Released: May 19, 2026 | Duration: 15:10
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About This Episode
You bought the new release. You were there at midnight on the Panini drop. Six months later, half the cards in your hands are down 40%, some even more. This is not bad luck. It is how the market actually works with new cards, and it is a pattern that has been running for at least a decade.
In this episode of Slabnomics, we name the cycle and walk through the three forces that drive it. The release premium is the gap between what cards are worth on release day and what they settle at six to nine months later, with supply artificially constrained while hype runs hot, much like an IPO with no SEC filing. The grading lag means the cards you see in month one are mostly raw, while the graded copies that set the real market do not arrive until month five or six, and gem rates above 60% can turn a PSA 9 into a failure certificate. Then comes the supply flood, with massive print runs that sit in warehouses and trickle out for years. Rising supply plus falling demand equals falling price.
We connect the pattern to the Wyckoff model from the prior episode, with the product manager at Panini as the composite operator who wants the release window to run hot. There are exceptions: true scarcity like one of ones and low parallels, and performance that beats expectations, with Caitlin Clark as the cautionary case of sky high expectations meeting heavy print runs. The play is to wait 90 to 100 days at minimum, ideally six months, track gem rates and pop growth, and remember the trade is in the rebuy, not the release. Frameworks at slabnomics.com.
Topics Covered
- The new release hype cycle from presale hype to month nine to 12 floor
- The release premium and the IPO comparison with no SEC filing for supply
- Grading lag: month one cards are raw, the real market comes in month five or six
- Gem rates above 60% turning PSA 9s into failure certificates
- The supply flood, massive print runs, and the upward sloping supply curve
- The composite operator at Panini and the Wyckoff release window
- True scarcity and performance as the two real exceptions, with Caitlin Clark as the warning
- The four point plan: wait 90 to 100 days, buy only proven scarcity, track pop growth, trade the rebuy
Full Transcript
The Pattern Nobody Names
You bought the new release. You were there at midnight on the Panini drop. You actually grabbed one off the website. But six months later, half the cards in your hands are down 40%. Some down even more. This is not bad luck. This is how the market actually works with new cards. And this is the model telling exactly the way you should not buy cards.
New card releases always go down. Almost every card out of those new releases is going to end up going down. And that's a pattern that's been running for at least a decade. Many collectors or people that have been in the space know a lot about it. It's been whispered. You probably heard it yourself. And today we're going to name it and we're going to talk a little bit about it in a short episode here. As always, we're going for quality, not quantity, because I am traveling this week. So I'm going to give you something to chew on and get you out here. Let's get into it.
How the Cycle Runs
Pick any flagship product, Panini Prism Football, Topps Chrome, Bowman Draft, and the cycle goes like this almost every time. A few weeks before release, hype starts building. Influencers are previewing cards on Instagram, dealers tease their case purchases, speculation starts about which rookies are going to be hot and which ones you should chase. Presale prices on hobby boxes come out at one price, and then immediately you'll see them on eBay for double that price.
When release day hits, all you see on Instagram is boxes being broken open. You see the aftermath the next day of all those cases thrown into the trash. The first big pulls are going up on social media within mere hours. Markey rookie cards get listed on eBay at sky high prices. Auctions start closing every day and they close hot. These early sold listings should set the anchor for everyone watching, right? That's how comps work. But for the next 30 to 60 days, those prices hold and then actually go down.
Supply is technically limited because every case hasn't been open yet. But with each case that's opened, less and less supply is out on the market, and more and more is rushing into a void that's already been there. And I think most people are trying to flip cards. They're not trying to grab them and hold on to them. They're trying to grab them, make a profit on them. That's where we are in today's world.
So what's the reality that we're dealing with? Collectors who buy at the peak are starting to wonder if they should sell even if they have great cards. Others will hold and convince themselves that they can catch the next wave, but oftentimes that next wave doesn't even happen. If you look four to six months after a product's release, that's where the real damage happens. People start getting pop reports, and everybody's waiting for the bottom to come in for these cards. The cards that everyone thought were rare turn out to have hundreds of graded copies. I'm looking at you, kabooms. Boxes still are being opened by late breaks, or boxes are still being opened by those late breakers, but it doesn't have the hype that it once had. Everything's side down, and people start looking at what's next.
