Issue #4 | February 7, 2026

Comped

1 week change data thanks to CardLadder

The Numbers

This week we see:

–Baseball gains accelerating more than last week
–Basketball gains ramping back up after cooling off last week
–Football index back in the positive after sluggish performance last week
–Soccer back in business
–Pokemon with the 3rd strong weekly gain in a row
–One Piece is a saw-tooth seesaw week-to-week
–S&P 500 reversing from bearish patterns last week
–Gold resumes its dominant run
–Bitcoin one of the worst major performers of the year

Sports card vendors watching Pokemon vendors

This week’s performance screams “Seasonality” to me. Common wisdom says to buy baseball before March. Basketball is in full swing in its season, and football is winding down.

From a broader financial market perspective, the “seasonality” is a late-stage bull market one, where we hear whisperings of words like: unrest, tension, hidden inflation (ok that last one was mostly me). More on this below, but suffice it to say before fit hits the shan money traditionally flows back to gold and out of less stable assets like crypto.

The News

Result if you search “central bank” in images

Remember how the title of this was “Are We Funked?”

Calling something funky like food, for instance, usually means it smelling a way it shouldn’t…giving decay. Now, when you think of the current economic state of the U.S., not by what they tell you to think, but what you feel when you look at daily life in this country, how does it make you feel?

For me, it makes me feel, well, funky.

Bitcoin, which is supposed to be the triumphant new digital gold, taking place of antiquated real metals we had to carry around, is getting absolutely shellacked while boring old physical gold is enjoying a huge resurgence as an investment vehicle.

Gold and Bitcoin “decoupled” beginning of Sep.

Meanwhile Elon Musk is saying we’ll likely no longer have any need to have jobs due to AI soon, and instead have something called “Universal High Income.” If any of you have read Brave New World by Alduous Huxley he mapped out pretty colorfully but clearly what this leads to. Major props to any BNW fans out there!

Yet I truly believe this shift is already happening. AI increases productivity so much when used productively, that it’s made most of our low-skill (and many high skill) activities defunct. And for the past few years if you were down on your luck you could drive Uber to make ends meet, but Waymo might have that dead and dusted soon as well in major cities.

If you’re thinking, “What in Ford’s name can I even do about this?!” read on to the Framework section…

The Framework

This blew my mind

The post carosel linked above reinforced starkly just how much timing affects everything. See, if you bought a PSA 10 Silver Prizm of all 6 first round quarterbacks in the 1st round of the 2024 draft, and held them for a year to sell them now, that’s how much you would have lost. 22%.

One of them just came a vote shy of MVP and is in the Superbowl! Three others look like they’ll be Pro-Bowlers, and even the two slouches have flashed.

And the craziest thing is most people in my DMs told me this didn’t surprise them at all. Even using the “diversifying the portfolio” approach buying and holding was a huge loss. And a big reason why is INFLATION.

In this case, it’s something you’re going to hear more about from me called Pop Inflation. And the gist of it is, people look at past comps and neglect to look at prior population at time of those comps to accurately comp it. When Drake Maye’s first 2024 Prizm Silver PSA 10 sold for $500, there were 27 PSA 10s. When that same 2024 Prizm Silver PSA 10 recently sold for $1,425, that looks like a 185% gain right?

Now, at the time of that recent sale, the Pop is 798. So the supply went up almost 30x, and still gained that much in sale price. Impressive when you think of it like that, right?

NOTE: In coming weeks I’ll be normalizing and standardizing this Pop Inflation concept, as it is baked in to some of the pricing. But this is very powerful stuff for long term analytics.

Now, back to the U.S. economy and what’s happening right now. Similar to this, we have a lot more “money pop” sloshing around due to how the system works right now. I’ll have more on this in coming newsletters, but just like in cards, rarity matters in hard assets (see Gold prices).

I’ll leave that here in the interest of keeping this short, but DM me on Instagram @Slabnomics any time to chat.