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Trading cards are cool again

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Re: Trading cards are cool again

#71

Post by rchaud »

cageface wrote: post #56
vmception wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is too reductive, there are entire generations of people, plural , that don't draw the line at "I can't hold it". People said the same thing about mp3s and digital music, the people they were criticizing have children now. both of these recipient generations don't care. but to say more about what you are missing - without drawing a different conclusion just adding an extra variable - is to look at how issuers ac…

I'm not sure mp3s are a good example. Vinyl is booming because many people want a physically tangible medium and streaming services are otherwise teaching a generation that music isn't something worth owning.

That just means that physical NFTs will be booming in 10 years time.

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#72

Post by bilbo991 »

gambiting wrote: post #47
KingOfCoders wrote: post #42

I have around $5k MTG cards from 25y ago and no clue how to sell Thema :-(

Go to your local MtG shop that runs Friday Night Magic and ask(people playing, not necessarily the staff). Find a Facebook group local to you and ask. You can just say you're looking to get rid of the entire collection if someone is willing to price it up for you, if you don't want to go through the effort yourself. That's how I see people selling their cards usually.

> Go to your local MtG shop that runs Friday Night Magic and ask(people playing, not necessarily the staff)

Make sure to ask the store employees if this is okay first. I know my store at least has a "trade only" policy on the property. I am not sure how common this is however.

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#73

Post by jkhdigital »

leppr wrote: post #45
whatshisface wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never going to be easy to distinguish between irrational overall exuberance, and enormous focused pessimism about currencies.

Bubbles of this magnitude are not caused by irrational sentiment. There is irrational optimism about market returns, but that's only a second-order effect from mechanisms such as low/negative borrowing rates and scheduled asset purchases (QE), monetarily incentivizing investments, which in turns incentivizes gambling. Borrowing as much fiat as one could take and dumping it into assets was the rational choice, unless…

> Borrowing as much fiat as one could take and dumping it into assets was the rational choice

This. I had a conversation with my boomer father the other day in which I tried to explain that the availability of cheap consumer debt means that individuals can now operate like mini hedge funds, making highly leveraged bets on everything from stocks to crypto to trading cards. Used to be that housing was the only highly leveraged investment available to the average consumer (20% down = 5x leverage).

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#74

Post by cainxinth »

ramraj07 wrote: post #55
lotsofpulp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that not how it is now? The top companies seem to have pretty good fundamentals and trajectories to me.

You mean like Tesla? Or even any of the top tech companies?

Tesla does have good fundamentals and a good trajectory as a car company. They make a product that people want, that sells well even with large margins, for which demand is expected to continue to grow.

The fact that the market ran up its stock price till the P/E went stratospheric doesn’t make their core business any less viable.

If Tesla stock crashes, it likely won’t be because of anything the company did, but because all bubbles eventually burst, and just about every market, from equities to crypto to trading cards and real estate is heinously overvalued right now and due for correction.

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#76

Post by ProjectArcturis »

fny wrote: post #69
nly wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NFTs are collectables and subject to the same trajectory.

I don't understand who can afford these with gas prices so high. NFTs aren't some typical trading card market. I think it's mostly tax evasion and some wealth posturing. You create an NFT sell it to yourself, the price tanks you deduct it from your taxes and then sit on a pile of USD coin in another wallet that no one knows about.

I doubt there is any jurisdiction in which one could deduct losses on a collectible of any kind, let alone an NFT, let alone unrealized losses.

The real use is, you have $X dollars that you acquired by doing crimes. You want to buy a yacht with that money, but you don't want the authorities asking questions. So you sell an NFT to yourself, attribute your crime money to getting lucky in crypto, pay taxes on it, and poof! You're on a boat.

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#77

Post by ProjectArcturis »

jkhdigital wrote: post #73
leppr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bubbles of this magnitude are not caused by irrational sentiment. There is irrational optimism about market returns, but that's only a second-order effect from mechanisms such as low/negative borrowing rates and scheduled asset purchases (QE), monetarily incentivizing investments, which in turns incentivizes gambling. Borrowing as much fiat as one could take and dumping it into assets was the rational choice, unless…

> Borrowing as much fiat as one could take and dumping it into assets was the rational choice This. I had a conversation with my boomer father the other day in which I tried to explain that the availability of cheap consumer debt means that individuals can now operate like mini hedge funds, making highly leveraged bets on everything from stocks to crypto to trading cards. Used to be that housing was the only highly l…

How is there more cheap consumer debt now than 20 years ago?

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#78

Post by stnikolauswagne »

burntoutfire wrote: post #36
exdsq wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you collect as a hobby or for profit? Seems like something I’d enjoy trying as a side-hustle but never really done before outside of Pokémon

> Do you collect as a hobby or for profit? I never got the idea of being a hobby collector in modern times. Nowadays, everything is available on the Internet for sale, so completing the collection is only a matter of coughing up enough money. How is that interesting or exciting? I can still understand collecting items which aren't mass produced for the purpose of being collected - things such as history/war memorabil…

There are certain categories of trading cards that can not easily be bought online.

I know some people in the actual hobby collection scene for certain trading cards (as opposed to people calling themselves collectors but actually want to just flip for profit). The items these people collect are things such as rare misprints (with population sizes of below 100), physical printsheets (which sometimes have a population size of 1) or promo cards given out for very specific events (such as the creators wedding), again with single- or double digit population sizes.

From what I gather the appeal is partly just seeing weird things from the history of a hobby you enjoy. It‘s also a kinda nice way to connect with other people in the collection hobby, since when you run into something wacky you can just call up Jon who collects that exact oddity and bring it to him in exchange for a nice dinner or something.

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#79

Post by ProjectArcturis »

adventured wrote: post #9
pram wrote: post #2

Absolutely everything is frothy right now. I wouldn’t make any long term conclusions from the markets today, since this seems like an exceptional time. That is to say, I think the “bull case” for many things atm are heavily tainted by irrational exuberance.

The higher-end of the card collecting hobby has changed permanently. The card companies are putting a lot of effort and money into producing unique or otherwise limited cards (autographs, relics, rare prints, etc). That's not going to stop. For example a lot of the more common rookie card prices have already deflated back toward something closer to sane prices. Take the Greg Maddux 1987 Leaf rookie card - that went u…

I don't know. How can you say "never" with such confidence? If we get a severe recession, it's hard to say that 25-year-old pieces of cardboard couldn't lose 70%.

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#80

Post by ProjectArcturis »

noduerme wrote: post #7

I wonder if it's relevant that the golden age of trading cards, the 60s, was prelude to a decade of rampant inflation. A friend of mine said in late 2020, w/r/t the explosion of NFTs, that we'd look back on it from the great depression of 2028 as the moment when the dollar became worthless, although most people hadn't realized it yet.

Why would you say the 60s was a golden age of trading cards? The iconic cards were printed in the 50s (Boomers' childhood years). Prices didn't get crazy until the late 80s.
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