This is the hype cycle in its true form. So you fast forward out to month nine to 12, you have a floor that's usually come in, and then people start reevaluating things. I talk about demand windows a lot when it comes to the top player, or I call it a gateway in the hobby. And oftentimes what happens is a lot of money comes into that gateway, but then over time it gets too expensive. So people move on to the next gateway, say the second best player in that set. And we see that as well when it comes to new sets. People are excited for the new thing, they buy it, and then after some time passes, it's no longer the new thing. So everything fades and people are left holding the bag. This is the pattern we see in modern, and it runs across pretty much all the sports and all price tiers. And people who lose money on it are the people that bought just after release.
Force One: The Release Premium
So why does this happen? Three forces drive the cycle. Let me walk you through each one quickly. The first force is what I'm going to call the release premium. This is the gap between what cards are worth on release day and what they're going to be worth six to nine months later. See, at release, supply is artificially constrained. The cards aren't rare, but there's so much hype and there haven't been enough open to fill that hype. The print runs are exactly what they're going to shake out to later. And we know that from the checklist. But if you think about what's actually available to people and what's new and exciting, that's why you still have a lot of demand not being met by supply yet.
We know that what's actually being traded in those days is a tiny fraction of the eventual supply. So think about what that's going to do with the pricing. We're going to hit an equilibrium where the hype is fading and the supply is increasing more and more. People know that. The smart ones know that what's going to happen.
In the stock market world, there's a clear comparison. It's called the IPO. Day one prices are set by limited float and maximum interest because everybody's on the new IPO. You've seen it on Bloomberg or you've seen it on whatever stock site you have. Everyone's excited about SpaceX going public. And so the stock, when it first comes out, has all this pent-up demand that puts the stock price onto a rocket ship. No pun intended. The same thing happens with cards, but there's no SEC filing to tell you what all the supply is going to look like. And there's no math to give you all that.
Force Two: The Grading Lag
So the second force that we have is grading leg. Here's what most people don't think about. The cards you're looking at on eBay in the first month are mostly raw. The cards that are going to be on the market in month five, six, those are going to be graded cards. And they give more clarity as to what the market for that player and that set will be. We know how PSA submissions have started lagging. They take a lot longer to get back, which means that Raw is even worse to be buying right off the output. You're not going to know how hard the gem rate is, although if it's modern, you know the gem rate's going to be very high, usually. And in that way, you're really betting blind. You're paying premium prices on that hype.
The cards have to be rare and high quality for a good performing player or a player that overachieves really for prices to hold and go up. And those three factors are really hard to get right. To be honest, there's a lot of disappointment with sets most of the time. And since we have 80, 90 parallels these days, think of how many of those would have to hold value for that set actually to hold value itself. And how many of those players would actually have to perform or outperform to their expectations. The math just does not math. It's almost impossible.
I talk about this kind of stuff in the PSA 9's dead carousel that I put out on Instagram. Gem rates above 60% usually turn a PSA 9 into a failure certificate. So everyone going raw to grade is going to be met with a lot of disappointment when they get those nines. And to be honest, I don't know if Topps and Panini designed it this way, but it's not an accident now. This is how the manufacturer makes the product work. They know this is how it happens.
Force Three: The Supply Flood
So we've gone over phase one and two. Phase three, you get the supply flood. Today we have massive print runs, and I'm sure that's not a surprise to you listening. So you have cases and boxes that are just sitting in back rooms in warehouses collecting dust. And there's no real urgency to get those sold after the initial hype is over. If you think about it then, we've talked about how the initial supply of coming to market is a lot, and then the grading supply comes in wave two. Well, wave three, the people that have been sitting on all of this supply start putting it out little by little, and you're still going to be having more and more supply come into the market. That's why at the end of the day, most cards go down.
If you want to hear that in finance terms, the supply curve for any modern card release is not flat. It's long, slow, and it's an upward slope that runs for years. On the other side of that, demand peaks at release and declines from there as collectors move on to the next product. Rising supply plus falling demand equals falling price time.
The Composite Operator
Let's take another spin on something we talked about in the last Slabnomics episode, the Wyckoff episode, talking about how the market moves in and out of cycles. I talked about something called a composite operator. And this is basically the operator that knows more than everyone else about what's happening on the supply and demand sides of sets. In this case, when we're talking about new releases, this is the product manager at Panini. They know exactly what's been done. They know where the pre-book slots are with the breakers and with the distributors, and they know who's getting allocation at the end of the day.
