Episode 20 Investing vs. Collecting Ft. Jeremy Lee of Sports Cards Live

Released: September 16, 2025 | Duration: 56:15

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About This Episode

Jeremy Lee has been collecting sports cards since before PSA existed. He opened a card shop in 1991, before grading was a category, back when every dealer was their own grading authority and the internet had not yet made buying sight-unseen a normal transaction. He has watched every major shift in the hobby from inside it, and his perspective on the sports card investing versus collecting question is the one that comes from actually having done both for four decades.

The framework he introduces early sets the tone for everything else: every dollar spent on a card is either a balance sheet entry or a P&L entry. Cards under roughly $250 are expenses, consumed and gone. Cards above $250 start to look like assets, things that will be sold eventually and generate a recovery. That distinction, made consciously at the moment of purchase, is what separates the investor mindset from the collector mindset. Most people in the hobby toggle between the two without realizing they are doing it.

The concept he has built his 2025 collecting around is flight collecting, a framework for navigating vintage sets without the obligation of set completion. You do not need every card from the 1948 Leaf set. You need the three or four that mean something to you. The rest are just filling someone else's checklist.

Topics Covered

  • Jeremy’s background: 45 years in the hobby, CPA by training and profession for 25 years, card shop owner 1991-1994, now full-time sports card content creator with Saturday live streams on the Sports Cards Live YouTube channel
  • Balance sheet vs P&L thinking: every card purchase is either an asset that goes on the balance sheet and will eventually generate a recovery, or an expense that runs through the income statement and is done; the threshold is approximately $250-$500
  • The collector-investor spectrum: no one is purely one or the other; most people fall between 5 and 95 on a 100-point scale
  • Set collecting as pure collecting: buying players you do not care about to satisfy someone else’s checklist; the exit strategy for set collections is poor
  • Flight collecting: Jeremy’s 2025 framework for vintage cards; choose three to five cards from a set that genuinely interest you, treat that as your flight, and move on
  • Low-grade, high eye-appeal vintage: PSA 1 cards that present as 3s, 4s, or 5s due to back defects; using back-of-card defects as an entry point into otherwise unaffordable cards
  • PSA grade as a spell: the hobby is under a collective spell where the number on the slab has replaced looking at the card
  • Grading inconsistency: graders working at hourly wages without institutional knowledge; the reproducibility problem in grading
  • Card condition over grade: buy the card, not the holder; eye appeal as a legitimate secondary market
  • The evolution of collecting identity: permission to change what you collect without guilt
  • Sleep on it and research intensity: approximately 40 hours researching a 1914 Cracker Jack Joe Jackson, the largest transaction of his card life
  • Wax as big brown boxes: unopened product as an index investment versus the emotional emptiness of owning something you cannot look at
  • Passion as the edge over pure investors: collectors process information that pure investors cannot synthesize from spreadsheets

Full Transcript Summary

The Balance Sheet vs P&L Framework

Jeremy Lee's accounting background surfaces early and sharpens quickly. Every time money leaves your wallet for a card, there are two places that transaction can go in your personal financials.

The first is the income statement, the profit and loss, where expenses run through in the current period and are done. You ate dinner, you bought a budget card, you have a good memory or a cheap card in your binder, and the money is gone. No recovery expected.

The second is the balance sheet, where assets sit and accrue until they are eventually sold, at which point they convert back to cash and appear as income. These are cards you expect to recover on, whether next month or after you are gone.

Most people in the hobby spend without being conscious of which bucket they are filling. Jeremy's threshold: anything under about $250 is an expense. Once a card crosses $250 to $500, it starts deserving the asset question: what am I going to get back on this eventually, and is that return acceptable?

This framework is useful not because it makes the decision for you but because it makes you make the decision. If you are treating a $2,000 card as a collector purchase with no recovery expectation, you are implicitly saying you can afford to write off $2,000. That may be true. But it should be a conscious choice rather than an avoidance.

