Episode 36 Demand Windows: A Rising Tide Does NOT Lift All Cards

Released: January 5, 2026 | Duration: 27:36

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About This Episode

The Problem/Question: Most collectors assume a bull market means everything goes up. But demand doesn’t work like a tide – it works like a current. It has a direction, a velocity, and a target. When capital enters the sports card market, it flows into specific tiers, specific sports, and specific players. Everything else gets left behind.

The Framework/Solution: This episode breaks down the sports card demand window framework: why COVID demand started from the bottom up while 2025’s bull market started from the top down, what supply absorption capacity tells us about when markets peak, and how to track volume versus price to identify where demand is heading before it arrives. Includes a sport-by-sport analysis covering soccer, basketball, football, baseball, and Pokémon.

What You’ll Learn: By the end of this episode, you’ll have a four-question checklist you can run before any purchase to determine whether you’re positioned ahead of capital flow or behind it – and why 2026 may be the year the low end finally catches up.

Topics Covered

  • How demand flows as a current, not a tide  –  and what that means for your portfolio
  • Supply absorption capacity: why smaller markets peak earlier and fall harder
  • COVID demand (bottom-up) vs. 2025 demand (top-down) compared
  • CardLadder index limitations and how to build more accurate custom indexes
  • Volume vs. price as leading indicators: accumulation before breakout
  • Sport-by-sport demand window analysis for 2026 (soccer, basketball, football, baseball, Pokémon)
  • Why vintage Pokémon functions like bonds in an alternative asset portfolio
  • The “Studs and Duds” strategy for deploying capital in 2026
  • Why “a rising tide lifts all boats” is wrong for sports card investing
  • Four-question pre-purchase checklist for demand window positioning

Full Transcript Summary

This is the first Slabnomics episode of the new year. If this is your first time here, welcome. If you’ve been here before, welcome back. Today we’re going to build on the last episode – the State of the Hobby – where I talked about how billionaires moved the market in 2025 and where I forecast things moving in 2026. I gave you a big breakdown of data across basketball, baseball, soccer, and Pokémon. Today, I want to make sure we’re not just throwing numbers out there. I want to give you something actionable.

To do that succinctly, we’re going to focus on demand – specifically how demand works within windows.

Why a Rising Tide Gets It Wrong

This concept came up when I was looking through the data from COVID. I was looking at sales history and sales volume, and I noticed that different markets peaked at different times. Different subsets within those markets also peaked at different times. That’s where I was able to piece together how demand actually flows.

You know the term: a rising tide lifts all boats. I think we assume there’s some general tide that buoys up all the cards beneath it. But think about it logically. There are millions and millions of cards. Tens of thousands of players. When someone makes a purchase, they’re not buying all baseball players. They’re not even buying all the Cincinnati Reds players. They’re buying one card, of one player, at one time.

Demand in this hobby is not a tide. It’s a current. When it enters the market, it pulls in a direction. It determines what comes with it – and what gets left behind.

Here’s a sanity check. In 2021 and 2022, larger, more established markets peaked later. A lot of that is because the supply shock never really happened for those markets. Smaller, nascent markets – Pokémon, baseball, soccer – peaked earlier because they had less supply. Baseball and football had more inventory, so they took longer for that demand current to exhaust the available supply.

The key concept here is supply absorption capacity. Markets with thinner supply didn’t take long for sellers to exhaust themselves. Baseball? Everybody had cards they could sell. That demand window shifted into the sport where supply and demand could meet.

How 2025 Was Different From COVID

The biggest structural difference between COVID and 2025 comes down to where demand entered.

During COVID, demand started from the bottom. Everybody had time, everybody had stimulus checks, and everybody was searching for identity. They pushed into low-end cards all at once, which created supply shocks at the bottom. As that supply got absorbed, capital moved into mid-end, then high-end. That’s the price tracking we see in the data.

In 2025, everything moved from the high end first. There was a push into alternative assets from institutional capital. We saw that move into mid-end afterward. And that’s really where it stopped.

I also need to flag something important here for anyone who watched the State of the Hobby episode last week. I looked more closely at how CardLadder builds their low-end index, and I found something worth correcting. CardLadder took a snapshot of assets at one point in time – everything under $500. Cards can only exit the index if they sell for $500 or more. So you have cards that have plummeted to a dollar still sitting in the index, and you have cards that were supposed to be low-end but shot to $11,000 sitting there as purgatory cards – last sold publicly in 2017. These cards aren’t transacting, so the volume signal is choppy and unreliable.