They want the release window to run hot. They want hype to peak in the first 30 days, and they want to sustain it as long as possible. They want buyers to anchor on those early sold prices. Why? Because they're the ones with the inventory. The longer they can keep that demand up, the longer they can keep pushing inventory at high prices out of the warehouses. This isn't a conspiracy. It's just a structural reality of how modern releases work. The product is designed and distributed to maximize the release window premium. And the marketing is designed to keep that premium running as long and hot as possible. The breakers and the influencers are basically the guys that are commoditizing the attention that allows the manufacturers to extend these windows. As always, the composite operator is the one who wins. So by the time the supply flood hits month six and those graded copies come in, they're already on to the next product.
The Exceptions: Scarcity and Performance
Now, this pattern is pretty reliable, but of course it's not universal because most things aren't. Knowing what this pattern looks like and how you can find the cards worth buying at release is something that might be worthwhile. So the first exception is true scarcity. One of ones, card numbered to five. When you have one of ones, when you have cards numbered to five or to 10 of players who have strong markets, those cards have a different supply curve because their supply tail is finite and known. And a lot of it isn't really based on hype. You look at LeBron James card that comes out, and out of five, you get a red tops chrome. And that's probably going to grow in value over time, especially if it's a PSA 10. So the release premium on a true one of one is real because the scarcity is real and established. Don't get me sorry on how many one of ones we have, but you know about it.
The second exception that we can talk about is, of course, performance. But that also has to go with expectations, as I talk a lot in Slabnomics. If the expectations are sky high, the player has to basically be an MVP coming out. If the expectations are low, but that player ends up being a good to great player, you're going to see a substantial bump as that market starts to firm up and recalibrate. Whenever you get rookie of the year, a championship from a key player or record-breaking season from one of these rookies that isn't Ballyhood, you get a very nice lift, two, three, four X, especially if you're looking at the rare pieces. But someone on the other side with those sky high expectations is someone like Caitlin Clark. She came out with so much supply being printed by the manufacturers because they knew people would buy it. She was one of the first women athletes to really hit the card scene in a big way. So they printed a lot. And at first demand was all there. But look at where her market is now. People were holding her up as the eventual GOAT within her first before she had even gotten before she had even gotten onto the court. And that leads to disaster in cards.
The Wyckoff Stages Applied to Releases
I talked about the four different stages in the Wyckoff model, and the same four stages apply to individual product releases. They run on a faster clock, though. The release day is the buying climax. You've got maximum volume, maximum hype. The euphoric retail buyer is in full force. But the 30 to 60 day window after release is the distribution phase. Volume stays elevated, but prices stay flat or drift slightly down. Smart money on the seller side is unloading. Then you get the markdown, supply flood, pop report catch up, demand exhaustion. The cards that don't have player performance get repriced. Pretty much all of them get repriced. Then you have accumulation phase after about a year or two. That's where cards actually trade on their own merit, and that's where smart money starts buying. If the player breaks out against expectations, you eventually get a new markup phase from the accumulation level. If they don't, they just keep heading down. This is the White Koff framework applied to product cycles. It's the same logic, but it's faster timeline, and it's the same outcome for the people on the wrong side of the trade.
What to Do About It
So what do you do about it? One, don't buy it released. Just don't do it. Wait 90 to 100 days minimum and best to wait six months. Two, if you buy it released, only buy true scarcity of proven players, true one of ones, low parallels. Three, track gem rates and pop growth before any commitment. Four, the trade is in the rebuy, not the release. Wait that 12 months and start getting that accumulation phase going.
All right. So if there's one takeaway to take from this episode of Slabnomics, guys, you have to assume that most cards you see are going to be going down from their release date and value. Cards always come back. You'll always see them hit the market. So make sure you aren't invested into the hype. You're invested into the reality, and that's going to make you a better investor overall.
Closing
Speaking of being a better investor, if you're not signed up to the Compt Newsletter, it's a free newsletter that I give out every Saturday morning at 7 a.m. bright and early for you, early birds. So to get signed up, just go to slabnomics.com and find Compt Newsletter Sign Up. It'll be there on the homepage. Get signed up. And then it'll definitely help you make better car buying and selling decisions. As always, definitely share this with a friend that helps the channel grow so much. Thank you guys so much for listening. Keep building, and I'll talk to you later.