A Saturday afternoon visit to the local card shop, now a fantasy investment brokerage

 Over the weekend I visited a local card shop here in Toronto for the first time. It's called Relikks and it's located somewhere in midtown on Yonge Street. I was surprised I hadn't bother going before because it ended up being just a quick subway ride from my apartment downtown. But I walk everywhere and try to avoid public transit as much as possible, so anything that doesn't exist within a half hour walk of my apartment doesn't exist.

But it turns out Relikks does exist, and I enjoyed the visit. It's a small shop that is well-designed, mostly focusing on high dollar cards and new wax. That's pretty typical of card stores these days, as "collectors" are burning through money to buy as much expensive stuff as possible even though little of it is going to hold value.

They did, however, have quite a few $5 boxes. Actually, tons of them. Five bucks is about the best you can ask for these days in Canada. I ended up going through some of the boxes. They were organized by sport, but the problem is they were totally random, so if something said "$5 Baseball", then you literally had no idea what was in it. And they had dozens of these boxes and really nowhere to sit and go through them carefully. Still, sifting through stuff like this is fun.

I love Court Kings, as the cards are gorgeous. It's really too bad Panini doesn't have an NBA license anymore. Not that I want them to have an exclusive license, but my preference is always for competition in the marketplace. Capitalism doesn't really work with exclusive monopolies. It kinda defeats the purpose of capitalism, actually.

I got this for about $15. It's part of the Water Color insert set from one of the recent Court Kings releases. I'm not sure which one, and it doesn't matter. Dr. J is cool and this is a lovely card, so an easy buy for me.

This is the 89 Hoops Jordan. Ten bucks. I always hated the Hoops cards from 89 and especially 90 back when I was a kid because they were everywhere. But they've kinda grown on me over time, even though they are basketball junk wax. But a Jordan is a Jordan no matter.

Speaking of Jordan, here he is with Scottie Pippen discussing their investment portfolios. This is from Upper Deck Collector's Choice from some year in the 90s. I don't keep close track of my cards, so I have no idea which year. Tracking like that is too tedious for me. I think this was $5.

 Kyle Lowry purple something-or-the-other parallel from NBA Hoops, maybe from 2018 or 19. I think it's purple disco or whatever, but it looks pretty. This was $5. They were really picked over for Raptors cards and had almost zero Jays, which is the problem with buying Toronto cards locally because literally every single person in this entire country is a fan of the same handful of teams. Life would be easier if I collected like the Sacramento Kings and San Diego Padres or something.

A Jari Kurri rookie from 81-82 O-Pee-Chee. I know hockey cards from before 1990 by heart, so no need to guess at which year this is. It's off-center top to bottom, but I don't care. The corners are sharp. It was $15. I find a lot of vintage stuff isn't scaling in price as much as modern stuff, as the Zoomers don't seem to give a crap about anything from the 20th century and they are driving much of these prices now. I'm mostly the opposite, as you'll notice that most of my modern pickups are of players from back in the day. I grow old with each passing day.

They also had this cool rug. I want one. Problem is that I have a fuzzy cat who has white fur and this would get matted with cat fur within hours. She's a fur factory. 

One thing I do want to mention, too, was the experience of being in a modern card shop on a Saturday afternoon in the lord's year of 2026. I don't go into too many card shops, as they are mostly located where rent is cheaper and rent in Toronto costs a pound of flesh monthly. It was full of kids, teenagers on down. The people working behind the counter were all teenagers. Lots of teens looking for Pokemon and One Piece. I'm familiar with Pokemon, but don't care about it, and I still have no idea what One Piece is. Some sort of anime, I guess? 

Anyway, there were a few middle-aged guys. Some were with their kids. One I want to talk about was someone I observed trying to help his son, who was no more than 8 or 9 years old, decide between buying a Cooper Flagg rookie or a Wemby parallel of some such. Both were about $100. I remember for my birthday I used to get one comic book, and I don't think it was even this kid's birthday. 

Anyway, the guy asked the teenaged boy working the counter which was the better purchase and the kid told him the Cooper rookie. The man then went into a long series of questions about long-term value, grading, the card market, that sort of stuff. He was asking the teenager all kinds of questions about grading the card in a few years and whether the value will hold up and which cards are best for investment.

Think about this. This was a grown man, buying an expensive card for his little boy, asking a teenager for investment advice about basketball cards. Who the fuck asks a teenager for investment advice? Who the fuck asks a teenager about anything? The kid has barely been on this planet all of 15 years and he's gotta answer some old guy's questions about collectibles speculation.

I thought this was weird, and probably a one-off. That is, until another even older guy came into the shop and was asking the teen about hobby box values. He wanted to buy the one that would give the best value for autographs. The answer to that is obviously none of them. He was looking to make an investment in autographs. Huh? This guy really grilled the kid, too, like the kid was an insurance agent working on commission.

This is the state of the hobby this decade. It's people who have never collected, or maybe remember collecting back in the junk wax era as kids, who are dipping back into it with the hopes of making money. The first guy with the little kid suggested to his kid that they will hold the Cooper rookie for a few years and then submit it for grading then. Fuck if the hobby even exists in a few years. Will anyone really have this much discretionary income by the end of the decade?

Look, sports cards are not an investment. They never, ever were and never, ever will be. They are rank speculation. Yes, you can make money from them. You can also make money betting the ponies or buying scratch tickets, but no one calls that investing. 

If sports cards were an investment, you would benchmark them against something like the Dow or the S&P 500 and then if the return on your cards is greater than that benchmark, you would take into account things like liquidity risk, volatility, and transaction costs. Even if you get lucky and put together a small collection of valuable sports cards that end up being a better "investment" than the S&P, if you factor in how hard it is to actually sell cards right away for their best value, how that value fluctuates wildly, and how platforms like Ebay, COMC, etc, take tons of money in fees, then even if you end up ahead of the market, it might not be enough to make sports cards worthwhile.

And even if it was enough, you would then have to compare speculating in sports cards to the returns and risk factors of other speculative investments. Things like stocks, real estates (REITS), options, commodities, other collectibles, etc. There are tons of nonsense to speculate on just in the financial markets alone. Do sports cards out perform any of those speculative vehicles, at an acceptable rate of risk? Do your sports cards? 

Man, just think this stuff through rationally. Being someone who just wants to collect cool looking cards of players and teams I like is such a weird experience. I feel like there are like five of us left doing this as a hobby, and countless who think they are going to get rich. Do these people not realize every single year there is another hyped rookie whose cards are going to be priceless in the future? Literally every single year. Going back decades. How many of these rookie cards have held up in value? I'm old enough to remember people hoarding Eric Lindros Score rookie cards, thinking these were going to be worth tons. They aren't worth shit.

This bubble will burst, as bubbles all do. I can't wait. I'll buy that kid's stupid Cooper Flagg rookie for ten bucks in ten years. Happy birthday.