My recommendation: build your own custom index on CardLadder. Pick 10 to 20 cards that you think are genuine barometers of low-end for the specific sport you’re watching. That’ll give you a much more accurate signal.

Supply Absorption Capacity Explained

The difference between how COVID and 2025 demand behaved comes down to one concept: supply absorption capacity.

Think of it this way. The demand current enters the market. Where it goes depends on where that current can find inventory to absorb. In 2021, Pokémon, soccer, and early-era baseball had thin supply. That current ran through the available cards quickly, prices spiked fast, and then the market settled because there was nothing left to buy at the old prices.

Baseball and football had deeper supply – more cards, more sellers, more inventory sitting in binders and shoeboxes. The demand current took longer to exhaust that supply, so those markets peaked later in 2022.

In 2025, the current entered at the high end. The institutional buyers – Kevin O’Leary types – were deploying capital into high-value alternative assets. The mid-end followed as those buyers looked for relative value. The low end hasn’t really felt it yet because the current hasn’t reached it.

But here’s where the value gravity concept comes in. Once the high end moves, the relative cheapness of everything below it becomes obvious to anyone paying attention. Messi’s high-end market moved, then Ronaldo looked cheap by comparison, and capital flowed into Ronaldo. That’s not random. That’s value gravity. The current tells you where the next cheap asset is.

Volume as a Leading Indicator

Here’s the most practically useful framework from this episode. Volume precedes price. Almost always.

Late 2024, Pokémon volume started accelerating long before prices actually boosted. The breakout happened because there was enough supply in the market to absorb initial demand. When that early supply was exhausted, prices broke out to a new level.

Four things to watch:

Transaction count versus dollar volume. If dollar volume rises but transaction count does not, you have whales concentrating. That’s a top-down flow signal.

Tier divergence. Movement only at the high tier with no movement in the low tier. This is exactly what’s been happening in 2025. The current isn’t strong enough yet to reach that demand.

Volume surge without a price surge. This is accumulation before the breakout. Things are about to pop.

Price surge without a volume surge. This is a supply vacuum – very fragile. Things will gap up and gap down. View this as a warning signal.

My current read: we’re moving from tier divergence into a volume surge before a price surge. We are mid-cycle, nowhere near demand exhaustion.

Sport-by-Sport Demand Window Analysis for 2026

Soccer has a known demand catalyst coming: the World Cup. A massive number of American fans are going to get introduced to soccer. The United States controls 52% of the entire resale card market, and the biggest gap between worldwide soccer popularity and US soccer enthusiasm is about to close – fast. But because the supply is so small in soccer, and print runs are tiny, this market is going to get caught up quickly. I think this is going to be a large gap up followed by a settlement into a more mature market. You’re going to have to move fast.

Basketball is a supply-side grind. There’s a lot of supply and demand has been somewhat capped. Things were printed aggressively during the boom years, similar to football. If you’re going to play basketball in 2026, you need the rare stuff. Refractors, numbered parallels – not the base.

Pokémon is something I’d describe as bonds in an alternative asset portfolio. The retro cycle is real: things get popular when we’re kids, and when we get money as adults, we go back to them. Vintage Pokémon – the 1999 base set – has a capped supply, and unlike modern Pokémon that keeps getting printed, it’s not growing. Money will always cycle back into vintage Pokémon. It smooths your returns, reduces emotional swings, and gives you a liquid exit in most market conditions.

Football has two structural problems: overprinting and myopic concentration into quarterbacks. Almost all the value in football cards flows to QBs. That means markets are perpetually diluted and vulnerable to prospect hype cycles. A rookie QB becomes the hot asset of the year, then defenses adjust, he has a down season, and the market corrects hard. Be careful.

Baseball’s demand windows are long and slow. The vintage collectors holding high-end pieces aren’t selling – they get more joy from the card than from the money. Those markets will tick up over time, but the interesting variable to watch is generational transfer. As the baby boomer vintage collectors age out, what happens to those collections? That’s a macro event worth monitoring.

The Four-Question Pre-Purchase Checklist

Before any purchase, run this:

  1. What tier is this card in?
  2. What direction is demand flowing in this market right now?
  3. Has this tier already received capital, or is it waiting for capital?
  4. Am I positioned ahead of the demand flow or behind it?

That’s it. Four questions. If you can’t answer all four with reasonable confidence, you’re speculating more than you realize.

And one final thought worth remembering. The market doesn’t reward truth. It rewards timing. Understand the windows through which demand enters. Know where that current is flowing. Move before everyone else moves.

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