Flight Collecting: The 2025 Framework for Vintage

Set collecting has a problem. You buy every card in a set because someone decided long ago what the checklist was. Most of the checklist you do not care about. The players you do not recognize were never going to be meaningful to you, and when you eventually sell, buyers will pay for the best cards and treat the rest as obligation.

Type collecting solves part of this: one card from every set, a representative sample of the hobby's history. But it removes the depth that comes from focusing on an era or a design you love.

Jeremy's 2025 invention is what he calls flight collecting, named after the beer flight. At a pub, you order a flight and you get two to four ounces of five different beers. You sample, you assess, you decide which ones you love. You are not committing to a pint of each.

In card terms: pick three to five cards from the 1948 Leaf or the 1933 Goudey that genuinely matter to you. Acquire those. Consider that set done. Move on to the next set that interests you. You are not a slave to the checklist. You are building a collection that reflects actual taste rather than the manufacturer's product structure from 80 years ago.

The result is a more personal collection, a lower financial commitment per set, and the freedom to follow curiosity across eras and sports without the weight of an incomplete master set hanging over every future purchase.

Low Grade, High Eye Appeal: The Value in Bad Grades

Paper loss on the back of a vintage card can drop it from a PSA 5 to a PSA 1. For most buyers, that is a reason to pass. For Jeremy, that is an entry point.

If the front of the card is sharp, the centering is right, the corners are intact, and the image is vibrant, the card is going to look like a mid-grade card to anyone holding it. The PSA 1 holder tells you something happened to the back. The holder does not tell you whether that matters to how the card presents.

His 1933 Goudey cards and the Lou Gehrig rookie he picked up at the National are purchased on this logic. The backs have a wrinkle or a small patch of paper loss. The fronts are some of the most visually compelling pieces of their era. He is paying a fraction of what a presentable mid-grade example would cost because the slab says 1 and buyers filter by slabs.

Eye appeal as a value metric is gaining recognition in the hobby. The argument is simple: if you display the card or enjoy looking at it, the grade is a data point about its past, not a verdict about its present beauty.

The PSA Grade as a Collective Spell

PSA's market position rests on a belief the hobby has largely accepted without scrutiny: the grade number is the primary and definitive value driver.

Jeremy's counterargument: look at the Wilt Chamberlain example from a Heritage auction. A PSA 10 sold for just under a million dollars. A PSA 8 in the same auction, one that Jeremy describes as presenting more attractively than the 10, sold for approximately $50,000 to $60,000. The difference between the two cards as objects was negligible. The difference in price was approximately $940,000.

The grade is a consensus fiction maintained by buyer agreement. That agreement is valuable as a market-making mechanism. PSA created a shared language at a time when the hobby needed one because the internet made it possible to buy cards from strangers who had every incentive to over-represent condition. Third-party authentication solved a real problem.

But the solution calcified into a new problem: buyers who do not look at cards. Who buy PSA holders. Who have no idea whether the card inside looks like a 10 or like something that survived a flood because someone got lucky with a resubmission on a good day.

The position here is not that grading is worthless. It is that the market's attachment to the number over the card is a bias that creates exploitable inefficiencies for buyers willing to look at what they are actually buying.

Passion as the Edge Over Pure Investors

The pure investor in sports cards has a built-in disadvantage relative to the collector-investor hybrid, and it is not financial.

The pure investor is working from data: sales records, population reports, market trends. These are necessary inputs but they are available to everyone. The collector who genuinely cares about the sport, the player, the era, and the card itself is processing information that the pure investor is not even looking for.

They notice when a player's cultural standing changes before the market reflects it. They recognize which cards are considered significant within their collecting community versus which ones look significant on paper. They understand intuitively which sales are liquidity events and which ones represent genuine new price discovery.

This is what Jeremy means when he says passion is the secret sauce. It is not motivation or enthusiasm. It is information. Collectors in the hobby have information that pure investors cannot synthesize from spreadsheets because it comes from years of caring, watching, and learning within the specific ecosystem of a player, a team, or an era.

The combination of financial discipline from accounting or investment backgrounds with genuine collecting passion is where the best long-term outcomes concentrate. Both alone are less effective than the two together.

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