously, this is just a chance for us. These are the conversations we have every day, just inviting you in. Next week, Bob and I are going to be on talking about business and how we handle adversity. I did talk to Kern this week. He said that he wants to jump on soon and talk about Gen 1 and excited to do that. So just be advised, as we told you as we headed into season three, you're going to be a little bit of a different schedule, not all of us on at the same time, but we're still moving forward with, you know, providing great content for you guys and I appreciate you tuning in. So final thought of the day, somebody asked you, Matthew, what AI tools are you using to help you in the sports card hobby? Just expose my secrets, uh-huh, that you wanted to talk about it. Yeah. I mean, if you want to make money in sports cards, you can make money however you want, but you can increase your profit using AI. It is. It's a research tool. You know, it's a resource that if you want to increase your profit, you should use it. It helps time and money and in sample of how it helps me my time. So all I have to do, I want to sheet a card for someone, I have to type it out, look at the thing. It takes a while to sheet cards, like people that sheet cards, you all know it's a paint. I can snap three pictures in the AI. Can you sheet these using this format done in a minute? And all I do is copy, paste, put on a sheet, fine. And that is literally an hour time saver on, you know, if it takes a minute, a card, it's literally- So AI can perform tasks that save you time, which allow you more time to be able to to the things that you need to do that make you money. So it's efficiency tool. The second piece of AI is research. - Yep, so if you're looking at, hey, can you pull the population down? - Population price. - Yeah, so this market research that we just did here, you know, that was all done just by card ladder and whatever. - So what I've done, this is like, I don't think I've shared this on the show before, but I've been trying to find cards that fit in a certain standard, which is basically. - So think about price, it's like, the way I wanna explain this is it's about price ranges. So when you're looking for value, it's if a PSA 10 does this, a PSA 9 does this, a PSA 8 does this and a 7 does this, and then you compare those populations against the price difference. - Like what does it make sense? - Exactly. You're looking for inefficiencies in the market based on population and price jobs. - So an example is the 2023 Prism Victor-Women Yama Blue. There is a 60% PSA 10 rate versus PSA 9. So I think there's 50 PSA 9s and like 77 PSA 10s. The PSA 10 does three times more than the nine when it's not as rare. So it should be like a 2x difference since it's a high gem rate, but there's a 3x difference. And AI did all that. I literally said, can you find me cards with a 3x difference that has over 50% gem rate, pumped out 10 cards like that. And I went and bought a couple of the cards that are on that list. - So you start to understand inefficiencies in the market, you're using it as a research tool. And all it does is just it just gathers information and it presents you with information. The danger is when you start getting predictive. So I would say don't use AI to come up with strategy. You analyze the data and you be the brain behind the strategy. And this is, you know, whether it's, you know, if your sports betting or, you know, cards or whatever, like you have to make the decision, but use AI for the research, information gathering or whatever, like I am in a survivor pool for football this year. And I've been feeding our survivor spreadsheet into AI each week. And I've been saying, hey, based on who's already selected what, what teams are most likely to be chosen this week? And I'm kind of picking against the field. And the field went from 1700. We're down to that 27 entrance now. And so it's just a utilization of the AI tool for the assimilation of information. So that's enough on that. I think it is useful. You know, there's AI tools now that are basically scouring the internet for listings. They're scouring-- - I mean, I know my baseball coach last year had a AI tool that literally would find, he literally would just put in cards that are, he would put in card, card letter information, find cards that are at less than 50% of their value with less than 10 minutes left. Any player, he could put it in. Rome and Anthony, $20 card sitting at four bucks, by the eight bucks. And AI did all of that for him, because it was just an algorithm that he put in. So I think there's great money to be made in AI. - Yeah, just opportunities on how it helps you. So well, that's it, man, for today's episode, we'll map it like that was really solid, a lot of good information there. Again, just inviting you guys into conversation about what we talk about, what things look like in Ham House and how we navigate this duality between being collectors and, you know, being investors or businessmen in the sports card space. So we appreciate you guys tuning in to the sports card CEO. Until next week, peace. (upbeat music)