Episode 33 The Future of Sports Cards: Data, AI & Discovery Ft. Tyler ‘TPott’ Nethercott

Released: December 9, 2025 | Duration: 1:01:48

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About This Episode

Tyler "TPott" Nethercott is Senior VP of Product at Sports Card Investor and one of the architects of Market Movers – the most comprehensive card data platform in the hobby, tracking 6.1 million cards across 11 auction houses. His background is as unlikely as it is perfectly suited: international business degree, failed Air Force officer career, nearly a decade in credit and risk analysis, SQL database management, and lean innovation work before a childhood binder full of Penny Hardaways pulled him back into cards in 2019.

This conversation covers the full spectrum. Tyler walks through the early days of Market Movers – how beta testing turned into a full-time job and eventually into one of the most important data tools collectors and investors have. From there, the discussion moves into the decision-making frameworks that actually separate successful investors from everyone else: floor versus ceiling thinking, opportunity cost, probability-weighted outcomes, and the sunk cost fallacy that keeps people parked in underperforming positions.

The back half of the conversation turns toward what's next. Tyler's concept of "augmented discovery" – using AI not to make price predictions (which he approaches with significant caution) but to help collectors explore what's out there, understand why certain cards command premiums, and apply that logic to overlooked segments – is one of the most practical takes on AI in the hobby available anywhere. If you've ever stumbled across a card you didn't know existed and wondered if there was a system for doing that on purpose, this is the episode.

Topics Covered

  • Tyler’s path from banking, credit risk analysis, and SAP data projects to SVP of Product at Sports Card Investor
  • How Market Movers was built: beta testing, database construction, 6.1 million card catalog across 11 auction houses
  • Why critical thinking and problem-solving beat encyclopedic checklist knowledge
  • Floor, ceiling, probability, and opportunity cost as the core framework for card investment decisions
  • Sunk cost fallacy: why staying in underperforming positions costs more than taking the loss
  • How Market Movers approaches roadmapping: competitive parity vs. competitive differentiation
  • The case against AI price prediction in sports cards – and what AI is actually good for
  • Augmented discovery: how to explore overlooked segments by understanding why established cards are expensive and applying that logic to adjacent cards
  • The difference between “collect what you like” and “invest in what others will like later”
  • Why exploration and discovery – finding cards before the market does – is the highest-alpha activity in the hobby

Full Transcript Summary

Tyler's Background and the Market Movers Origin Story

Tyler Nethercott came into the hobby the way most people do: childhood cards in a binder, years of disinterest, and then a rediscovery. He found his old Penny Hardaways and Gary Paytons in the summer of 2019 while his wife was trying to get him to pack for a move. A coworker pointed him toward Jeff Wilson's Sports Card Investor content, which was then just a few episodes old. Tyler became one of the first 50 subscribers.

From there, he joined the Discord, became a moderator, and messaged Jeff with a simple observation: you're building charts and graphs manually, and you have a software development agency. Why not build an app? Jeff told him beta testing was already underway. Tyler got in immediately, submitted proper bug reports, and within months was moonlighting to help grow the database. When COVID hit and Tyler got laid off from his nine-year career in food service distribution, he went back to Jeff and took the job.

His background – international business, French linguistics, credit and risk analysis, portfolio management, SQL databases, lean innovation projects – turned out to be almost perfectly suited for building a card data platform, even though none of it was designed for that purpose. That kind of diverse experience, he argues, is often more valuable than deep specialization in a single domain.

Critical Thinking as the Core Investment Skill

Tyler's answer to what separates successful card investors from everyone else is deceptively simple: critical thinking and problem-solving. Not memorizing checklists. Not knowing every set. Not having a network of dealers. It's the ability to put together information from different sources, model potential outcomes with probability, and make decisions under uncertainty.

This connects directly to the frameworks he uses when evaluating cards. He thinks in terms of floor, ceiling, and probability – not just "this card might be worth more." What's the realistic downside if the player regresses? What's the upside if they have a breakout postseason? What's the probability of each scenario, and does the current price reflect that correctly? The opportunity cost question comes right after: what else could this capital be doing right now?

The sunk cost fallacy is where he sees most collectors get stuck. People sit on underperforming positions because they don't want to realize the loss, meanwhile missing windows in other segments. The money doesn't remember where it was when you invested it. Taking a loss and redeploying into something with higher conviction is almost always the right move when the original thesis is broken.

How Market Movers Is Built and What Makes It Different

Market Movers tracks 6.1 million cards across 11 auction houses – including Fanatics Collect, Cards HQ retail data, and all the major auction platforms. The core product has three pillars: a comprehensive comps repository, a structured card database with specific variations matched to historical sales with 95 – 100% accuracy, and charting tools that visualize price trends over time.

