Issue #6 | February 21, 2026

Comped

The Numbers

This week the data shows:

–Baseball slight upward trend the past few weeks’ span
–Basketball streak of three positive weeks
–Football still not showing any seasonal weakness
–Soccer ticking up
–Pokemon 5th straight week of strong gains
–One Piece bucked the seesaw trend; two straight negative weeks
–S&P 500 first positive week in recent memory
–Gold DJ Khaled (anutha one)
–Bitcoin more negative, who still hodls?

Pokemon continues its surge, but worth noting: The index outperformance was heavily driven by Logan Paul’s record-smashing $16.5M sale of the PSA 10 Pikachu Illustrator. More on that below, but important to note how big sales can skew indexes; we’ve actually seen a slight downtrend of pokemon sales volume in the past week, that sale aside (per Cardladder “Pokemon” Index").

Speaking of downtrend, is One Piece cooked? The once-challenger-to-Pokemon’s-throne is sitting on a sizable 11.6% loss over the past month.

Crazy-but-true: if you had only purchased $10,000 in gold since the start of this newletter 6 weeks ago, you’d be up to $11,527.63. Oh, that doesn’t sound like much? That’s 242.9% annualized ROI.

The News

$16.5M, chest sweat included

Look, after seeing this image in this section you feel either: 1) Tired of this story 2) Have no idea who this is 3) Never can remember which one is Logan and which is Jake.

The fact of the matter is, this is the biggest piece of news in The Hobby since Kevin O’Leary won the Michael Jordan/Kobe Dual Logoman back in August 2025 for $12.9M. A Pokemon card displacing a card like that (by no small margin, 28%) is no small matter; this has to substantiate the Pokemon market as a true force in the collectible alternate assets universe.

It seems easy to disregard Pokemon, especially for anyone that is Gen X or older, because when it began, these people were already grown adults. It can be difficult to wrap ones head around a cartoon mouse on a piece of cardboard fetching F-you money, but if you think about it the same argument can be made for a piece of cardboard from 1952 with a picture of white guy with a stick and the name Mickey Mantle on it going for that kind of money…

To truly understand valuation in any card market, I truly believe we must hold in mind that implicitly none of it is worth anything. The truly crazy thing about The Hobby is the value boils down to how that thing makes us feel.

People certainly had some feelings about the Logan Paul sale. I’m short on the details, because my stories are usually built in 0s and 1s, so I can’t comment on much. But I will say he almost made wearing a pokemon card look cool, just for a split second.

The Framework

I knew this week’s Slabnomics post carousel wasn’t going to be popular, but part of the reason I created it was specifically so I could talk about it here.

This kind of thing doesn’t go viral because its a cacophonous medly of derivative metrics…in plain English it’s… a lot.

The subject matter is important, though, for anyone who wants to understand the answer to the question “Is a PSA 10 compared to a PSA 9 worth less or more when a parallel is rare?” The basis I used was comparing a refractor’s value in PSA 10 to it’s value in a PSA 9, then further comparing a gold parallel of that same card in PSA 10 to it’s PSA 9.

What do you think, do you think a PSA 9 gold gets less of a dropoff from the value of a gold 10, compared to how much less a PSA 9 refractor is worth than its PSA 10 counterpart? Or do you think the gold PSA 10 gets fought over so much that it’s top-heavy compared to a refractor PSA 10?

Sounds simple to find out, right? But it’s not. Because there aren’t a lot of PSA 10 or even PSA 9 sales for gold /10 refractors.

Even when you do find gold PSA 10 or 9 sales, the challenge is that they normally occur far apart from each other. So your dataset is sparse, and your points are scattered. If your gold 9 sold in 2022 and your gold 10 just sold last week, how do you even compare them, they’re in different eras almost.

So I tried several methods to normalize the data, until I arrived to some satisfying paths to clean-data insights…

I know it’s early in the morning and you don’t want to read the nuances, so I’ll spare you the details. I just want you to know how hard it was 🙂

With tired, triumphant eyes I gazed upon the numbers glowing back at me: 15% and 5%. These were how much ime-adjusted “extra” value the gold had in going from PSA 9 to PSA 10 versus the same refractor 9 to 10, for Lebron’s rookie Topps Chrome Gold and Mahomes rookie Prizm gold, respectively.

Crazy thing is, that number is both way less, and way more than I thought. I expected either:

1) A PSA 10 Gold is SO desirable that it would be worth way more than the 9s.
OR
2) A Gold by itself is so desirable, that people don’t card if it’s a 9 as much.

Instead the data said: High-end collectors do value the gold 10 comparitively more than a refractor 10 against the 9, but it’s only small amount, and that amount is a bit more if there’s more supply. As I put on one of the slides:

With more supply, the derivative scarcity mechanism of the PSA 10 matters more.