Knowing when to sell
I have been collecting, buying, selling & trading sports cards for the majority of my life. I started when I was 4 years old with my first pack of Topps Baseball and the passion I have for sports cards is stronger today than at any point in my life. I have turned my collecting passion into a business because I wanted to take the next step and be engrossed deeper into the sports and sports card world than just hoarding cards for myself. I wanted to talk about sports and cards all the time. I wanted to be able to put special cards in the hands of the right people.
Along the way, I have made a lot of mistakes with buying and selling too early or too late. Hey, it happens. There is no science to it, and anyone that claims they have it 100% figured out is flat out lying.
Very recently, I had a conversation with a collector that was scared about selling a high dollar card too early because he was “afraid the card could climb in value” and he would regret selling too soon. I hear this almost daily on social media, especially with the ever-constant debate: Are sports cards investments? I’m not going to dive into that topic here though. What I am going to talk about is when to sell a card that isn’t a “forever PC” card.
Its no secret that people buy (or hoard) sports cards with the intent of selling for profit down the road. Whether the sale is later that day or in 10+ years, the idea of selling a card for profit has been in people’s minds for well over half a century. Sure there are plenty of people out there that collect purely for the intention of never selling, but don’t let anyone discourage you from selling a card that you don’t care about keeping. As an avid collector even before creating Sports Stuff Hub, there were still plenty of cards through my youth that I owned but didn’t PC. Trades aren’t always the easiest to arrange and selling can give you some financial aid for buying for your PC or helping you rip packs/boxes.
The art of the sale can sometimes be even trickier than the art of the trade. Either way, a value has to be established by the owner and an interested party has to be ok with the value associated. eBay has become the typical go-to for deciding values for most sports/trading cards as their platform has become widely used in the collectibles world for buying and selling. Over the past year and a half, collectibles have seen incredible value spikes but are also extremely volatile. Spikes and dips are common daily occurrences for almost any player. Media at our fingertips can be viewed as a main contributor for this as we now live within the moment and see updates immediately. A player could have a career game and spike their values or go on a multi-game skid which tanks values. We also now see players values spike/dive due to comments, actions, contracts and other things outside of game day.
When talking to this collector that was afraid of selling too soon, I asked him if he sold the card today based on current market value, would he still make money from the amount he had paid? The answer was a resounding “yes”. I asked if he had any personal attachment to the card? Outside of being a card that he had pulled from a box himself, he answered no. I had now eliminated the possibility of emotional attachment being an issue. I shared a very recent story with him about a card I had sold in January. A 2000 Bowman Tom Brady RC graded PSA 8. I had owned this card for only a couple of years. When I purchased the card at a card show, it was graded PSA 7. It looked so clean and centered that I had to crack it and resubmit it. I knew it wouldn’t be a Gem 10, but if I could get a grade bump up at all, I would be happy. Fast forward to fall of 2020, the card comes back from PSA as an 8 and Tom Brady is playing for Tampa Bay and looking like a Super Bowl contender. The playoffs roll around and I sell the card to a local collector after the Bucs beat the Saints. Could I have held on to the card longer and gambled on the card going up if the Bucs won the following week to head to Super Bowl LV? Of course I could have!
The following weekend, the Bucs went on to beat the Saints and then two weeks later beat the Chiefs in Super Bowl LV. Just my luck, right? The card I had sold SOARED in value and today sells for double what I sold it for (sales spikes at triple immediately after the Super Bowl). I’m an absolute idiot, right? To some of the savvy “investor” folks who claim to never fail in hindsight, sure. To anyone claiming that the value of the card wouldn’t drop if the Bucs had lost, be aware that the day of the sale, the value of the card was 2x what it was when I got it back from PSA in October.
Now I am going to take you to the exact opposite side of the spectrum. Rewind the tape to 2018; The Shohei Ohtani craze was in FULL effect. There was a bounty on his Bowman Auto RC Superfractor #1/1 to the tune of $100,000. Yes, this was real life in 2018. Even his base Bowman Auto RC was selling for $1000-$1200. Absolute madness was happening! When Panini Donruss Optic Baseball was about to release, Panini was still in the early stages of their “1st Off the Line” (FOTL) program. FOTL is an exclusive, direct to consumer version of the base product that includes parallels of certain types of cards only found in FOTL boxes. Well, for this product in particular, one of the exclusives happened to be a Rated Rookie Autographs Black parallel sequentially numbered to 25 or less. I bought 4 boxes directly from Panini. Within my 4 boxes there were TWO Ohtani Autographs and both were numbered out of just 12. No joke. Jackpot, right?! Since Panini doesn’t have MLB Licensing rights, the value of Panini Baseball products is substantially lower than Topps. But still, these had to easily be $5,000-$8000 per card.
I watched eBay over the next week as the autos were starting to surface more and more. Sure enough, an auction for one like mine had started. I watched as the price climbed to $4,000 and settled. That was good enough for me! I listed one of mine at 5-day auction. The bids were instantaneous. Within 2 days, my auction had reach $1500 and I was excited. Unfortunately, day 4 rolled around and the high bidder of $3500 had retracted his bids dropping my auction down to $2200. That kills an auction and typically means that the bidder was shilling your auction up because they have a similar card or they are trying to drive your price down so they can buy on the cheap. I wasn’t going to allow any garbage to take place on my card’s auction, so I canceled the auction. Over the next couple of weeks, announcements came out regarding Ohtani’s elbow and needing surgery which promptly tanked his value as he was unable to finish his rookie season as being a dual threat (pitcher and batter). Prior to this, I had received a couple of offers on the pair of Ohtani autographs I had pulled. One offer was $5500 for the pair, which at the time, I felt was about $1000 under where they should be. I didn’t sell either card during the season; however, I did trade one in the fall for a handful of cards (roughly $800 in trade value) and the other I still have today. Checking the going rate for that card, it would be priced around $400-$500 today. That’s a far cry from the $2750 per card offer I had in the summer of 2018.
I could go on and on with stories of selling too early, holding too long and cashing out perfectly. If you have been buying and selling cards for a significant amount of time, you will have had it all happen at some point. As I mentioned earlier, there is no science in this. Sure, you can be excellent at watching trends and markets but no one can foresee injuries. A former employer once told me, “You can’t go broke selling for profit.” That stands true with collectibles as well. The key is to not dwell on your prior sales. Once you sell a card, move on. Don’t go back and visit values later. It can often be a painful look at what could have been. Besides, maybe you used that money for something big that you wouldn’t have gotten or done otherwise. As I always said when I was playing sports, “eyes forward”.
written by Ryan Samuelson