The database is what Tyler emphasizes most. You can look up the exact Shohei Ohtani card with the set description, the variation, and the grade, and see a chart of historical sales. That's different from scanning raw eBay comps. Visualization changes what you can see. Stockbrokers don't look at line-item transactions – they look at charts. The same principle applies to cards.

The platform also has the most comprehensive graded Pokemon database of any card app – something many people in the hobby don't know. As grading Pokemon has grown into a serious investment category, Market Movers has been ahead of that curve. The app is free to download at the basic level, which gives access to the core comps repository and a subset of historical data.

The Roadmap Philosophy: Parity vs. Differentiation

Building a product roadmap for a card data platform in a fast-moving hobby requires constant calibration between two competing forces: competitive parity (making sure you have the features users expect) and competitive differentiation (building things no one else has that make you irreplaceable).

Tyler evaluates the roadmap every three to four months, asking whether the planned work still makes the most sense against the company's north star. Individual months have planned sprints, but the quarter-level view is always subject to revision when something significant shifts in the hobby landscape – new licensing deals, new data sources, new competitors emerging.

One of the biggest frustrations in his role: the backlog is always longer than the bandwidth. Ideas that seem obviously good sometimes sit for months because infrastructure work, bug fixes, and higher-priority items are in the way. That's the nature of product development. The post-agile era means the team has more agency over ideation – developers aren't just executing specs, they're identifying improvements themselves – but it also means managing ideas carefully so that dozens of half-finished features don't pile up simultaneously.

AI in Cards: What It's Good For and What It Isn't

There's a lot of speculation about what AI will do to sports card investing. Tyler approaches this with deliberate caution, particularly around the idea of predictive pricing. The card hobby is still driven by human beings who are wildly unpredictable – people buy on emotion, on FOMO, on intoxication in literal cases, and on hype cycles that defy rational modeling. Building a pricing algorithm around that behavior creates more liability than benefit.

What AI is actually well-suited for in this space is discovery. The ability to articulate what you want in plain language – "show me Lewandowski cards in the $50 – $200 range that have PSA 10 populations under 50" – and get a structured result from a database of 6.1 million cards is genuinely transformative. It's not prediction. It's exploration.

This is what Market Movers is building toward under Tyler's framing of "augmented discovery." The database becomes a research tool as much as a pricing tool. Collectors can explore checklists, visualize what's out there in a given segment, and start asking "why is this card expensive?" in a systematic way – which leads directly to the next section.

How to Find Mispriced Opportunities Before the Market Does

Tyler's framework for discovering value before others do comes down to one question: why is this card expensive? If you can answer that question for an established, high-value card – the set design, the player's legacy, the scarcity structure, the collector demand base – you can then go looking for other cards that share the same attributes but haven't been discovered yet.

His own example: in 2020, he found 1990s Fleer Ultra Marvel Precious Metal Gems cards that almost nobody knew existed. He bought 25 – 30 of them for $15 – $50 each. Over the following 18 months, the market found them and prices went nuclear. The key wasn't insider information or a dealer network. It was awareness. He was willing to go down the rabbit hole and apply the same evaluation lens he'd already used for basketball inserts to a completely different category.

The same logic applies across sports. If Jerry Rice's Star Ruby's card trades at the same level as Dikembe Mutombo's equivalent, that's a mispricing worth examining. If Lionel Messi's cards were trading at 4% of Tom Brady's value a few years ago despite Messi being the most popular athlete on earth, that's a gap waiting to close. The market eventually finds these things. The question is whether you're there before or after it does.

Seasonal Cycles, Rules for Your Collection, and the Discipline of Letting Go

Buying and selling in cycles makes sense – but only if you're cycling with the market, not against it. The sweet spot for buying in most sports is the offseason, specifically about a month after interest in a given sport cools off. Baseball cards bought in November, before the hot stove season builds buzz, tend to do better than cards bought in October when playoff interest is peaking.

Tyler's collection rules have gotten increasingly specific over time: no sticker autos in his personal collection if he can avoid them, no cards with images he doesn't like unless something else makes them compelling. Rules like these serve as filters that prevent undisciplined accumulation – the collector's version of position-sizing discipline.

The hardest part of the hobby, by his own admission, is letting things go. He recently sent 1,300 cards to consignment and several hundred high-end cards to vault storage, including almost all of his personal Drummond one-of-ones. The logic: cards in storage with access to sell don't have to be sold today. They can be slow-dripped into auctions over time as needed. That structure separates the emotional decision to sell from the operational execution, which tends to produce better outcomes.

The phrase he returns to: "Collect what you like. Invest in what others like – and especially in what others are going to like."

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