Issue #12 | April 4, 2026
Comped
The Numbers
first all-green week in Comped history!
This week the data shows [all green, baby]:
–Baseball still largely trendless as of the last few weeks
–Basketball Up trend continues for the 5th straight week
–Football flat, but an optimistic kind of flat
–Soccer World Cup in 67 days
–Pokemon 12 straight weeks of gains👇
–One Piece VERY healthy movement
–S&P 500 finally ekes out a good gain
–Gold Dead cat bounce?👇
–Bitcoin a gain, but an unconvincing one
The title for this chapter of Comped: The Numbers is Irrational Exuberance.
Now don’t hear what I’m not saying. I’m no doomsayer running around saying that the sky is falling.
But I will say that when you have 9 asset classes all positive after a week, even one uncorrelated to stocks like gold, that’s reason for pause. If gold were down and everything else up, that would make more sense to me.
Baseball, basketball, and football cards are largely flat which makes a lot of sense considering where in the market cycle of those assets are (season underway and offseason). This is another reason why I’ve been clamoring for soccer cards this whole time – seasonally the rest of the sports aren’t in the exciting parts of their hype cycles.
Quick thing on gold, which shows a sharp upturn after 4 weeks of steady declines. This looks like a pattern that vest-wearing, ivy-league graduates call a dead cat bounce: a brief, temporary recovery in the price of a declining asset, followed by a continuation of the downtrend.
The name comes from the dark observation that even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from high enough. The bounce looks like a recovery but it is not. It is a momentary relief in selling pressure, often driven by short sellers taking profits, bargain hunters stepping in, or just the natural rhythm of markets pausing before the next leg down.
Time will tell.
The News
2025-present Pokemon market
If you’ve been reading Comped for awhile, there’s been one constant: The Pokemon market has only gone up, week over week, since the start of this newsletter (12 weeks). Here’s some more facts:
Fact 1: The Card Ladder Pokemon Index is up 52.4% in the past 3 months.
Fact 2: The Card Ladder Pokemon Index is up 191.86% in the past 2 years (the broad card market boom).
Fact 3: The Card Ladder Pokemon Index is up 1501% in the past 7 years (since the Covid market boom):
Pokemon used Growth…It’s Super Effective!
This is the chart for Pokemon growth as a market since just before Covid…you see how there just really wasn’t much of a break? See how aggressive that 2025-26 price movement is?
Let’s turn this practical observation of facts into an interpretation of those facts, and then into a forecast for the future. Ready? Good, read on…
The Framework
2027 Forecast
We turn from news and facts to the opposite. This is a forecast. And remember, I do not have a crystal ball, and could very well be wrong.
But we will look at how the facts look against market patters we see in the stock market.
Here are some numbers from the Pokemon Index since pre-covid (October 2019-Now):
Rate of growth: 1,501%😵💫
Covid High: 41% of current value
Post-Covid low: 75% of Covid High.
So Pokemon has grown 15x as a market in 7 years, it is 2.5x higher than it was at its Covid peak, and after Covid it only dropped 25% from its high point.
You might ask, how does that compare to other indexes, like sports cards?
For reference, let’s compare that to the High End Index (cards >$5k) which is what we can use as a mature market getting a LOT of steam in Covid and 2025-present. Here is the graph and numbers:
High End Index from Cardladder 10/2019-Present
Rate of growth: 435%💪
Covid High: 96% of current value
Post-Covid low: 62% of Covid High.
This reads much more like a high-flying, aggressive growth large cap stock chart for me (Like Nvidia). Doubling every two years, a 38% drawdown off bull market highs, and then a resumption of the uptrend. Back at All-time High after 4 years.
The Pokemon chart, in contrast, looks like a fighter jet that went fully vertical…and is about to sputter and drop like a stone.
But what might cause this change? Pokemon has been bulletproof for a long time, but there are three risk factors that have become alarming:
1) Level of suspicious/fraudulent practices: store employees weighing and grabbing boxes before they can hit the shelves, rings of people someone having hundreds and hundreds of hits to send in at a time to PSA, etc.
2) Overprinting: Before 2019 they printed 1.5B -2B a year. Since 2023, they’ve been printing 10B-12B cards per year.
3) Overpopulation: With overprinting comes overpopulation. Case hits and chase cards with 50,000 PSA 10 copies.
These risk factors accumulate, until they outweigh the growth of the demand, and quickly the market tips over and heads south.
Critically important, however, I don’t see this drop happening in the next few months, more at the end of the year, or beginning of 2027. Sales volume in Pokemon is also quite elevated, likely due to positive effects from the 30th anniversary of Pokemon happening currently.
Yet financial gravity is a real thing. In my last Slabnomics Podcast episode (#47) I talked about how you don’t want to be among the first 20% on a trend or the last 10% in order to have repeatable, long-term gains.
Starting to thin out your Pokemon assets over the coming few months is how you can avoid being the last 10% holding the bag.
“You may hate gravity, but gravity doesn’t care”
Clayton M. Christensen
Keep Building,
DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or legal advice. The content reflects the author’s personal opinions and analysis and should not be construed as a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any assets. Sports cards and collectibles are speculative investments with significant risk of loss. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The author may hold positions in assets discussed in this newsletter. Readers should conduct their own research and consult with qualified financial, tax, and legal professionals before making any investment decisions. By reading this newsletter, you acknowledge and accept these terms.