Episode 35 Why Billionaires Are Buying Cards (And What It Means for You)

Released: December 30, 2025 | Duration: 31:06

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About This Episode

Everyone said 2025 was just 2021 again. They were wrong – and if you positioned like it was, you likely got hurt. This is the State of the Hobby episode: a full equity-analyst treatment of the 2025 bull market, built from PSA SEC filings, CardLadder index data, and volume metrics broken down by sport and price tier.

The single most important finding: demand in 2025 flowed from the top down, not the bottom up. High-end cards recovered to 96% of all-time highs while low-end cards sat at just 43%. That’s the opposite of COVID. It means the participant base for this rally has been institutional – capital allocators, not casual fans – and the market structure reflects that completely.

The billionaire signal is real. Kevin O’Leary launched a high-end card fund. Tom Brady acquired Card Vault. These are capital allocators with theses, not nostalgic hobbyists. Understanding what they see – and why their exit strategy requires a healthy low-end – tells you exactly where the 2026 opportunity lives.

Topics Covered

  • Why 2025 is structurally different from the COVID bull market of 2020 – 2021 Supply absorption capacity as the hidden determinant of market character CardLadder index breakdown: high-end at 96% ATH, mid at 82%, low at 43% PSA as a demand indicator: 830K cards graded in 2019 vs. 6.5M in 2025 Category-by-category analysis: Pokémon, baseball, basketball, football, soccer Why the Pokémon market’s hybrid supply structure (vintage scarcity + modern cycles) makes it uniquely positioned – and uniquely dangerous Kevin O’Leary, Tom Brady, and what institutional capital entering this space signals Why billionaires need low-end demand to exit high-end positions The 2026 World Cup thesis and why soccer low-end may be the asymmetric opportunity What Matt got wrong: scarcity without demand is just illiquidity

Full Transcript Summary

Why 2025 Is Not 2021

When this was confirmed as a bull market in 2025, influencers immediately reached for the 2021 comparison. Some issued cautionary warnings. Others had greed-driven narratives about how it was just beginning. What was missing was anyone actually pulling the data.

That’s what this episode is. I spent several weeks treating the card market the way I would treat a stock as an equity analyst – pulling index data, PSA submission numbers from SEC filings, and volume metrics by price tier. What I found changed how I’m positioning my own portfolio going into 2026.

There is a bull market happening. That part is true. But the structure of this bull market is fundamentally different from 2021. The demand is real, but it is flowing in the opposite direction – and most people haven’t seen it yet.

How Supply Structure Determines Market Character

Here’s the observation that unlocked everything. In 2020, COVID hit with simultaneous tailwinds across all categories: boredom, stimulus money, the “cards are the new stocks” narrative. Pokémon, basketball, soccer, baseball, and football all got hit at the same time. But they didn’t peak at the same time, and they didn’t recover the same way.

Pokémon, basketball, and soccer all peaked in Q1 of 2021. Then they corrected differently: Pokémon down 25 – 30%, basketball down 50%, soccer down 60%. Baseball and football peaked in mid-2022 – 12 to 15 months later – and corrected only 20 – 25% for baseball and 45 – 50% for football.

The explanation is supply structure. Markets with thin supply of graded cards – Pokémon, basketball, soccer – ran out of willing sellers fast. They spiked hard and corrected sooner. Markets with deep supply took longer to exhaust new sellers, peaked later, and had different correction patterns. Demand ignites the move. Supply structure determines its duration, depth, and sustainability. Once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it.

2021 vs. 2025: The Demand Direction Reversal

In 2021, demand flowed upward. It started at the low end – stimulus money, new entrants, nostalgia-fueled buyers who couldn’t afford higher price points – and gradually worked its way into mid-end and eventually high-end. The high-end was late to the party precisely because those buyers were dealing with significant macro uncertainty and weren’t looking at sports cards yet.

In 2025, the direction reversed completely. Kevin O’Leary launched a high-end card fund. Fanatics took over the licensing for football and basketball. Major capital allocation events rewired how the high end of this market thinks. So the growth catalyst for 2025 has been from the high end down.

The data confirms this precisely. CardLadder defines low-end as cards under $500, mid-end as $500 – $5,000, and high-end as anything over $5,000. High-end is at 96% of all-time highs. Mid-end is at 82%. Low-end is at 43%. The demand just isn’t starting from the bottom – and it’s barely touched the low end at all.

PSA as a Market Indicator

Before COVID, Collectors Universe – PSA’s parent company when they were still public – derived 69% of their revenue from coin grading through PCGS. They were grading 144,000 cards per month. By Q2 2021, cards had become 65% of their revenue and coins had dropped to 33%. The card boom had flipped a 30-year-old business.

I went back through the 10-Ks and 10-Qs Collectors Universe filed while they were still a public company. In 2019, 830,000 new graded cards entered the market. In 2025, that number is 6.5 million – eight times the volume in just six years. And they haven’t proportionally scaled their grading staff, because per their financial statements, the average PSA grader had 14 years of experience. You can’t pluck that skill off the street.

When PSA raised prices and extended ETAs in 2025, that was a signal: their demand backlog is growing and they have limited capacity to address it. Submission volume dropped roughly 40% in subsequent months – whether seasonal or structural, that’s what the data shows. PSA is telling us, as the gatekeepers of value in this hobby, that demand is real and supply is constrained.

Category-by-Category Breakdown

Pokémon is up 113% year-to-date and is at 1.74x COVID’s all-time high – breakout territory. Volume is running 134 transactions per day across 9,200+ cards in the index, representing a 4 – 6x baseline surge. The hybrid supply structure is what makes it structurally compelling: vintage sets have scarcity floors driven by millennial nostalgia, while modern releases provide continuous demand cycles from youth buyers. That said, the sheer volume of modern printing and the ways the distribution model gets exploited give serious pause. Pokémon has already started retracing. Watch it carefully.

Baseball is up 26% year-to-date and is back at all-time highs, driven heavily by Ohtani. It showed the shallowest drawdown post-COVID at only 20 – 25%. Baseball is the blue-chip of card markets – the most mature, the most collector-driven, the most historically rooted. Collectors don’t sell into weakness, which is why baseball didn’t spike as hard in 2021 and didn’t fall as hard afterward. It just grinds up. Vintage is the strongest play within the category.

Basketball is up 46% year-to-date and is at 80% of COVID’s all-time high despite massive volume increases. The problem is a seller backlog. A lot of buyers from 2020 – 2021 have been waiting for the next cycle to offload. When new demand shows up, that existing supply meets it immediately, which caps price appreciation. Until that supply exhausts itself, basketball will be sluggish at the index level – though individual players and rookies will still have their moments.

Football is up 29% year-to-date but at only 70% of its all-time high – the worst recovery of any category. Volume is high relative to price performance, which means cards are selling but prices keep slipping. Football’s structural problem runs deep: too much new supply printed per year, too much focus concentrated on quarterbacks, and money that just chases whoever is hot that week. The Panini era may have permanently damaged football’s supply dynamics. If Topps Chrome brings it back to what it was in the early 2000s, that’s the thing worth watching in 2026.

Soccer is up 92% year-to-date. It had the sharpest COVID drawdown – about 60% – and a sharp V-shaped recovery. But with only 28 transactions per day across 1,000 cards in the index, it’s still the least liquid major market. This year’s cycle started with Yamal’s breakout, then became a Messi and Ronaldo super-cycle, then pulled back to performance-based movement toward Mbappé and Haaland. That’s actually healthier. Going into the World Cup, the market structure looks more durable than it did a year ago.

The Billionaire Signal and What It Means

Kevin O’Leary launched a high-end card fund. Tom Brady bought Card Vault and is building out a chain of stores. Institutional money is entering this space in ways we haven’t seen since COVID. And the question nobody is really asking is: what do they see?

These aren’t hobbyists who got nostalgic. These are capital allocators. They don’t move into an asset class without a thesis. My read: they saw Fanatics taking over licensing and recognized a real operator entering the space. They saw the World Cup coming to North America and understood what a global catalyst looks like. They saw the alternative asset thesis gaining traction. And they got in early.

But here’s the structural implication most people miss: for their high-end bets to pay off, they need liquidity. A $5 million card is worthless without a buyer when they want to exit. Liquidity comes from a deep market – from broad participation across price tiers. For the billionaires to win, they need the same thing the low-end buyer needs: new participants entering the hobby.

The 2026 Thesis and What Matt Is Betting On

The data says low-end may be permanently impaired without a new wave of entrants. History says demand can’t revive that segment without a catalyst. But there’s a catalyst coming: the 2026 World Cup lands in North America, bringing the world’s most popular sport to the largest sports card market on earth.

Average fans going to matches or watching at home aren’t going to buy $1,500 kaboom refractors. They’re going to buy base cards. Silver parallels, maybe. The 2026 entrants are going to be collectors first. And in the face of every data point that says this bull market has been a high-end-only phenomenon, I’m betting the World Cup cracks the low end open.

This thesis could absolutely be wrong. Soccer has tried to make fetch happen in North America before, and it hasn’t always worked. The market is still tiny – 28 transactions per day tells you that. But the asymmetric upside of being positioned in low-end soccer before that demand arrives is exactly the kind of bet this analysis leads to.

One more thing to close on: I was wrong about something for most of this past year. I was focused on low print run, hyper-collectible product – scarcity as the whole game. What I didn’t understand was how much sets inform demand structure. Rarity without demand is like a gold nugget in the desert. You might get lucky, but time is your enemy and probability is against you. Scarcity without demand is just illiquidity..

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